As a result of these talks, treaties that limited the fleets, size and armament of battleships were ratified after agreement between the parties (Fanning 1995:1–24). Following the war, the major naval powers agreed to naval arms limitations talks that were held in Washington, D.C. This pre-World War I naval build-up was a major factor in stoking international tensions that led to World War I. Naval officers and proponents of sea power joined with politicians in the world’s leading industrial nations to build larger fleets of increasingly larger, faster, better armored and harder-hitting battleships in an escalating naval arms race. Not only were these ships symbols of national pride and the projection of power, but for the Navy, as represented by its officers and crews, a way of life epitomized by ritual, social structure, and conceptions of “power, courage and fighting etiquette,” unchanged by a transition to steel and steam, as the “single most important artifact” for naval professionals, symbolizing “everything that was acceptable and orderly about naval life” (O’Connell 1991: 3). The wreck of USS Nevada is the next former target ship to be located on the seabed and archaeologically studied, and the first Crossroads target ship to be examined after being sunk as the result of a prolonged naval barrage.Ī dominant theme in the life of USS Nevada was the concept of an international arms race in which the battleship played a key role as the various great naval powers competitively built ships in larger numbers, but also with an emphasis on better ability to out-gun, out-pace, out-race and take more punishment and keep fighting it has been described by one historian as the “cult of the battleship” with battleships representing not only national power and technology used for the purpose of waging war but also as the inheritors of the traditions of the wooden-hulled sailing ships of the line (O’Connell 1991: 3). 2017, 2018a), and a separate study of naval aircraft also used in the Crossroads tests that remain in context at Bikini and on board the wreck of USS Independence (Delgado et al. 1991 Delgado 1996), and the aircraft carrier USS Independence (CVL-22) off San Francisco (Delgado et al. Archaeological studies of Crossroads target ships moved to secondary locations post-test include the former German cruiser, Prinz Eugen at Kwajalein Atoll (Delgado et al.
This allowed a team from SEARCH and the University of Delaware in June 2019 to study them as a simulated nuclear battlefield that included the actual blast crater of the second test and its effect on lagoon sediment movement. 1991 Delgado 1996) and a detailed survey of the lagoon floor along with all associated wrecks of ships lost during Crossroads. That includes shipwrecks directly lost at the time of the tests, and vessels which were subsequently sunk by the US Navy, most through scuttling or as targets in naval gun and aerial attack drills, as they were “outmoded” and “too hot to handle,” or in at least one case, presumably in of fear of revealing atomic secrets through analysis of atomic residues.Īrchaeological study of Bikini and material records of Operation Crossroads include initial work by the National Park Service in 1989–1990 (Delgado et al. The larger cultural landscape of Operation Crossroads, however, is broader with greater geographic distribution of individual wreck sites where associated facilities and artifacts associated with those ships and test equipment and artifacts associated from Crossroads comprise the historical extents of the sites. Bikini Atoll is a larger archaeological site and cultural landscape that reflects not only the 1946 tests, but subsequent nuclear weapons tests at Bikini through the hydrogen bombs tests of the 1950s. That archaeological legacy is defined by the site of the tests at Bikini, the fleet of test vessels sunk there as a result of the two atomic detonations, as well as vessels subsequently scuttled “in place” at Bikini. While an historic American battleship with an important symbolic significance for the American people, as an archaeological resource Nevada is one of a number of sites, including sunken vessels, that comprise a detailed archaeological record of the beginning of the atomic age and the Cold War, and specifically Operation Crossroads, the first tests of the new weapon at Bikini Atoll.
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