Word: yucca
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
OVER in Nevada, TIME'S science expert, Associate Editor Jonathan Norton Leonard, waited for the A-bomb to go off. More than one dawn he stood on Yucca Flat in a milling mass of scientists, newsmen, civil-defense workers, military observers and state governors, just waiting. To the north, the Joshua trees stood like shaggy ghosts, and behind them lights marked the 500-ft. tower that held the bomb. Near by, TV crewmen turned their great searchlights toward the ground to warm themselves in their artificial sunlight. The desert was bitter cold, and no one seemed to have enough...
...like that last week when reporters first visited the village on Yucca Flat built to test the effect of an atomic blast. The reporters, who had waited 13 days for the explosion and another day to see what had happened, were primed to be shocked. They had seen the fireball dwarf the tiny village on the desert (three houses can be seen in the lower right corner of the picture above ), watched a train of dust follow the shock wave across the desert, felt its punch eight miles away...
...device at Yucca Flat was a small one. An H-bomb tested in the Pacific was 500 times more powerful...
Suitcase Size. During the Yucca Flat tests, one baby bomb was parachuted out of a B-36, exploded at 30,000 ft. amid a cluster of other parachutes carrying little metal canisters. Probable purpose: to estimate the effect of an atomic aerial explosion, such as an antiaircraft shell or missile, on the metal parts of bombers. Another blast was exploded underground (TIME, April 4), gouging a mammoth crater and tossing a column of dirt hundreds of feet into the sky. Reportedly, the bomb was no bigger than a suitcase...
...Vegas where, amid the clatter of one-armed bandits, he solemnly asked the proprietor of The Sands Hotel if he was used to A-blasts (he was). NBC's Dave Garroway was reported by his mates on the Today show as having dug his own trench out in Yucca Flat. Meanwhile, the desperate networks kept rerunning film of the target area until the tall, thin pole with the bulge at the top that was the housing for the bomb was as naggingly familiar as a Lucky Strike commercial...