Originally Posted by
JamesNoBrakes
They yanked half a submarine off the seafloor at 16,000' in the early 1970s and came back with a plan to get the rest of it, although it was foiled by the russians. It may take more time to recover stuff with slower robots and submersibles at those depths, but I'm sure it would get done.
Originally Posted by
gdube94
The Russians foiled it. Height of the Cold War. More things change.....
Seriously, thanks for the info.
Actually, the Russians didn't foil it. Thanks to recent declassification of many details about Project Azorian, we now know that the
Hughes Glomar Explorer's retrieval claw failed because of Lockheed's design decision to use maraging steel, which, while very strong, proved too brittle to support the Soviet submarine's weight. Had they selected a more ductile metal, the claw may not have fractured, causing 2/3 of ascending the submarine to tumble back down to the ocean floor:
The capture vehicle failure thus appears to have been caused by both the last-minute offloading of another million pounds of weight onto the vehicle and the basic decision to employ maraging steel.
—Polmar & White (2010), "Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129"
Although the Soviets were tipped off that a CIA recovery operation was underway, and they did send ships to the area (two of which visited the
Hughes Glomar Explorer's work site), the Russians 1) didn't know exactly where their sunken submarine was located, and 2) didn't believe recovery was actually possible. The Russian tracking ship and tug that visited Project Azorian's worksite didn't foil—or even significantly disrupt—the operation. They left the area before the Glomar's capture vehicle even reached the target object [=the sub]. Indeed, Project Azorian really only went totally sideways later, and for reasons entirely of our own making.
Lessons learned: Don't use a giant claw made of maraging steel if you want to resurrect MH370, in its entirety, from the ocean floor.