Raise the Titanic (film)

Raise the Titanic is a 1980 adventure film by Lew Grades ITC Entertainment and directed by Jerry Jameson. The film, which was written by Eric Hughes adaptation and Adam Kennedy screenplay, was based on the book of the same name by Clive Cussler. The story concerns a plan to recover the RMS Titanic due to the fact that it was carrying cargo valuable to Cold War hegemony.

The film opens on the fictional island of Svardlov in the far North Sea above the Soviet Union where an American spy breaks into an old mine where he discovers the frozen bodies of a US Army sergeant and mining expert Jake Hobart. Next to the frozen corpses is a newspaper from 1912 as well as some mining tools from the early part of the 20th Century. Using a radiation meter, the spy discovers that what he seeks, an extremely rare mineral named byzanium, was there but had been mined out leaving only traces. He is then chased and shot by Soviet forces but rescued at the last moment by Dirk Pitt Richard Jordan a former U.S. Navy officer and a clandestine operator.It is explained by scientist Gene Seagram David Selby and the head of The National Underwater and Marine Agency NUMA, a NASA like agency for sea exploration, admiral James Sandecker Jason Robards that the mineral their man was trying to find is needed to fuel a powerful new defense system code named The Sicilian Project. This system, using laser technology, would be able to destroy any incoming nuclear missiles during an attack and make nuclear war obsolete. ........

Source: Wikipedia