Word: yucca
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Yucca Valley, Calif...
...here," said Winant Sidle, a spokesman for manufacturer Martin Marietta. David Harris of the Army Missile Command, who had watched three previous tests go awry, wept as the missile disappeared in a corkscrew of smoke and headed downrange for 66 nautical miles over a desert dotted with sagebrush and yucca. "Congress told us we needed a good firing, and we got one today," he said, his voice choked with emotion. "The message was pretty clear...
...timing was both fitting and macabre. Last Thursday the U.S. detonated a nuclear bomb in the 20-to 150-kiloton class under the desert of Yucca Flat, Nev. The test blast was the eleventh this year, but it came on the eve of the 37th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and on the day the U.S. grass-roots nuclear-freeze movement faced its first real test of political strength...
This morning, in mock-funeral fashion, the motorcade of atomic-age pilgrims solemnly winds its way past whorls of dust and yucca bushes to reach the 6-ft. Cyclone chain-link fence that surrounds the blast area. Among the pilgrims, some 1,700 of them, are mothers and babies, parents and grandparents, families of three and four who scurry out of cars, Minoltas in hand, eager to record for posterity the "place where it all began." What they see is nothing much. The original 400-yd., 25-ft.-deep crater has long since been filled in to prevent further radiation...
...high mesa framed by a fiery desert sky, the dancers appear: with eerie spectral masks, flesh painted in earthy clay and turquoise colors, and swathed in skins. The kachina priests whirl through the dusty streets of the village clacking tortoise rattles, chanting, waving yucca switches. Hopi legends say these "messengers of the Creator" have returned from the San Francisco mountains to begin anew the natural and spiritual cycle of planting and harvest. The desert will be blessed and purified and nourished by rain. An hour's drive north of the high mesa, on desolate scrubland wreathed by a dark...