http://marshall.csu.edu.au/Marshalls/ht ... 627471.jpg This pic gives a pretty good idea of the kind of forces exerted on ships.
I think he mean cleared out of personal artifatct and equipment (rather than crew !) - I was wondering that too.
My guess is that all the personal artifacts that were wanted were cleared out by those to who they mattered and it was simply not considered worth the time or effort to send a crew in to strip the remainder out. As for the ships themselves, as much as I would have loved for every WW2 vehicle, vessel, aircraft or artifact to have been preserved in museums or as museums, let's face it it just wasn't going to happen, and as for a waste of material it was probably more practical to use old war weary vessels for experiments than to design and build special test ships from new. What the victorious powers were faced with in the immediate aftermath was a vast surplus of kit that wasn't needed in peacetime and needed disposing of, aircraft were bulldozed into ditches or shoved off ships and cliffs into the sea because they weren't worth salvaging for scrap metal. Ironically these ships at Bikini Atoll have probably survived more intact than they would have if they weren't sank. If they hadn't been sank they almost certainly have been sold for scrap and broken up or for a few sold on to other countries and either scrapped or lost in other wars (Like the Belgrano). At least they still exist in a form that is accessible to the (Diving) public.
I was indeed talking about the personal artefacts. I'm not the type to nuke a vessel full of men just for a test.
The Nagato comes in my mind. One of the last floating japanese battleshipsat the end of the war. Or the Prinz Eugen, that way there would be a decent surface ship as a museum close to where i live. If more then a couple hundred kilometers can be called close
no money off of scrap metal? when you have those citys in the water with all that tons of steel im sure there worth destroying in a dry dock. its an example of governments bad use of tax payers money.....
Well, they did need to know what effect a nuke would have on warships. Why not test it out with surplas warships? Actually quite an efficient use of uneeded resources.
here it goes, you can visit it even at home via internet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzZYhHqK ... re=related Regards, Che.
Supply and demand takes effect though, think of how many hundreds of thousands of tonnes of surplus steel there was out there, how much it would cost to get to the scrapping and breakers yards and how much demand there was for it once it was broken up.
That's true even today. It would cost so much to scrap the US Navy's old supercarriers that they will all likely be scuttled instead. With the possible exception of KITTY HAWK once she's decommisioned; there is a group here in North Carolina that wants to moor her next to the battleship NORTH CAROLINA in Wilmington as a museum and memorial.
