Voyage To The Bottom of The Sea - Historical and Technical Background

Historical and Technical Background

The name of the film is an inversion of a phrase popular at the time, concerning the exploration of the Arctic Ocean by nuclear submarines, namely, "a voyage to the top of the world".

From August 1, 1958 through August 5, 1958, USS Nautilus (SSN-571) (the first nuclear powered submarine, and the first nuclear powered ship of any kind), under the command of Commander (later Captain) William R. Anderson, steamed under the Arctic ice cap to make the first crossing from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the North Pole. On August 3, 1958 she became the first ship to reach the North Pole. Nautilus 90 North (1959, with Clay Blair) was the first book Captain Anderson wrote about the Arctic missions of USS Nautilus. It was named for the radio message he sent to the Chief of Naval Operations to announce that Nautilus had reached the pole. His second book about these missions, The Ice Diaries: The Untold Story of the Cold War's Most Daring Mission (2008, with Don Keith), was completed shortly before Captain Anderson's death. This second book includes many previously classified details.

On March 17, 1959, the nuclear submarine USS Skate (SSN-578), under the command of Commander (later Vice Admiral) James F. Calvert, became the first submarine to surface at the North Pole. While at the Pole, her crew scattered the ashes of Arctic explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins. Commander Calvert wrote the book Surface at the Pole about this and the other Arctic missions of USS Skate.

Two milestones in underwater exploration were achieved in 1960, the year before Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was released. On January 23, 1960, Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh (USN), in the bathyscaphe Trieste, made the first descent to the bottom of the Challenger Deep. The Challenger Deep is the deepest surveyed spot in the world's oceans, and is located in the Mariana Trench, southwest of Guam. From February 16, 1960 to May 10, 1960, the submarine USS Triton (SSRN-586), under the command of Captain Edward L. Beach, Jr., made the first submerged circumnavigation of the world. Triton observed and photographed Guam extensively through her periscope during this mission, without being detected by the U.S. Navy on Guam. In the film, Seaview fires a missile from a position northwest of Guam to extinguish the "skyfire".

At the time that Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was made, the Van Allen radiation belts had only recently been discovered, and much of what the film says about them is made up for the film. Discoveries since then clearly invalidate what the film says: the Van Allen belts (actually somewhat more radiation-dense portions of the magnetosphere) are made up of sub-atomic particles trapped by the Earth's magnetic field in the vacuum of space and cannot catch fire, as fire requires oxygen, fuel and an ignition source, all of which are insufficient in the Van Allen Belts. Unburned hydrocarbon emissions have never reached concentrations that could support a "skyfire".