Word: yucca
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...booklet describes FCDA's sketchy tests held last spring at Yucca Flat, Nevada (TIME, March 30). Two "typical" frame houses, densely populated with department-store dummies, were exposed to the heat, radiation and blast of an AEC "nuclear diagnostic device" on a 300-ft. tower. In their basements and dug into nearby desert were various shelters, also inhabited by dummies...
...Force 8-36 droned through the sky 35,000 ft. above Yucca Flat, Nev. just before dawn one morning last week, and slowly opened its barn-sized bomb-bay doors. Forty-two seconds later, at 4:15 a.m., the desert below exploded into noonday brilliance. For five miles around, acres of Joshua trees, cactus and sagebrush burst into flame. A sturdy frame house ten miles from the explosion collapsed. In San Francisco, 600 miles to the west, people saw the incandescent flash; in Pasadena, 250 miles southwest, they heard the explosion as a rumble in the distance...
...first of the day's two great demonstrations of atomic progress (the second: announcement of a breeder reactor-see SCIENCE), the explosion at Yucca Flat was caused by the most powerful A-bomb ever set off in the U.S. With an estimated explosive force of 40,000 tons of T.N.T., the bomb produced an initial flash of unusual length (more than five seconds), which suggested that U.S. scientists had either changed the fissionable materials used or had discovered a new and probably more efficient method of detonation...
...east, the Federal Civil Defense Administration had built a simulated suburb: two typical frame houses, looking prim and white among the yucca trees. Nearby a typical signpost read Elm & Main. Typical U.S. cars were spotted in the imaginary parking places of the imaginary town...
...dust cloud with its waning radio activity drifted harmlessly eastward ,but the ruins left behind at Yucca Flat impressed some observers more than others. For an area nearly a mile and a half long and almost as wide, the desert had been made dangerous with radioactivity. Hopefully, FCDA men announced that the bomb shelters in the cellar of House Two would have saved real inhabitants. Perhaps said dubious AEC officials, but it would be helpful to remember a few facts. The "Diagnostic Device" was less powerful than the primitive A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It probably packed the punch...