Transcription
Why is the Nagato still there? Have you ever looked at the Nagato shipwreck and wondered why it's there? I don't mean how it got there. If you're watching this video, you probably already know how, but if you are unfamiliar, the Nagato was Japan's most famous battleship. It was the flagship of Admiral Yamamoto. And from the Nagato's bridge, the order was given to attack Pearl Harbor.
After Japan surrendered, the US Navy took the ship and sent it to Bikini Atoll to be used as a target in the nuclear weapons tests known as Operation Crossroads. It survived the first bomb with only light damage. The second bomb started slow flooding that couldn't be stopped. Nobody could even board her because she was dangerously radioactive. Over the next 5 days, her list gradually increased until she quietly capsized and sank alone in the dark, on the night of July the 29th, 1946.
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What I want to know is why it is still there. The wreck is sitting upside down in a remote Pacific lagoon that barely anyone can visit. Why hasn't anyone come back in nearly 80 years to salvage it? And here's the thing, the answer involves radioactivity, low background steel, and a ship so historically important that nobody would dare touch it now, even if they wanted to.
To understand why nobody salvaged the Nagato, you first need to understand what it actually was. When the Nagato was completed in 1920, it was the most powerful battleship in the world. It was the first battleship ever built with 16-in guns. Those gun barrels were 60 ft long and could fire a shell over 23 m. At 738 ft long and displacing nearly 47,000 tons fully loaded, [music] it was an engineering marvel. Japan was so proud of it that they classified its top speed as a state secret for years. It was the symbol of Japanese naval power and the entire country knew it.
By the end of World War II, the Nagato was the only Japanese battleship still afloat. Every other one had been sunk. The Yamato, the Masashi, all of them gone. The Nagato had survived the entire Pacific War. It fought at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It was attacked by aircraft from five American aircraft carriers in July 1945 [music] and still didn't sink. When Japan surrendered, American sailors specifically boarded the Nagato before the formal surrender ceremony was even signed. [music] The US Navy said this act symbolized the complete surrender of the Japanese Navy. Then they pointed it at Bikini Atoll.
The first test [music] called Able was an air burst on July the 1st, 1946. The Nagato was 1,500 meters from ground zero. It survived with only moderate damage, [music] wrinkled plating, some doors blown off, paint scorched. [music] A skeleton crew boarded it afterward and actually ran one of its boilers for 36 hours [music] without any problems. The US military was not happy about this. The whole point was to show nuclear weapons destroying warships. And Japan's most symbolic battleship was sitting there barely scratched. So they moved it closer for the second test. [music]
For test Baker, on July the 25th, the Nagato was positioned 870 m from ground zero. The bomb was detonated underwater. A column of water over a mile high erupted from the lagoon and drenched the entire fleet in radioactive spray. When the water settled, the Nagato was still floating. Mines had actually been strapped to her sides beforehand, specifically to help sink her, according to the US Navy's own records. And it still wasn't enough. She had a list of just two degrees. [music] Once again, the most hated ship in the American fleet had refused to go down. But this time, something was different. The Baker test hadn't just damaged the ships. [music] It had coated every surface of every ship in radioactive water. The Nagato was so contaminated that nobody could approach within 1,000 yards of her. [music] Sailors tried hosing her down from a safe distance to wash off the radioactivity, but nothing worked. Unable to board, unable to stop the flooding, the Americans could only watch as the list slowly increased. [music] 3 days after the test, it had reached 8°. Then it kept going. On the night of July the 29th, with no crew, no ceremony, and no one watching, the most famous warship in Japanese history quietly rolled over and disappeared beneath the surface. By morning, the spot where the Nagato had been was empty.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. The Nagato came to rest upside down at around 170 ft of water in Bikini's Lagoon. [music] That's deep, but it's not unreachable. Plenty of wrecks in worse condition have been salvaged. So why hasn't anyone ever come back for it?
The first issue was the radioactivity. Right after the Baker test, the Nagato was dangerously contaminated. Even the ships that were decontaminated and sold for scrap afterward, only nine of them made it through that process out of dozens of target ships. The rest were too hot to touch. The Nagato hadn't been boarded since before the Baker test. Nobody knew the exact state of the contamination because nobody could get close enough to check. In the late 1940s, with a nuclear age barely a year old, nobody was rushing to volunteer for that job.
The second issue is the location. Bikini Atoll sits in the Marshall Islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, roughly 2,500 miles from Hawaii. There is nothing nearby. No port, no shipbreaking yard, no heavy equipment. Any salvage operation would have to bring everything across thousands of miles of open ocean. That alone makes the cost enormous before [music] you've touched a single piece of steel.
The third issue is the steel itself. And this is the interesting part. The Nagato was built in 1920, which means its steel is what scientists call low background steel. All steel made after the first nuclear test in 1945 contains trace amounts of radioactive particles from atmospheric nuclear fallout. Pre-war steel doesn't. That makes it genuinely valuable for sensitive scientific instruments like radiation detectors where even tiny amounts of background radiation in the shielding material would interfere with measurements. Hospitals and nuclear research facilities have actually used hull plates from old warships to build radiation shielding rooms. It sounds strange, but there's a real market for this stuff.
Here's the problem with the Nagato. The Baker test detonated a nuclear bomb directly underwater. Then a massive column of radioactive water fell back down onto the entire fleet. That water soaked into every surface of the ship. So, you have a battleship made of pre-war low background steel, theoretically valuable, that was then drenched in radioactive seawater by a nuclear bomb. The very test that sank it also contaminated the steel that might otherwise have justified salvaging it. If that isn't ironic enough, I don't know what is.
Unlike the Prinz Eugen, which had a formal feasibility study done by the US Navy in 1974 that actually calculated salvage cost versus scrap value, I haven't been able to find any record of a serious salvage study ever being carried out for the Nagato. And that in itself tells you something. [clears throat] The Prinz Eugen study found that salvage would cost around $7.5 million against a scrap value of only 1.5 million. The Nagato is a much bigger ship, over twice the tonnage of the Prinz Eugen, sitting deeper, further away, upside down, and with a radioactivity question nobody has ever formally resolved. Nobody even bothered to run the numbers because the numbers were obviously never going to work.
Today the wreck sits completely. In 2010, UNESCO declared Bikini Atoll a World Heritage Site specifically because of its role in the history of the nuclear age. The Marshall Islands opened the lagoon to divers in 1996. The Nagato became one of the most famous wreck dives in the world. The Times of London named it one of the top 10 wreck diving sites on the planet. You descend past four massive propellers, each over 13 ft across, pointing up toward the surface. You can swim the entire length of the upturned hull. You can enter the bridge where Yamamoto gave the order that brought the United States into the war. The Marshall Islands owns the wreck. They are never going to allow anyone to salvage it. It is their most valuable diving attraction and a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a war grave. And honestly, that seems about right for a ship this significant.
The Nagato is still there because it was too radioactive to approach right after it sank. Then it was too remote and too expensive to justify. Then the steel that could have made it worth salvaging turned out to be the same steel contaminated by the test that killed it. And now it's too important to touch. The most powerful battleship in the world when it was built. The ship that launched the attack on Pearl Harbor, the only Japanese battleship to survive the entire Second World War. It ended up quietly capsizing alone in the dark, and it's been sitting upside down at the bottom of a remote Pacific atoll ever since. Nobody came back for it. Nobody's coming back for it.
Now, if you enjoyed this video and want to see more like it, [music] please let me know in the comments, and I'll make more of these for more ships. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss those. And I'll see you next [music] time.