The Battleship Nevada’s Marking Day

The battleship sat alone in anchorage X-ray, separated from the other vessels by a thousand yards of empty water. Her hull gleamed international orange from stem to stern, a color chosen to catch the eye from thirty thousand feet, and the geometric shape painted atop her forward gun turret marked the aim point for the bombardier who would look down through his bombsight in the B-29 called Dave’s Dream.

The engineers had stripped her guns of their breechblocks and emptied her magazines, and the damage control parties had sealed her hatches and opened her sea cocks just enough to let the water find its level. She rode low in the lagoon, a hull waiting to be holed.

The battleship USS Nevada, the only battleship to get underway at the Attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, had been designated as the aim point for Able and was painted orange, with white gun barrels and gunwales, to make her stand out in the central cluster of target ships.

The time was 0834 on the morning of July 1, 1946. The Superfortress had already passed the point of no return. The bombardier in the Plexiglas nose could see the target below: the battleship painted orange, the geometric shape on turret number one, the aim point that the planners had chosen and the engineers had marked. The aircraft had come in from the east at twenty-eight thousand feet. The bomb bay doors hung open. The weapon waited in the rack. The clock in the bombardier’s mind counted down the seconds to release.

Every sailor who could find a view had found one. The men lined the rails of the support ships anchored beyond the reef. The scientists clustered around their instruments on the observation vessels. The congressmen and the press and the foreign observers stood on the decks of the transport ships, their cameras ready, their sunglasses dark against the glare of the Pacific morning. The lagoon lay still, the water flat between the islets, the target fleet arranged in its geometric patterns like pieces on a board.

The Nevada had earned her place at the center. She had served as a convoy escort in the Atlantic and provided fire support in five amphibious assaults: Attu, Normandy, Southern France, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. By the end of the war, the Navy had decided that her age disqualified her from the active fleet. She was thirty-three years old, a relic of an earlier era of naval warfare, and the atomic bomb offered a convenient way to dispose of her while answering a question that had haunted the Navy since Hiroshima: could the weapon that had burned two Japanese cities also sink a battleship? At the end of World War II, the Navy decided that, due to age, Nevada would not be retained as part of the active fleet and she was instead assigned as a target ship for the atomic experiments at Bikini Atoll in July 1946 (Operation Crossroads).

The question had become an obsession for the admirals who had watched the Army Air Forces claim victory in the Pacific while the Navy’s great ships rode at anchor, their guns silent, their crews reduced. Operation Crossroads was their chance to prove that the fleet still mattered, that ships could survive the atomic age, that the Navy could absorb the blow and remain afloat. The target fleet existed to absorb damage that the institution preferred not to suffer directly. And the Nevada, painted orange and placed alone at the center, was the beacon that would draw the fire.

The first proposal to test nuclear weapons against naval warships was made on August 16, 1945, by Lewis Strauss, future chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. In an internal memo to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Strauss argued, “If such a test is not made, there will be loose talk to the effect that the fleet is obsolete in the face of this new weapon and this will militate against appropriations to preserve a postwar Navy of the size now planned.”

The aircraft flew steady, the autopilot locked to the sight, the bomb hanging in the rack and waiting for the signal. At 0834 and thirty seconds, the bombardier pressed the release.

The weapon fell away from the B-29 and began its descent.

The planners had calculated everything. The release point, the trajectory, the wind speed, the ballistics of a weapon that had only been dropped in anger twice before. They had accounted for the drift and the drag and the rotation of the earth. They had practiced with pumpkin bombs filled with concrete, and the practice drops had been accurate. The bombsight had been checked and found error-free. The crew had been briefed and rehearsed. The Nevada sat in the water below, and the bomb fell toward her, and the mathematics of the drop should have put the weapon directly over the aiming point. There were eight ships within 400 yards of it. Had the bomb exploded over the Nevada, the damage would have been catastrophic.

But mathematics, as the planners would learn, was not destiny.

The weapon fell for forty-five seconds, and in those forty-five seconds something happened that no one had predicted. The bomb drifted left of the aim point, off the geometric target on turret one, off the centerline of the ship, off the calculations that had placed the Nevada at the epicenter of the blast. The drift was slight, a matter of seconds of angle, a fraction of a degree, but at thirty thousand feet the slight became the substantial, and the substantial became the catastrophic.

The bomb struck the water approximately 2, 130 feet from the Nevada’s hull.

The detonation came at 0900 hours precisely, the weapon exploding not over the battleship but beside it, in the open water of the lagoon, in the empty space between the target vessel and its nearest neighbor. The flash lit the morning with a light brighter than the sun, and the heat wave rolled outward across the water, and the blast wave followed, a wall of compressed air that struck the Nevada from the side rather than from above.

The observers on the support ships saw the flash first, and then the column of water that rose from the lagoon, and then the spray and the steam and the shock wave that spread across the surface of the water like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. The column rose thousands of feet into the air, a geyser of Pacific seawater mixed with the fire of the atomic reaction, and the observers lowered their eyes and covered their faces, and the heat washed over them at the speed of light.

On the Nevada, the blast struck like a giant’s hand. The heat flash came first, a searing wave that scorched the paint on the superstructure and ignited the wood and the canvas and the cordage that the engineers had left on board. The temperature on deck reached thousands of degrees for a fraction of a second, and then the blast wave hit, and the battleship heeled over in the water, her hull groaning against the force, her empty gun turrets straining against their mountings.

The ship shuddered and righted herself. The fires caught and spread. The blast had torn away sections of the superstructure and buckled the deck plating and shattered every piece of glass and every fragile fitting that remained. But the Nevada floated. The hull held. The torpedo bulkheads that had been designed to keep out enemy weapons kept out the atomic sea, and the battleship that had been marked for death survived the first test of Operation Crossroads.

The miss was not immediately apparent to the observers. The flash and the column and the shock wave had obscured the aim point, and the cloud of steam and spray that rose from the lagoon hid the target fleet from view. The radio circuits crackled with reports, and the observers compared their notes, and the photographers developed their plates, and slowly, over the minutes that followed, the truth emerged.

The bomb had missed.

The column of water settled back into the lagoon, and the spray drifted downwind, and the observers on the support ships raised their binoculars and looked for the Nevada. The orange paint was scorched and blackened, the superstructure bent and torn, fires burning on the main deck and the boat deck and the forecastle. But the ship was there. The battleship had not sunk. The aim point had been missed, and the weapon had detonated in the open water, and the target that should have been vaporized remained afloat.

The reports reached Admiral Blandy on the command ship, and the scientists compared their readings, and the photographers measured the distance from the aim point to the detonation point on their aerial photographs. The miss was 1, 500 feet, maybe more, maybe less, the exact distance would take days to calculate, but the fact was clear: the bomb had not hit the target.

The question of why would haunt the investigation for months. The bombsight was checked and found error-free. The pumpkin bomb drops were conducted and were accurate. Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, who had commanded the B-29 that had dropped the weapon, believed that the miss was caused by a miscalculation by the crew. The mystery was never solved. The factors that could have contributed to the drift—the wind, the ballistics, the human error, the mechanical failure—were debated and analyzed and reanalyzed, and the conclusions remained inconclusive. There were other factors that made Able less spectacular than expected. Observers were much farther away than at the Trinity test, and the high humidity absorbed much of the light and heat.

But for the Nevada, the cause mattered less than the effect. The battleship had survived. The ship that had been designated ground zero, the vessel that had been painted orange and placed alone in the anchorage, the sacrifice that was meant to demonstrate the precision and the power of the atomic weapon, remained afloat. The fires burned on her decks, and the smoke rose from her superstructure, and the water sloshed through her lower compartments where the sea cocks had been opened, but the hull held.

The irony was not lost on the observers. The Nevada had survived Pearl Harbor, torpedoed and beached and repaired, and she had survived the atomic test that was meant to sink her. The orange paint that had marked her as a target now marked her as a survivor, scorched and blackened but still visible, still afloat, still defiant. The symbolism that the planners had intended—the precision strike, the surgical removal, the demonstration of accuracy—had inverted itself. The miss had become the message.

The other ships in the target fleet fared worse. The cruiser USS Independence, anchored closer to the detonation point than the Nevada, took the blast on her beam and suffered catastrophic damage. The flight deck buckled, the hull ruptured, the fires spread through the empty hangar spaces where the aircraft had been removed. The Independence would sink in the hours that followed, one of five vessels that would go down from the first test.

The Japanese battleship Nagato, the German cruiser Prinz Eugen, the destroyer Laffey, the transport Fallon—the list of damaged ships grew as the assessment teams moved through the fleet. Assigned as a target vessel for the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests, she was placed within one half mile of ground zero for the 1 July explosion. The veteran ship did not sink (though her funnels and island were crumpled by the blast), and after taking part in another explosion on 25 July was taken to Kwajalein and decommissioned 28 August 1946.

But the Nevada remained.

The assessment teams went aboard the battleship in the hours after the detonation, wearing protective clothing and carrying radiation detectors. The readings were high but not lethal, the contamination concentrated in the ash and the debris that had fallen on the decks, the fires that had burned and the metal that had been exposed to the flash. The hoses were rigged and the washing began, the water sluicing over the scorched paint and the buckled plating, the teams moving through the compartments and taking readings and noting the damage.

The survival of the Nevada posed a problem for the planners. The first test of Operation Crossroads had been designed to demonstrate the accuracy of the atomic bomb, the ability to place a weapon on a specific target and destroy it with a single strike. The miss had shattered that illusion. The weapon was not a scalpel but a bludgeon, and the bludgeon had swung wide, and the target that should have been destroyed remained afloat. The Navy had absorbed the blow and survived, but the survival came from error rather than design.

The scientists on the assessment teams documented the damage and the contamination, the readings and the effects, the fires and the structural failures. The data would be analyzed and compared and compiled into the reports that would be submitted to the Joint Task Force and the Pentagon and the White House. But the data could not erase the fact of the miss, the visible truth that the Nevada was still there, floating in the lagoon, her scorched hull a monument to miscalculation.

The fires burned for hours before the damage control parties could bring them under control. The smoke rose from the superstructure and drifted across the lagoon, and the observers on the support ships watched and photographed and wrote their notes. The press correspondents filed their dispatches, describing the flash and the column and the shock wave, the damage to the fleet, the survival of the Nevada. The congressmen cabled their reports to Washington, and the foreign observers sent their assessments to their governments, and the story of the miss spread around the world.

The Nevada’s survival became the story of Test Able. The weapon had detonated, the blast had spread, the damage had been done, but the aim point had been missed. The precision that the planners had promised had failed to materialize, and the atomic bomb had proven itself to be something other than the surgical instrument that the propaganda had described. The weapon was powerful, yes, and terrible, and destructive, but it was not accurate, not in the way that the Navy had needed it to be accurate.

The lagoon settled in the hours after the test. The fires on the Nevada burned down, and the damage control parties completed their work, and the assessment teams compiled their data. The target fleet remained at anchor, the damaged ships listing and smoking, the undamaged ships waiting for the next test. The observers on the support ships turned their attention to the reports and the photographs and the readings, and the Nevada sat in her anchorage, scorched and blackened, the orange paint now a charred reminder of what had been intended.

The miss had exposed a truth that the planners had not wanted to see. The atomic bomb was not a weapon of precision but a weapon of chaos, a device that could be aimed and released and detonated but could not be guaranteed to hit its mark. The mathematics of the drop could be calculated, and the physics of the blast could be modeled, and the effects on the target could be predicted, but the moment of release, the fraction of a second when the bomb left the rack and began its descent, contained an element of uncertainty that no amount of planning could eliminate.

The uncertainty would haunt the planners of Operation Crossroads, and it would haunt the planners of every nuclear test that followed. The bomb had missed the Nevada, and the Nevada had survived, and the survival was a symbol not of strength but of error. The fleet assembled for ruin had absorbed its first blow, and the ruin had been incomplete.

The three weeks between Test Able and Test Baker would be filled with the work of assessment and preparation, the analysis of the miss and the planning for the underwater shot. The Nevada would be repaired and re-instrumented and returned to the target fleet, her hull patched and her compartments pumped, her place in the anchorage adjusted for the second test. The battleship that had survived the first bomb would be asked to survive the second, and the question of whether she could endure another blast would be answered in the waters of the lagoon.

But for now, on the evening of July 1, 1946, the Nevada sat in the anchorage and burned. The fires had been extinguished, but the smoke still rose from the superstructure, and the water still sloshed through the lower compartments, and the assessment teams still moved through the compartments with their detectors and their clipboards. The battleship had been marked for death, and she had survived, and the survival was a victory of sorts, a victory of hull integrity over atomic fire, a victory of the sea over the weapon that had been designed to master it.

The victory was incomplete. The Nevada was damaged and contaminated, her superstructure bent and her decks scorched, her place in the fleet uncertain. The second test would come, and the underwater blast would bring new challenges, new dangers, new questions about the survivability of ships in the atomic age. The survival of the Nevada, a symbol now of miscalculation rather than precision, creates a pressure for the Navy to produce a demonstrable result, handing off the need to examine the choices made in the three-week interlude.