Drain the Oceans (2018–…): Season 2, Episode 6 - Lost Nukes of the Cold War - full transcript

Cold War
killing machines and
lethal nuclear weapons,

abandoned under our oceans.

The thought that these
Doomsday weapons lie

down there in the
depths is frightening.

The terrifying
reality has been hidden,

the keys to the truth
of the Cold War

lost under icy waters
for over half a century.

Imagine if we could
empty the oceans,

letting the water drain
away to reveal the
secrets of the sea floor.

Now we can.

Using accurate data and
astonishing technology,



to bring light once
again to a lost world.

This time, how did the
Cold War's most advanced
submarine end up shattered

on the sea floor?

A giant hand
had just crushed it.

How close
does America come to
accidentally nuking Europe?

There was
this terrible explosion.

Big ball of flame.

And who stole parts
of a secret Soviet submarine?

October, 1962.

The United States and the
Soviet Union hit crisis point.

This is a red alert. Repeat.

Moscow installs
nuclear missiles in Cuba.

President Kennedy
issues an ultimatum;

withdraw the missiles
or it's war.



A poor retaliatory
response upon the Soviet Union.

31,000
nuclear devices.

If it starts, the world
would go up in smoke.

That's it. Crazy.

The Soviets back off.

But the world remains
just one mistake away
from nuclear apocalypse.

Many flash points
are hidden from view,
shrouded in secrecy.

Now we can reveal just how
close we came to disaster.

Off the coast of San Francisco,

could a mysterious wreck
reveal the truth about

top secret experiments at
the dawn of the Cold War?

A giant object has been
detected under these waters.

Maritime archaeologist
Doctor James Delgado
wants to know more.

Mapping the seabed
outside the Golden Gate,

they found a big target,
a very big target.

Was it a ship?

Was it something more?

What brought this here?

Why is it on the bottom?

James hopes
the new find could solve
a Cold War mystery.

The location of a ship
lost for over 60 years.

USS Independence,
a giant aircraft carrier.

Imagine
the wreck of an aircraft
carrier as big as this

sitting on the bottom,
just off the coast of
San Francisco,

unrevealed for so many years.

It's powerful,
it's compelling.

He sets
out to explore the
site with his team,

sending a remotely
operated vehicle, or ROV,

2,600 feet down.

A submerged beast.

You got to go a little
further, brother.

A little more to the left.

This is an area where we would
have had the name painted.

There's the Independence.

You can see it.

E-N-C-E.

Yes!

Yes! Yes!

This carrier is a
hero of the Second World War.

It battled to recapture Pacific
Islands from the Japanese.

It survived all that,

but it hasn't been seen
for over half a century.

Why is it now sitting in
an unmarked location

at the bottom of
Monterey Bay?

Using precision scan data,

the waters roll back to
reveal a staggering sight.

A World War II colossus.

It looks almost new,
but on the flight deck
there's evidence of damage,

the surface torn,
buckled and bent,

and one giant corner
punched in completely.

On the hull, strange scars.

Steel plate creased
like tin foil.

On the control tower,
eerie details.

Japanese flags were
painted on this kill board,
for every enemy unit destroyed.

But now only white
paint remains.

Now
this should be painted
in different colors.

It should be red, for example,
but it's not here and that's
not age or sea water.

What could have
caused such bizarre damage?

James picks up on a trail of
evidence that leads him all
the way to the fiery dawn

of the Cold War.

Bikini Atoll, July 1946.

Behind a ring of low
rise islands, nearly
100 obsolete war ships

lie empty and abandoned.

One of them is the
USS Independence.

This remote Pacific
lagoon is America's
new atomic test arena.

It's less than a year since
the first ever atom bomb
attacks on Japan ended the

Second World War,
and the US needs to
know more about what

these terrifying
new weapons can do.

On July 25th, at 8:35 AM,

the first ever test of an
atom bomb underwater.

Two million tons of radioactive
seawater blasted into the air.

The bomb
punches out of the lagoon,

with a heated core hotter
than the sun shooting up
through the heart of it.

Also an airborne
detonation as big as the
bomb at Nagasaki.

A mile and a half
from the epicenter is
the USS Independence.

A blinding flash eradiates
her, instantly vaporizing the
red paint on the kill board.

The bursts not only
of light, but heat,

took away all the other
colors, leaving only
the white base coat.

Then blast
waves rock the carrier,

shredding her flight deck,

and washboarding the
steel around her hull.

This is
all of those thousands of
pounds of air or water coming

right up alongside the ship
and slamming into it, bending,
denting, rippling it.

This is what an atomic
bomb does to a ship.

The many
war ships destroyed at
Bikini carry a message.

This is the future of warfare.

With the Soviet Union
working around the clock
on an atom bomb of its own,

an arms race like no
other will dominate
the decades to come.

The drained wreck
of USS Independence
can tell us more

of this shadowy confrontation,

but first we need to
know why does she lie

not close to Bikini,
but California?

Hidden under the
waters of Northern California,

the wreck of the
USS Independence.

4,500 miles away from
where she smashed by atomic
blasts at Bikini Atoll.

How did she get here, and why?

Can our immense drained
wreck provide a clue?

When
you look at all the damage
brought by the atomic bomb,

while grievous for the most
part is above the water line,

it wasn't enough
to sink the ship.

The Independence
survives the atomic blasts,

but she is ravaged
by radiation.

It had been coated in
radioactive steam.

There's a near panic that
the radiation levels have
not subsided much at all.

In the summer
of 1947, the Independence
is towed to California.

James Delgado and his
team want to know why.

This was here
for a couple of years.

They discover
a link to a top secret
naval research facility

on the fringes of
San Francisco.

Hunter's Point.

Inside the high security port,
a specialist team studies the

radioactive fallout
on board Independence.

Their mission; design a defense
against nuclear weapons.

The
key lessons underscored
by study of Independence

is to just get scarier,
to build more weapons,

to bring more of
them into play.

In short, proliferation.

But a
question remains.

After almost four years at
Hunter's Point, the US Navy
scuttles Independence.

And the wreck is nowhere
near where contemporary
news stories claim she is.

We found
it only 30 miles offshore,

more than 100 miles away
from where reports said

Independence had gone down,
which stunned us and we
began to think, "Why?"

James goes deep
inside the Independence
to look for answers.

As the
robot drops down, I have it
zoom in again, and again,

until finally I see
exactly what they're hiding.

Now, using
precision data, we can
reveal what he finds there.

In the hangar, tucked behind
a Hellcat fighter plane,

a stack of large
sealed barrels.

On one barrel, a side
panel has rusted away,

and when James
inspects it up close,

something catches his eye.

Those are rubber gloves.

Looking at it, everything
from the labs is getting
packed in barrels,

sealed in concrete.

Not only from Hunters Point,
but from the labs in and
around the bay area.

They wanted to put
these away, out of the
sight of prying eyes,

beyond the reach
of Soviet spies.

They were afraid of espionage.

The US Navy
decides to take no chances,

whether Soviet spies are
operating in California or not.

What
better thing to do then
with your atomic secrets,

than to put them inside
this big carrier

in a location with all
these nuclear secrets
entombed within it?

The battered wreck
of the Independence still lies
off the California coast.

A chilling reminder of
the dawn of the Cold War.

In the years that follow,
the two super powers build
huge nuclear arsenals,

and sometimes
accidents happen.

The coast of Almeria,
southern Spain.

Draining these waters
reveals a shocking site.

A nuclear war head,
more powerful than a
million tons of TNT.

How does it get here?

And how close is Spain
to a nuclear disaster?

Joe Ramirez is serving
with American forces
here in the 1960's.

It's the height of the
Cold War, and the US is
flying nuclear arm

patrols over Europe
around the clock.

Operation
Chrome Dome as it was called.

B52 bombers, each carrying
four hydrogen bombs, in
flight 24 hours a day.

Chrome Dome maintains
a constant nuclear threat

against the Soviet bloc.

But to keep the
bombers airborne for
as long as possible,

crews must refuel in mid-air.

A delicate and
dangerous procedure.

On January 17th, 1966,
in the skies over Spain,

something sparks an explosion.

Four bombs complete
with nuclear war heads
hurtle towards the ground,

two without their parachutes.

The nuclear components are
unarmed, but the conventional
explosives do detonate,

spreading radioactive
plutonium over a square mile.

Hundreds of American
and Spanish personnel
scour the countryside

and find three of the bombs.

But that's all.

We couldn't
find the fourth one.

The US military needs
to locate their lost nuke,

before it leaks dangerous
radiation or falls into
the hands of the Soviets.

After more than a week
of searching, the team
still can't find the bomb.

Then Ramirez meets
a local fisherman.

He reports seeing a
parachute fall into the sea
on the day of the accident.

It
hit me, we're looking
in the wrong place.

We're looking for
the bomb on land.

This bomb may be under water.

But if the
nuke is under the
ocean, where is it,

and what condition is it in?

In the last few years,

Spanish oceanographers
have mapped the
Mediterranean Sea floor.

The
bottom of the ocean is
dark, but thanks to

acoustical techniques, we
can see all the particular
features with them,

in great, high resolution of
the sea bed of the oceans.

Now, with access
to Doctor Rivera's data,
we can drain the waters of

Southern Spain, exactly
as it looked in 1966,

and uncover the sea from an
American nuclear calamity.

The lost nuke, 2,500 feet down,

teetering on a cliff edge.

A state of the
art hydrogen bomb,

100 times more powerful than the
one that destroyed Hiroshima,

the nose cone dented, but
the bomb itself still intact.

The Americans need
to find it first,

to get it away from this
densely populated coast line,

and to stop the Soviets from
salvaging it for themselves.

American ships
and divers scour the
Spanish Mediterranean,

looking for a lost nuke.

They search miles
of dark seabed for
almost two months...

But find nothing.

You can imagine
what it's like, feeling
your way around there,

trying to find an atomic bomb.

Then, on
March 15th, 1966,
a remotely controlled

submersible finally
spots something.

When the announcement
came through, I said, "Phew."

The submersible
attaches a rope,

but as they carefully
attempt to winch the
bomb to the surface

the rope suddenly snaps.

All the US Navy can do is
wait for it to hit the bottom.

The fail-safe system
holds, and there's no
chance of a detonation.

But a nuclear weapon, full of
plutonium, is lost once again.

Now, using the latest
data, we can drain the
Mediterranean completely

to reveal where it falls.

A huge sea canyon opens up,

nearly 3,000 feet deep.

And right at the bottom,
the nuclear bomb.

The difficult rescue
attempt has just
become near impossible.

One of the Air Force
colonels said if somebody had
sat down and thought about a

way to lose a hydrogen bomb,
they couldn't of thought of
anything more devilish.

Finally, the Navy
sends a cable controlled robot
down into the canyon,

and use it to grab the nuke.

But it snags on the
bomb's parachute.

It's now completely stuck
half a mile under the sea.

The only way to retrieve the
nuke is to haul the robot up,

and drag the parachute
and bomb along with it.

A delicate daisy chain for
a two ton nuclear weapon.

The man leading
the mission actually
fainted from the tension.

Miraculously,
the chain holds.

These are two of the
four thermonuclear
bombs dropped on Spain.

On the left, the nuke
that journeyed to the
bottom of the sea,

now safely stored
in New Mexico.

To
just see it lying there,

this item contained the
power to destroy a city.

It's scary, you know?

A Cold War
catastrophe is avoided.

But Operation Chrome Dome is
suspended two years later.

Nuclear confrontation has
moved beneath the waves.

200 miles off the
coast of New England,

draining the waters of
the Atlantic exposes the
horrors of a deep sea disaster.

By the 1960s, the Cold War
has a new front line.

Submarines armed with
nuclear weapons try to
creep into enemy waters.

America deploys hunter
killer subs to guard
against the threat.

The very latest is the
USS Thresher, powered
by a nuclear reactor.

On April 9th, 1963,
Thresher sets out from

Portsmouth, New Hampshire
for sea trials.

Just over 200 miles out,

it begins trialing extreme
deep water dives.

Thresher was pushing
boundaries under the ocean.

The men who served on
her are very similar
to space astronauts.

A US Navy
ship called Skylark
is in attendance.

A few hours into the trial,
the captain of Thresher
sends out a call,

saying the sub is experiencing
minor difficulties.

Then, fragments of
a garbled message,

a loud hiss and silence.

The staff aboard
Skylark is not quite
sure what has happened,

and continue to call to
them and ask them to respond.

They continue to do
that for some period.

Thresher never makes
contact and never resurfaces.

Lori Arsenault is eight years
old when the sub goes missing.

We
were watching TV, and
there was a news flash.

A Navy ship was missing.

My brother went running
out into the kitchen.

By the time I got there,
everyone was crying and
I didn't know why,

but I just started crying.

And then little by little,

I found out that my
dad was on that boat.

In 1985, deep sea
explorer Doctor Bob Ballard

sets out to find
the wreck of the Titanic,

but his famous expedition
is a Cold War cover story.

In fact, Ballard is on a top
secret mission to investigate
the wreck of the USS Thresher.

I was a trained naval
intelligence officer.

The Soviets could
track me with satellite,
so we needed a cover.

Ballard deploys
a submersible equipped
with video cameras.

The once classified
footage shows

images of jagged metal.

Ballard's first
glimpse of what's left
of the lost submarine.

The only way to understand
the scale of the wreck

is to see it in
the light of day.

A traumatic scene.

The sub is ripped into
mangled pieces and scattered
across the sea floor.

Water drips off a torn rudder,
and laying behind it, the
conning tower on its side.

There's a blasted air
canister, and finally
fragments of piping.

Little else is identifiable.

So what we're
seeing here is the debris
field of the Thresher,

but it's completely shredded.

This is carnage.

The only big piece was a piece
of the tail, and even that
looked like a giant hand that

just crushed it.

So it was everywhere.

How did
the USS Thresher
end up like this?

It wasn't carrying
munitions, its nuclear
reactor isn't explosive,

and there's no evidence
of a Soviet attack.

Ballard believes that
only a force of nature
can explain the damage.

Pressure is a deadly
force, so we have a lot of

experience with things
really blowing up.

If a sub goes too
deep, the pressure of the
ocean becomes overwhelming.

The whole structure will
suddenly fail and implode.

An implosion is
a gigantic explosion.

It's known
as crush depth.

But why would the
Thresher be so deep?

Ballard searches the
wreck looking for clues.

In the vast field of
scattered wreckage,

bent pieces of piping
litter the sea floor.

Some of these pipes would
have carried water into the
sub from the sea outside,

to cool the reactor.

And during deep dives, they
become highly pressurized.

Ballard knows a leak from any
of these pipes could trigger

a shut down in the
nuclear reactor.

When it comes in,
it comes in like a jet.

And it can atomize
and form a cloud,

so it's just
really coming in.

When that happens, the nuclear
reactor automatically scrams.

He digs back
into US Navy files,

and uncovers a survey of the
Thresher's cooling pipes.

The report reveals that
some of the pipe joints
are weak and fail testing.

The message from Thresher
about difficulties now
makes sense.

At 2,200 feet below,
the sub springs a super
high pressure leak.

Makes a really
nasty noise, sounds
really high pitched.

It would just go
through you like a knife.

The reactor
power cuts out.

The sub begins to
fill with water.

They can't drive out.

They're dead in the water.

But Thresher
should still survive.

Studying the wreck, Ballard
can see components of a
crucial buoyancy system.

Compressed air canisters.

If the sub needs to surface,
the canisters blow into
ballast chambers,

and the buoyancy
propels it upwards.

So why didn't the
Thresher do that?

The US Navy conducts
an investigation.

What they find is chilling.

In the cold conditions of the
Thresher's deep sea dive,
moisture in the compressed air

freezes and
blocks the ballast.

So it froze over.

It couldn't blow.

The hiss in the
captain's final message
is the crew trying

and failing to
blow the ballast.

The shocking discovery
completes the story of the

last moments of
the USS Thresher.

At the bottom of its
deep dive, a powerful
leak kills the engines,

and the icy deep freezes
and blocks the ballast pipes.

Without power and
buoyancy, and partially
full of sea water,

the Thresher is dragged
deeper and deeper.

And they are
now taking on water,
the ceiling collapsed in.

They have no way out.

The hull
creaks and groans.

The crew know they are
reaching crush depth.

They're just going down,
they're getting deeper,

and they're crushing.

And that is a tough way
to die, because there's
just nothing you can do.

At 2,400 feet below,
the pressure is 70 times
greater than at the surface.

And when that went, it
just destroyed the submarine.

It'll just crush it
like you're not even there.

From above, the
full terrifying power of that
monumental implosion is clear.

The wreck has been
blasted across four
square miles of ocean.

The
first time I ever saw the
pictures of the wreck,

it was a profound and
powerful experience.

The Cold War was not a
war without casualties.

Americans
are not the only ones
to lose their lives.

Beneath the wild waters of the
Northern Pacific lie the
remains of another submarine.

How does a Soviet wonder
weapon fall victim to
Cold War power games?

On February 24th,
1968, a Soviet submarine
leaves port in Eastern Russia.

K-129's mission is to
disappear beneath the waters
of America's West Coast,

armed with three
state-of-the-art
nuclear missiles

that can launch
from underwater.

Once fired, the nukes are
almost unstoppable;

each one 65 times
more powerful than
the Hiroshima bomb.

The ocean
itself has become weaponized.

It is the ultimate cloak in
which you can hide, and wait,
and then deliver death.

The whole aura
about the nuclear submarines
is to disappear from the radar

of the opposite side.

Two weeks into its
patrol in the North Pacific,

K-129 misses a scheduled
transmission home.

Something has
gone badly wrong.

A Soviet Navy flotilla scours
the Pacific looking for K-129.

But it could be
anywhere in a 1,000 mile
sector of deep ocean.

I mean, it's beyond
needle in a haystack;

it's like needle
in 1,000 haystacks.

There
was a submarine out
there that had been sunk

and the Russians had lost it;
literally lost a submarine.

After months of
searching, the Soviets are
forced to accept that their

submarine, and their
nuclear weapons, are lost.

So what does happen to K-129?

Today, a new investigation
is uncovering a story of
spycraft and subterfuge.

Journalist Josh Dean has
recently acquired images from
a source in America that show

parts of the wreck of
the lost Soviet sub.

The remarkable black and white
pictures are hard to decipher,

but using expert
analysis to enhance
the images means it is

now possible to reveal
what remains of K-129

three miles under
the Pacific Ocean.

The black steel of
a conning tower.

A fractured silo still
loaded with a nuclear missile.

Only some sections of the sub
have ever been identified,

and a clue as to why
lies here at the stern:

jagged edges of
peeled back metal;

the telltale sign of a
powerful internal explosion.

This is
an image I never thought
we'd be seeing, K-129.

It's heavily damaged.

Whatever forces were at
play, and I don't know if
we'll ever really know,

this is an amazing
and tragic image.

It's
hard to think of anything
more mysterious than K-129.

It's an unprecedented wreck.

Searching for an
explanation, Dean digs back
into Cold War history.

His research leads him to
the tropical shores of Hawaii.

In the 1960's, this row of
innocuous-looking buildings
is a listening post

for a top secret US
facility called SOSUS.

SOSUS is a vast network of
underwater microphones that

stretches across the oceans of
the world listening for the

sound of Soviet submarines
and tracking their movement.

Marine acoustics professor
Bruce Howe has access to
the Cold War data.

The Russians
were building submarines

that were coming uncomfortably
close to the United States

and so that motivated putting
out these listening arrays.

In 1968,
the Americans use
acoustic technology

to try and find K-129.

Noticing the Soviet's
frantic search,

they scanned back
over their data

looking for a marker

and identify something
far out in the Pacific.

Analysis suggests it could
be an underwater detonation.

Have they found the sound
of the explosion that
blasts K-129 into pieces?

Sound can travel
underwater literally
halfway around the world,

so in the case of a submarine
explosion, that would be a
pretty obvious signal.

If there was an
explosion, to this day no
one knows what caused it.

But by triangulating the
noise across the network,

the US Navy can pinpoint
where the sound comes from.

Here, one and a half
thousand miles
northwest of Hawaii.

For the US Military,
a Soviet sub loaded
with nuclear missiles

is a priceless bounty.

But attempting to seize
K-129 would be an act of war.

You can't
just take stuff that belongs
to another military.

There was real risk
that going after this
thing could start a war.

The US Navy
closes the file and
leaves the wreck untouched.

But someone does tamper
with K-129 and its
nuclear missiles.

And the evidence
is in the wreck.

Some experts think
that K-129 is probably
destroyed by an internal

explosion deep under the
Pacific Ocean and there's
evidence for this theory

on the drained wreck.

But there's something else too,

signs that something more
than an explosion happens here.

At the front, there's no
trace of the jagged remains

typically produced
by an explosion,

and the nose itself is
missing, cleanly sliced off.

How could that have happened?

Investigative journalist
Josh Dean is determined
to find out.

I think
there are pieces of the
K-129 out there somewhere.

It's been lost for some
reason and lost is never good.

Dean has
been passed video,

shot in 1974 on-board
a ship called the
Glomar Explorer.

Owned by eccentric American
billionaire Howard Hughes,

the Glomar claims to be a
deep-sea mining vessel.

But the video reveals
something straight out
of a James Bond movie.

It's
mind-boggling, it's
remarkable to see today.

That's footage that's
never been released before.

Hidden within the
Glomar Explorer is a giant
cavity and a hydraulic claw.

The men on board
are CIA operatives.

Operation codename:
Project Azorian.

Their mission is to
recover sections of K-129,

and especially
its nuclear missiles,

six years
after the sub went down.

Even
most people within the
CIA were not aware

of the existence
of this program.

The stakes could not
be higher, essentially.

The claw is designed
to drop down through three
miles of ocean and retrieve

the sub and its
nuclear missiles.

In the murky 45-year-old
video, it's possible to
see it down in the deep,

preparing to grasp
a part of K-129.

It pulls a 2,000 ton section
away from the seabed,

and begins an agonizing
three-day-long ascent
to the ship.

Two days into winching,

on the surface there's
a sudden jolt.

Those
engineers who had spent a lot
of time on boats thought like,

"We definitely just
dropped some weight.
Something happened."

Stressed from
digging into seafloor,

one of the claws
has cracked open.

Only the tip of
the nose remains.

Most of what was in
the claw, including
the nuclear missiles,

plunges back
into the darkness.

The
guys on the ship have
to sit there and say,

"We can't try again,
the claw is broken!"

The CIA is forced
to abandon the operation.

The dropped sub is
still on the floor
of the Pacific today,

along with its
nuclear weapons.

Nobody knows how many
more Soviet warheads
are lost in our oceans.

The US admits that six
of its nuclear weapons
are unrecovered,

left behind by a conflict
that abruptly ends in 1989.

Gorbachev
said, "We have tried to kill
your submarines.

We have failed. We quit."

The Soviet
regime collapses.

But the scars of the Cold War
remain beneath our oceans.

Nuclear weapons and
radioactive waste
litters the sea.

Now, the super
powers are re-arming,

with thousands of
new missiles that can
strike across the globe.

Secret nuclear power
games continue day and night.

Captioned by
Cotter Captioning Services.