USS Battleship turret hydrogen cracking repair (Puerto Rico, ~1980)

Battleship 16-inch turret explosion (Tom dates ~1980, Puerto Rico). Navy wanted to repair the 14-inch armor plate but had lost the WWII-era welding procedure — last used circa 1947, all the procedure-holders dead. Tom's case study in *technology loss*: a national-defense capability that decayed because nobody had welded that thick in 35 years.

In fact, it's such a real problem that back 20, 25 years ago when we still had battleships, there was a sailor down in Puerto Rico on the battleship who had another seaman — his lover — jilt him. To spite him, he set off one of the 16-inch shells inside the turret. Boom. The turret goes jumping up in the air, and the Navy wanted to repair it. The armor plate is 14 inches thick, and back around 1980, no one knew how to repair our 14-inch-thick armor plate. The last 14-inch-thick armor plate we welded was around 1947. That was the last battleship we built with heavy armor. Today a shaped charge goes right through 14 inches, boom — right through 36 inches, I've seen it. A shaped charge would cut right through 36 inches of solid steel. But back in World War II they had 14-inch, 16-inch-thick armor plate, all welded with stick electrodes.

We'd lost the technology. We didn't have a welding procedure, and to develop another welding procedure and prove it out under today's more rigorous standards would have cost — you could have built another battleship. Actually you couldn't have, because you didn't have a welding procedure. But in any case, Stout and Doty has all this information. I'll show you later other information, but this is a nice little summary of the types of things we have to have in order to figure out how to weld things. So these guys would call me up and say, how do we weld this? I would go to Stout and Doty, spend fifteen minutes looking at it, write up a procedure for him, and charge him a half an hour or something like that, okay.

Did I tell you the story about the battleship Iowa down in Puerto Rico? One of the sailors was upset with one of the other sailors, and he set off a shell in the turret and destroyed the turret. The Navy didn't know how to repair it. Of course, you don't need 16-inch shells anymore. They were firing shells that had been made in World War II, and the last time I think we fired shells was in the 1970s — they were sitting off Israel and they were lobbing them into Palestine, somewhere in Syria. The Missouri may have been the last battleship built during World War II — that's why they had the signing on the Missouri in Tokyo Harbor; it was the newest battleship. You want to go in there with your newest machine if you're going to sign an armistice. The Iowa may have been finished after World War II, I think it may have been the last one. They're getting to be old ships, old and rusty. But we lost the technology.

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