Word: nevadas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...nuclear bombs began exploding in the Nevada desert in 1951, when Sheldon Nisson was five. "They used to tell us to get up and watch the blasts," recalls his mother Helen, who still lives in Washington, Utah, some 125 miles downwind from the test site. "We saw the clouds go over all the time. Our children played outside. All the while, the Government kept saying that it wouldn't hurt us." But when the last of 102 mushroom clouds rose above the desert in 1962, Sheldon Nisson was dead from leukemia. His cancer, along with that of nine other...
...senior drilling inspector at the Department of Energy's Nevada Test Site, Rufus Moore usually pays scant attention to the antinuclear protesters who often appear at the perimeter of the top-secret patch of desert 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The 1,350-sq.-mi. site in the Nellis Range has absorbed hundreds of underground blasts as the U.S. has fine-tuned its nuclear arsenal. For Moore, 54, a cigar-chomping veteran of hundreds of such tests, nuclear deterrence and superpower peace depend on the results. "The minute we stop testing, we're in trouble," he says...
...demonstration came too late. To foil the activists, the nuclear test, code-named Hazebrook, was set off Tuesday, two days ahead of schedule. The subsequent protest was not confined to Nevada. On Capitol Hill, the House Democratic caucus proposed that Congress cut off funds for further U.S. nuclear tests as long as the Soviet Union adheres to its testing moratorium. The House Democrats called on President Reagan to negotiate with the Soviets to achieve a "reciprocal, simultaneous and verifiable" test ban. The Soviets, meanwhile, announced they would soon resume testing in response to the U.S. action...
Moore, who has worked at the Nevada Test Site since 1961, views the protesters as "sincere in their feeling, but they don't understand the big picture." When he drives from his home in nearby Pahrump to the heavily guarded site, Moore enters a domain pockmarked with gaping craters, a lunar- like legacy of blasts thousands of feet underground. Many of Moore's 5,500 colleagues labor in cavernous horizontal tunnels that are bored into the granite mesas. To the worker, the test site represents not a nuclear underworld but a well-paid job. "You get used to it, feels...
...Nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada site from 1951 to 1992 is alleged to have caused tens of thousands of cancers in residents of Arizona, Utah, Nevada and Idaho. Although the findings are disputed, the 1990 federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act provided compassionate payments to some victims. In announcing the test, James Tegnelia, director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, told reporters the blast "is the first time in Nevada that you?ll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons." Later, after a rebuke from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Tegnelia retracted the description...