The Nevada Test Site (NTS) of the
United States Department of Energy, located
in southern Nevada, is the home of the
United States nuclear testing facilities,
though activities have been greatly reduced
since the United States signed
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty
in 1996. The last nuclear test by the
United States was at NTS on September 23, 1993,
but the facility is also home to the United
States' program of sub-critical or
hydronuclear testing, in which small
amounts of plutonium undergo materials
testing with high explosives without generating
any nuclear yield. The Nevada Test Site has
quite a history, and is also, like New Mexico's
Trinity Site, a nuclear tourist destination.
The United States, like several other nuclear
powers, has tested nuclear weapons pretty much
everywhere it could
without starting World War 3. It
exploded some serious megatonnage in the South
Pacific between 1946 and 1962. It detonated
a few in the South Atlantic. It tested devices
in the Aleutians of
Alaska. In Colorado. In Mississippi (yes,
Mississippi, I'm not
kidding). In New Mexico. And in
Nevada. Those test films of GIs sitting out in
the desert, watching mushroom clouds wafting up
into the stratosphere, just a few miles from
where they're sitting? Nevada. That picture of
the Vegas strip with a mushroom cloud framed by
a neon cowboy? Obviously Nevada. Test films
in which mannequin-filled houses are reduced
to toothpicks? Nevada again.
Even today, if you look at the population
maps of the United States, there isn't a
heck of a lot in southern Nevada other than
Las Vegas, military bases, and
alien mortuaries. Imagine what it
was like back in the 1940's and 50's, when
the United States was looking to test its
precious new machinery of omnicide.
Rural Nevada was perfect.
The problem was that winds easily carried
fallout from weapons tests well away
from the test range, and radioactive debris
was carried by the jet stream throughout
most of the United States east of NTS. Did
this cause any harm? We don't really know.
The number of global cancer deaths from atmospheric nuclear
testing has been estimated to be anywhere from a
few hundred to
a few hundred thousand, but
of course the actual numbers are impossible to
know given the other sources of carcinogenic
materials in the environment, including
Human doses from nuclear weapons testing
fallout are probably a few millirem per year,
but directly downwind from NTS and other test
sites around the world,
they're a little higher.
Just about every test condition and device
design that could be tested at Nevada probably
has been, with the exception of high-yield
thermonuclear devices. The big ones
produced too much fallout even in airburst
tests to detonate above ground in the continental
United States, so those were tested at full yield
only in the Pacific Ocean testing areas. Some
notable highlights of activities at the Nevada
Test Site over the past 56 years include:
Operation Buster-Jangle, in which GIs
were told to hang out and enjoy the fireworks,
but to also cover their eyes until the
all clear was
sounded. Designed in part to assess the
of tactical nuclear weapons detonations near
ground troops, decontamination procedures for
Operation B-J reportedly included
cleaning one another off with brooms and brushes.
While you're waiting, have a cigarette.
Buster-Jangle was also noteworthy for producing
one of the funniest and most appropriate pictures
of a nuclear test -- a distant mushroom cloud
framed by the "Vegas Vic" billboard on the Las
Vegas strip. Try your luck, cowboy?
The Grable test
in which a 280 mm nuclear artillery shell
was fired for the first (and only) time on
May 25, 1953. The test films show three or four
artillery men pulling the trigger and then
scrambling like mad for cover. The only
thing cooler would've been to invent a nuclear
bazooka. Oh wait, they did!
Operation Upshot-Knothole which generated
many of the always-entertaining
test films of houses
and mannequins being
government built houses, warehouses, factories,
bridges, and railroads in the middle of the desert
just to see how badly nuclear weapons would damage
civilian infrastructure. Duck and cover, kids!
It's a beautiful world we live in!
The Sedan test of
July 6, 1962, part of the Plowshares Program,
in which peaceful uses for nuclear explosives
were sought. Apparently the purpose of this test
was to see how big a hole one could dig. The
Sedan Crater is now on the
National Register of Historic Places. Look,
it's a hole! It's a big, radioactive hole!
Take my picture!
The Baneberry test of December 18, 1970, in which
an underground test of about 10 kilotons "broke loose"
and vented to the atmosphere. This was a no-no
under the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 between
the US and Soviet Union. Government and
non-government estimates of the radiation released
from this test seem to vary, but the data I found
at the National Cancer Institute says Iodine-131
was detected as far away as Idaho. Don't drink
the water. Or the milk.
Astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan got
himself arrested at NTS in 1987, while protesting
underground nuclear testing by the United States.
Sagan had earlier participated in the TTAPS
study of nuclear winter, and had long been a
vocal detractor of nuclear
weapons. Other celebrity trespassers in NTS
history include Martin Sheen, Phil Zimmerman
and Kris Kristofferson.
And as mentioned above, NTS is still the location
of explosives testing that involves nuclear
material. From time to time, the United States
tests plutonium under high-strain conditions to
better understand its metallurgical
properties. It does this as part of the United
States' Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship
program as a way to test its stockpile of
weapons without actually conducting a nuclear
test. But if the United States ever feels it
necessary to drop out of the CTBT (which it has
the right to do under strictly defined
circumstances) and test a nuclear weapon, NTS
will be the place.
Let's hope they don't.
The Nevada Test Site may be a mess, and it may
be a dark spot in our nation's geography and
history, but just as the United States is not
the only nation to build nuclear weapons, it
also isn't the only one to test them. Russia
had Semipalatinsk and Novaya Zemlya. China
had Lop Nor, France had Algeria and
Polynesia, Britain had Australia (and also
used NTS under the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement),
India had Pokhran, Pakistan had the
Chagai Hills, and South Africa and/or
Israel had the southern Indian Ocean.
Who knows where North Korea is going to test
-- Tokyo, maybe. Unfortunately, having nuclear
weapons requires testing because they're
not a valid
otherwise. And there is no good way to conduct
a nuclear test. Our predecessors of sixty years
ago made the decision that nuclear weapons were
necessary instruments of military and foreign
policy, and in so doing, created places like
NTS which we now live with.
Is NTS an immediate danger to anyone? Not
really. Most radiation levels are down to
tolerable levels within the base, and are
vanishingly small outside it. Though it is
on the Environmental Protection Agency's
Superfund list, it isn't on their National
Priorities List, and I'd rather see the
government working on
Rocky Flats anyway. The more important
question we now face is this: will our
generation be responsible for any
more places like the Nevada Test
I hope not.
The Nuclear Weapons Archive Project:
Atomic Veterans History project:
The Nevada Test Site: http://www.nv.doe.gov
Personal visits to the Bradbury Science Museum,
A few weeks ago, I came across an issue of National Geographic in my local laundromat, and by chance, it happened to have an article on weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear ones. Specifically, it talked about the effects of atmospheric nuclear tests on people living upwind or otherwise near the test sites. One photograph was a portrait of a Utah farmer who had been exposed to fallout as a boy. His throat was badly scarred from several thyroid cancer operations. Another was a picture of a Kazak woman and her two grown sons, both of whom were profoundly retarded, and unable to care for themselves. Then there was a picture of some aborted fetuses (spontaneously or otherwise) from Russian women exposed to radioactive fallout.
It took a lot of deep breaths not to become physically ill in the laundromat.
Never again. Please?