Word: yucca
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...underground nuclear tests may not produce a fiery mushroom cloud but there is one above-ground effect that anyone can see. ] Shortly after each recent blast, a strange dent has appeared in the ground at the Yucca Flats, Nev., test center. Some of the depressions are only a few feet deep, but two of them are 50 ft. deep and several hundred feet across. The holes are not craters; nothing is blown out. There is no radioactivitiy, and the level of the ground around the depressions is not raised. But millions of cubic feet of dirt have apparently disappeared...
...Alamos Scientific Laboratory, describes it in somewhat unscientific terms: "It sort of takes a guy by surprise. You hear a kind of crunching sound and you look out of the window. Half an hour ago when the bomb went off, it was plain old flat, sandy Yucca Flats. All of a sudden it's a hole big enough to float a small fleet if you had any water...
MERLE ARMITAGE Yucca Valley, Calif...
Only 35 miles east of Phoenix, Superstition Mountain rises dull red and sheer from the sunbaked Arizona wasteland with its yucca, saguaro, greasewood and ocotillo. In that land Geronimo, Cochise and their Apaches once roamed, and Superstition Mountain gave them hiding. When the moon is right, its beams shine through two notches flanking a spike of rock called Weaver's Needle. Some say the moonlight points to the location of the Lost Dutchman's gold mine, where men have sought wealth for more than a century-and died in the seeking...
...even as the negotiators were talking, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was totting up results of the October series of underground blasts at Yucca Flat, Nev. The results were enough to curl the scientists' hair: instead of a five-kiloton threshold, the real minimum underground blast that could be fully detected was about 20 kilotons-about the size of the Nagasaki-Hiroshima bombs. Science Advisory Committee Chairman James Rhyne Killian Jr. broke the news to President Eisenhower before Christmas, and the U.S. expects to break it to the Russians at Geneva this week. Next soul-searching question: Should...