This comes in from our Australia office with the infamous lagado reporting:

: Hi Sean, how's things?
:
: Here's a link I thought you might find interesting:
:
: An interview with Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic
:
:
: "Around 1979, I began to question the utility of manned submarines and felt
: that we should shift to robotics. I took a sabbatical to Stanford and I
: began to design the Argo-Jason system--that was the first tele-operated
: robotic system. Ironically, my first test expedition was the Titanic. . . .
: Quite honestly, the Titanic was a cover for classified military purposes: to
: go inside the Thresher [a lost U.S. nuclear-powered submarine] and find the
: nuclear weapons that were on it. Little Jason Jr., which went inside the
: Titanic, was really designed to go inside the forward torpedo room of the
: Scorpion [another lost U.S. submarine], but they kept it under wraps."
I did find it interesting, so here it is.

Thanks, John.