19481776 Club
Radioactive and unwanted, the Nevada finally goes down under naval gunfire
The battleship that survived Pearl Harbor and an atomic blast could not survive its own Navy's target practice.
Two years after the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll left her too radioactive to keep, the USS Nevada still would not sink easily. On July 31, 1948, Navy gunners firing on the decommissioned battleship off Hawaii finally sent her to the bottom in a target-practice exercise. This was the same ship that had been the only battleship to get underway at Pearl Harbor during the 1941 Japanese attack. She was struck from the Navy Register on August 12, 1948, twelve days after the sinking…
