The year was 1965, and the United States Navy had a problem.

After the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had started producing an alarming number of mushroom clouds and attendant fallout as they both tested their nuclear arsenal, the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 had put the kibosh on atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. But the Navy still wanted to test effects of a nuclear blast on naval vessels. Left with no option to use atomic options, they turned to old-fashioned trinitrotoluene, better known as TNT, for an experiment known as Operation Sailor Hat.

Three separate domes of TNT (called "sailor hats") were set up along the coastline of Kahoʻolawe, Hawaii, each dome containing 500 tons, or about a million pounds, of TNT. (For comparison, one of the smallest nuclear warhead ever detonated, the Mk-54 "Davy Crockett", had a yield of just 10 or 20 tons of TNT. Little Boy, the bomb that fell on Hiroshima, had a yield of 15 kilotons, or about thirty times what was being tested during Operation Sailor Hat.) They set up a ring of aging naval vessels around the domes, and then let everything go boom:

Some of the findings of Operation Sailor Hat:

Radar towers did not fare well:

Walls close to the blast buckled inward:

And it was confirmed that standing on the deck of a ship when the Navy blows up a million pounds of TNT nearby is not gonna be a fun time:

The tests were large enough to leave a permanent landlocked crater lake near the blast, which are now home to a specially adapted species of Hawaiian red shrimp. Even ersatz nuclear tests can have happy endings.

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