AI Summary
5 min readOn April 19, 1989, a sixteen-inch gun turret on the battleship USS Iowa exploded during a gunnery exercise, killing 47 sailors in an instant. The Navy’s subsequent investigation did not focus on the decades-old powder stored in unventilated barges, the non-functional safety systems, or the unauthorized experiments with illegal powder configurations. Instead, the Navy concluded that a sailor named Clayton Hartwig had built a bomb and detonated it in a murder-suicide because he was gay. The evidence for this theory was a joke book, a life insurance policy, and a copper ring fragment that the FBI determined was likely contaminated by the Navy’s own clumsy extraction process.
The Ship and Its Problems
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:01) **Episode Opening & Banter** - The hosts struggle with recording setup and discuss Liam's new Jeep Cherokee.
- 2 (06:19) **Introductions & Personal Updates** - The hosts introduce themselves and Liam announces he has left the podcast's "jobs program" for a real job.
- 3 (10:10) **Topic Introduction: USS Iowa Turret Explosion** - The main subject is introduced: the 1989 explosion of the USS Iowa's Number Two turret and the subsequent cover-up.
- 4 (11:48) **The Goddamn News** - The hosts deliver a chaotic, free-association news segment covering global oil politics and domestic absurdities.
- 5 (31:27) **What is a Battleship?** - A definition of a battleship is given, focusing on the obsolete Iowa-class and its massive, manually-operated 16-inch guns.
- 6 (44:14) **How the Guns Work** - The manual, dangerous process of loading and firing the 16-inch guns is explained in detail.
- 7 (50:55) **The Cast of Characters & A Neglected Ship** - The key figures are introduced: an incompetent captain, a reckless gunnery chief, and a ship in disrepair.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
this would never happen on a Trump-class battleship
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in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
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