The stern of the wreck has the remains of “36” and “140.” U.S.S. Nevada’s designation was BB-36 and the 140 was painted on the structural “rib” at the ship’s stern ahead of atomic tests to facilitate post-blast damage reporting.
By the end of WWII, Nevada carried 32 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns. This 40mm gun is mounted next to a partly fallen, standard-issue “gun director” used by the crew to direct the fire of these guns.
U.S.S. Nevada, like other ships at Bikini, was a floating platform for military equipment and instruments designed to see what the atomic bomb would do to them. One of four tanks placed on Nevada, this is either a Chaffee or Pershing tank that survived a 23-kiloton surface blast and a 20-kiloton underwater blast, and remained on Nevada until the ship was sunk off Hawai’i on July 31, 1948.
The engraving is on the exterior bulkhead above the hatch leading into a shell handling compartment for one of Nevada’s 5-inch/38 caliber guns. The first line of the inscription is the number of the door, the second is the designation of the compartment, and the third is the compartment number to which the door gives access. This remarkable level of preservation is occasionally found on deep-ocean shipwrecks due to the lack of light, oxygen, and the extreme cold at depths of more than 15,000 feet.
Like its sister battleships of the WWI and early WWII-era, Nevada’s superstructure was built around a towering steel tripod mast that supported the navigation and command centers, lookout stations, and radar. This is the top of the mast that once towered more than a hundred feet over Nevada’s deck.