 Although the Able bomb missed its target, Nevada, by nearly half a mile, and it failed to sink or to contaminate the battleship, a crew would not have survived. Goat # 119, tethered inside a gun turret and shielded by armor plate, received enough fireball radiation to die four days later of radiation sickness having survived two days longer than goat # 53, which was on the deck, unshielded. Had Nevada been fully manned, she would likely have become a floating coffin, dead in the water for lack of a live crew. In theory, every unprotected location on the ship received 10,000 rems (100 Sv) of initial nuclear radiation from the fireball. Therefore, people deep enough inside the ship to experience a 90 % radiation reduction would still have received a lethal dose of 1,000 rems. In the assessment of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "a large ship, about a mile away from the explosion, would escape sinking, but the crew would be killed by the deadly burst of radiations from the bomb, and only a ghost ship would remain, floating unattended in the vast waters of the ocean."
