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 1,375 square mile research center located 65 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 just over 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 nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons safety tests known as Operation Plumbbob that were conducted at the NTS between 28 May 28 and 7 October 1957.
In December of 1941, the U.S. 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 August 1945, with the US at war with Japan, President Harry 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 Allied Powers.
1957’s Operation Plumbbob took place at a time when the US was engaged in a Cold War and 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 just over nine hundred tests took place at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1992, when the U.S. conducted its last underground nuclear test. In 1996, the U.S signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits nuclear detonations in all environments.
Rico says that the Nevadans thought it was a good idea, at first...
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