In June 1919, the captured German fleet was scuttled by its own crews at Scapa Flow in Scotland — and a century later those wrecks have become a strange commodity, because their steel, made decades before the first atomic bomb, is free of the faint radioactive fallout baked into every batch produced since 1945

In June 1919, the captured German fleet was scuttled by its own crews at Scapa Flow in Scotland — and a century later those wrecks have become a strange commodity, because their steel, made decades before the first atomic bomb, is free of the faint radioactive fallout baked into every batch produced since 1945

At around noon on June 21, 1919, the crews of 74 interned German warships at anchor in a bay in the Orkney Islands opened the seacocks of their vessels and began to sink them. The German High Seas Fleet had been surrendered to Britain seven months earlier under the terms of the Armistice that ended the First World War. Its fate remained undecided while the Allies argued about how to divide it up. Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, the German comman…