Can anyone explain why a wreck of a battleship lies in the Nevada desert?

score:22

Accepted answer

The reason for battleship parts lying in Nevada Desert is (from nps.gov) :

The gun barrel was taken off the Missouri during the Korean War (battleship guns were removable) when the ship was refurbished. The gun barrel was put into storage at the Naval Weapons Depot at Hawthorne, Nevada, for possible re-use aboard another battleship. But it was never remounted and lay in the Nevada desert alongside eighteen other battleship gun barrels for more then forty years

The picture above is of the gun turret converted into a sensor:

This gun turret was removed from a pre-1940s scrapped U.S. Navy Heavy Cruiser. It was developed by Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory for line-of-sight diagnostics. Basically, the turret could be used on multiple atmospheric nuclear tests by rotating it and adjusting the elevation to aim at the tower cab. This eliminated the need of constructing new line-of-sight equipment for each test.

Upvote:1

That turret appears to be from the pensacola class heavy cruisers in service until 1947. Interestingly enough, both ships of this class were used in operation Crossroads and then sunk as targets in 1948.

Upvote:9

The turret design is indeed USN and was used on three classes of heavy cruiser (NOT battleship), Pensacola class, Northampton class, and 2 of the Portland class. Of these 10 ships:

  • 4 were lost to enemy action in WW2 (Northampton, Chicago, Houston, and Indianapolis)

  • 2 were used in Operation Crossroads (both survived tests able and baker) and were sunk as target ships off the coast of Calif and Wash state (Pensacola and Salt Lake City) with all turrets in place

  • 4 survived the war and were scrapped on the east coast (Chester, Louisville, Portland and Augusta). Augusta was sold to a private individual (Robert Benjamin), three were scrapped in Panama City Fl.

The turret could only have come from these last 4. Further research would be required to determine which one (it took two hours using the web to find what I have posted here).

The reason for using a turret from this vintage ship was that all ships made after atomic testing are made with steel that has radioactive contamination (from the above ground tests performed between 1945 and 1963). All steel made thereafter suffers from this contamination and the scientists at the nevada test site wanted something that did not suffer from this issue.

The turret was part of several above ground tests at the NTS in the 1950's

UPDATE: It was taken off of the USS Louisville after she was damaged by two Kamikaze attacks in Jan 1945. See the technical report I developed at Lawrence Livermore National Lab: report number LLNL-TR-679776, "The Mystery of the Gun Turret in the Desert". Go to http://library.llnl.gov/uhtbin/cgisirsi/0/0/0/60/26/X and search for LLNL-TR-679776.

R. Hoffman

Upvote:10

That's not a battleship wreck. It's a naval gun turret.

Looking at the internet it's referenced as a "clean steel sensor", and has something to do with the nuclear tests in Nevada.

Although it's claimed to be German and from WWI it doesn't look like German gun turrets, it is in fact of an American type.

US gun turrets

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