1957: Nevada Test Site

On 19 September 1957, the United States detonated a 1.7 kiloton nuclear weapon in an underground tunnel at the Nevada Test Site (NTS), a fourteen-hundred square mile research center located sisty miles north of Las Vegas. The test, known as Rainier, was the first fully contained underground detonation and produced no radioactive fallout. A modified W-25 warhead weighing two hundred pounds and measuring two feet in diameter and eighteen inches in length was used for the test. Rainier was part of a series of thirty nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons safety tests known as Operation Plumbbob that were conducted at the NTS between 28 May 1957 and 7 October 1957.
In December of 1941, the government committed to building the world’s first nuclear weapon when President Franklin Roosevelt authorized two billion dollars in funding for what came to be known as the Manhattan Project. The first nuclear weapon test took place on 16 July 1945, at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. A few weeks later, on 6 August1945, with the US at war against Japan, President Harry S. Truman authorized the dropping of an atomic bomb named Little Boy over Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on 9 August, a nuclear bomb called Fat Man was dropped over Nagasaki. Two hundred thousand people, according to some estimates, were killed in the attacks on the two cities and, on 15 August 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allies.
1957’s Operation Plumbbob took place at a time when the US was engaged in a Cold War and a nuclear arms race with the then-Soviet Union. In 1963, the US signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, underwater, and in outer space. A total of 928 tests took place at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1992, when the US conducted its last underground nuclear test. In 1996, the US signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits nuclear detonations in all environments.