How Nuclear Weapons Made Shipwrecks More Valuable

Low-background steel and illegal salvage

Grant Piper
5 min readMar 27, 2024
(Public domain)

When the United States detonated the first nuclear bomb in 1945, the world changed in more ways than one. Everyone who watched the first mushroom cloud blossom over the New Mexico desert that fateful day knew that the world would never be the same. However, they had no idea that the world would change in small…

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Grant Piper

Professional writer. Amateur historian. Husband, father, Christian.