You Might Want to Know: Where have we conducted nuclear tests? What for?
You Might Want to Know: Where have we conducted nuclear tests?
Where did we detonate the one-thousand fifty-four or so nuclear tests we’ve conducted so far?
The test of the first atomic bomb ever to be exploded took place in the American Southwest, in southern New Mexico at the Trinity site. The flash was visible far beyond the site. The story used was than an ammunition dump had exploded. The Trinity site is now on the White Sands Missile Range, which is still being used for ordnance testing. The site can be visited by members of the public, but only twice a year. A dark obelisk has been stood up on the site.
The first tests after World War II were conducted in 1946 out among the Marshall Islands, which are islands and atolls five thousand miles out west in the Pacific Ocean not far north of the equator. We had claimed them after World War II. The area was later designated as our Pacific Proving Ground. Starting in the 1950’s, that was where we tested our biggest devices, our hydrogen bombs, after we figured out how to make them. The biggest device we tested out there, in the Castle Bravo test in 1954, yielded fifteen megatons. The equivalent of a thousand Hiroshima bombs. It was the biggest one we ever tested.
Out there, some devices were detonated on the surface of atolls, some on barges, some under water. Some were put on Thor missiles and launched into space to see what would happen when we detonated hydrogen bombs up there. By the time we stopped testing in and over the Pacific in 1958, we’d conducted over a hundred tests that had produced the blast equivalent of about 210,000,000 tons of TNT. That’s about 80% of the yield of all the tests we conducted from only 14% of the tests.
A lot of radioactive fallout was produced in and around the Marshall Islands, of course. It’s still a serious problem there. The people who lived on those islands, who were relocated before the testing, are still trying to get help from our government.
The largest number of tests took place at the site we established in 1951 in Nevada about sixty miles of northwest of Las Vegas. A big site, but not big enough for megaton-range tests of the kind we were conducting at PPG. Megaton-range tests were therefore not allowed at the Nevada Test Site. The Atomic Energy Commission thought that might be too unsettling. Maybe make us want to call a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. The AEC didn’t want that idea to take hold.
The great majority of our tests was conducted at these two places, the Pacific Proving Ground and the Nevada Test Site, but not all. In 1958, we secretly sailed several Navy ships into the South Atlantic so we could launch three missiles and explode small (1.5 kiloton) nuclear devices up above the atmosphere. A scientist named Nicholas Christofilos thought this would create more belts of radiation around the earth. It did. The experiment was a success then. I’m not sure what it got us.
We also did more than thirty tests here and there in the United States, off the official test sites, most in an operation called Plowshare. More about Project Plowshare below.
Before we finally stopped testing, in 1992, we had conducted at NTS over nine-hundred tests. A hundred or so in the atmosphere (before 1963), so eight-hundred tests underground.
Las Vegas did a brisk business with tourists who came to see the clouds and feel the tests through the soles of their feet and the seats of their pants. People living and ranching to the north and east of Las Vegas and downwind of the NTS enjoyed the tests less. The radioactive fallout that came their way on the wind damaged livestock and caused health problems for people. In the 50’s and 60’s, our Atomic Energy Commission continued to maintain that fallout wasn’t what caused these problems. We had to keep testing, they believed. It was a question of national security. National security is something different from the safety of people.
What for?
Most of our early tests were for “weapons development,” to test new design ideas. Those tests were usually overseen by one of the two national labs, Los Alamos, in New Mexico, the lab where the first bomb had been designed, or Livermore, the newer lab that had been started by Edward Teller in northern California when he left Los Alamos. The labs were huge rivals.
Some tests were to study “weapons effects.” These were usually overseen by the Department of Defense. Effects on buildings and houses, railroads and bridges, military equipment like tanks, ships, airplanes, and on live animals like pigs, sheep, and rabbits were studied. The effects were dramatic.
The large nuclear explosions in space had produced more radiation up there and an unexpected weapons effect called an “electromagnetic pulse.” The EMP fried electrical circuits down on the earth.
In an operation called Desert Rock that ran from 1951 to 1957, soldiers were sent into the sites of “tactical” nuclear explosions to see how they would hold up during maneuvers. Thousands were sent in.
Some tests were “safety” tests, to learn how to keep the weapons from going off by accident and such.
Project Plowshare, the idea of Edward Teller, was to see how nuclear explosions might be used for peaceful commercial purposes—like to generate steam, or to dig out harbors, or to release oil and gas in tight rock. Unfortunately, the thirty-five blasts in the Plowshares program turned out not to work for any of these things. The major problem—not exactly unforeseeable—was the residual radioactivity that was created.
Off-site tests were conducted in southern New Mexico again, in a salt dome in Mississippi, in western Colorado, and below an Aleutian Island off Alaska named Amchitka.
Some tests, like one in Mississippi in 1964, were to help us learn how detect small underground tests other countries had conducted and distinguish them from earthquakes. This was to keep other countries from cheating if we ever did sign a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. We did learn how to detect small tests but we still haven’t signed the treaty.
The biggest test in the continental United States, and the biggest underground test ever conducted by the U.S., was the one detonated under Amchitka Island in the Aleutians in 1971. In a test called Cannikin, a five-megaton warhead was lowered more than a mile down into a shaft. We wanted to see if this was a warhead we could shoot up into space to defend ourselves against incoming ICBMs.
This test registered as the equivalent of a 7.0 earthquake. That is a major earthquake, but it did not produce the tsunami some had worried about. In the end, we decided this kind of device wouldn’t work for missile defense. We still don’t have anything that would.
There’s a new big round lake on Amchitka Island now, if you ever go there.
Our last test, so far, in 1992, was an underground test on the Nevada Test Site called “Divider.” Divider was a “weapons development” test that had a yield the equivalent of only five-thousand tons of TNT. Clearly for a “tactical” weapon.
The negotiations among the countries of the world for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty began in 1993. The United Nations General Assembly adopted the CTBT in 1996 but some nations haven’t ratified it yet. The United States is one of them.
The countries that have conducted tests since the CTBT was signed are India, Pakistan, and North Korea. All were weapons development tests and all were conducted inside the countries that conducted them. We detected them all after they were conducted but they seem to have surprised our CIA. It must not be so easy to know that a country is secretly trying to build a nuclear weapon.
Next: Did any of our presidents ever witness a nuclear detonation?