Thanks for your comment Larry! I think top Titanic experts dismiss the notion that the rivets were to blame for the disaster. The damage would have been in any case irreversible.

Imagine a 52,310-ton ship that steams at almost full speed striking an iceberg tens of times its weight. The force of the impact is such that at least some rivets are going to fail.

That Titanic was structurally sound is proven by the fact that it took almost three hours to sink while her designer (Thomas Andrews) had given her only an hour/an hour and a half.

The plain fact is that under the same circumstances (speed, angle of impact, impact's force, etc) no ship, contemporary to Titanic or modern, could have sustained the damage suffered by the iceberg .