All language subtitles for gne.piRBEW.p027.raW.dloC.eht.fo.sekuN.tsoL.60E20S.snaecO.eht.niarD

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.

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.

In the waters of
northern california.

A mysterious wreck
could 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!

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 these
cool coastal waters?

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 eradicates 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 ture 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?

Rthern 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 delgo 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 francisc.

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?"

Off the waters of northern california,
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 wa,
and the us is flying nuclear am.

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 airbore
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 remove 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, "".

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?

K-129's mission is to disappear beneath
the waters off 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.

And 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 mes 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 belongsto a.

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.

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 explore.

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.

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 litter 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