WWII naval artifact rusting in Nevada desert
LAS VEGAS - Sixty years ago, this summer, the ground shook and the sky was ablaze in southern Nevada. One after another, powerful atomic explosions rattled the Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas. It was the most intense series of nuclear tests in American history.
Among the artifacts that survived intact is a piece of World War II naval history that seems very out of place in the desert. The I-Team was allowed into the facility for a look around.
It was a grim and tense era. The summer of 1957 saw one mushroom cloud after another, billowing high into the sky. Between late May and early October, 29 atomic fireballs pierced the atmosphere of the Nevada Test site. Staying ahead of the Russians was primary objective, not historical preservation.
But now, decades later, one historical mystery has been resolved by a physicist-turned-gumshoe.
The code name was Operation Plumbob. Atomic fireballs shredded the sky almost weekly. The security of the planet hung in the balance. These explosions obliterated pretty much anything within range -- almost.
Livermore lab physicist Rob Hoffman first saw the odd relic two years ago during a tour of the Nevada National Security Site.
"I thought it was a funny looking trailer, as a matter of fact. But the closer I got, the more it looked like it belonged on a ship at one time," said Rob Hoffman, physicist, Lawrence Livermore Lab.
Hoffman, who is from a navy family, was right. It's a gun turret from a heavy cruiser. During World War II, heavy cruisers were often in the thick of the deadliest sea battles. So, what's it doing in the desert of Area 2, in a spot that 60 years ago would have been battered by multiple atomic blasts? The barrel isn't a gun. It's a detection device designed to collect and analyze light.
"The idea behind it was to find out how well a nuclear weapon design functioned," Hoffman said.
The turret was the answer to an engineering challenge. During Plumbob's frequent tests, test site workers had to build detection bunkers, filled with equipment, for each blast. They dug trenches, some 20 feet wide, 20 feet deep, and up to a mile long, for the coax cable that connected the detection gear. The trenches were then refilled to protect the cable from being vaporized.
A contractor named Erv Woodward had the bright idea.
"That if you could make a reusable line of sight with something that could protect the detectors but could point at each of the devices as they are scattered around here, then they wouldn't have to lay so much cable, wouldn't have to make so many special purpose bunkers and they might even save some money," Hoffman said.
Woodward and colleagues went to the Mare Island shipyard in San Francisco, found a couple of turrets sitting on a dock, and chose it. It was transported south by ship, then was loaded onto trucks, and likely generated stares as it traveled the new Interstate highway 15 to the Nevada Test Site. It had to be modified considerably, the 8-inch gun barrels were removed, and the assembly was mounted on a foundation that allowed it to rotate 360 degrees.
"This was pointed at the device sitting on a tower, light would shine through this tube in the turret, safe from the blast wave less than a mile away," Hoffman said.
Diablo was the first. An atomic device detonated from a tower north of the turret (July 15, 1957) followed by Shasta (Aug.18) to the south and Whitney (Sept. 23) to the west. In between, the turret collected data from the Smoky test (Aug. 31) uncorked in area 9 further away.
"It worked like a piece of cake, like a charm, got great data out of it," Hoffman said.
The turret survived the tests and the elements. Today, it sits in obscurity, home to ferocious test site termites and other curious critters. In the 90's, test site archeologists collected information about the turret, but there was one big question that remained unanswered.
"But they couldn't tell me what ship it came off and being from a navy family, it caught my imagination," Hoffman said. "If you look closely, you can see it had rough treatment."