To be fair, at the end of both world wars, the nations involved usually ended up with a whole lot of spare ships that they couldn’t even find buyers who want the scrap metal. A glut of steel on the market.
A lot of historic ships where used as targets in the Bikini (Operation Crossroads) test:
USS Saratoga (CV-3), USS Nevada, USS Pennsylvania (both Pearl Harbor survivors), HIJMS Nagato (largest Japanese battleship until the Yamato came along), the German cruiser Prinz Eugen, (which participated in the Bismark sortie, and the Channel Dash).
(USS = “United States Ship”, HIJMS = western words for the Japanese ships “His Imperial Japanese Majesty Ship”, which I don’t think the Japanese themselves used… What was the Kreigsmarine lettering in English? “KM”? “KMS”?)
Agreed, but note that they took great pains to show us that the refrigerator was lead-lined! What would definitely kill him would be suffocation - those refrigerators had no way to open them from the inside!
I think the battering at the end was what opened the thing up. But Indy lived in a world where primitive tribes could construct elaborate death traps in rock caves and have an extremely sophisticated knowledge of perspective, so you might as well buy it.
Getting blown through the air and crashing to the ground in the inside of a metal box would break every bone in his body and crack his skull like a robin’s egg. Radiation doesn’t even need to be a consideration.
Here is another interesting pamphlet from the past. I don’t know if the writer was naive, ignorant or figured that lying was better than making people worry.
“Lingering Radiation: [Risk] So small it is not a hazard.”
Note that you can view the back side of the pamphlet as well.
