In the pacific off bikini atoll, 200 feet below the surface, sit a dozen radioactive warships. The fleet includes the aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Saratoga, the Imperial Japanese Navy battleship Nagato and the destroyer U.S.S. Lamson. All were formidable WWII battlewagons-the Saratoga, a launching point for U.S. fighter planes attacking Guadalcanal; the Nagato, the command center for Japans attack on Pearl Harbor.rnIn 1946, as part of a series of tests to determine the vulnerability of warships to atomic attack, the U.S. subjected the Nagato and the Saratoga (sans people) to a blast, code-rnnamed Baker, equivalent to 23,000 tons of TNT, making it more powerful than the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb, detonated 90 feet below the oceans surface, sent a water spout more than a mile into the air. The ensuing 95-foot waves, plus a million tons of radioactive water falling back into the sea, sent both ships to the bottom. The Lamson had been sunk by Able, an above-water A-bomb blast, three weeks earlier.
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