The statement is a bit too strong. It's not malice, it's just plain old stupidity. In the same way as soviet nuclear reactors don't explode, nuclear submarines don't either. Nobody have thought it might happen, nobody was aware, and no special "on call" service for recovering people from sunk submarine ever existed. _Of course_, it would never happen in just 6 hours.
In the same way, if you don't have anyone on-call to recover the backend along with backups and recovery plans, the chance to have production up and running in 6 hours will be zero.
In case of a way more physical thing of "submarine sunk in polar cold waters", it'd take a good 4 hours just to get _something_ there. Not to mention extracting a person from 300ft involves a good plan on avoiding decompression sickness, and you can't really bring a 50-ton decompression bell on a helicopter and hover for half a day. I can hardly imagine what would such a disaster recovery plan even be.