Word: yucca
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...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...
...grey-green desert basin at Yucca Flat, Nev., some 1,500 G.I.s and technical observers huddled face down in deep, narrow trenches. If they were tense and nervous, they had reason. Never before had willing men waited so near the site of an imminent atomic explosion. Only two miles away, an A-bomb (officially called a "Nuclear Diagnostic Device") was perched on a tall steel tower, 300 feet above "Ground Zero...
...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...
Atom Bomb Tests (Tues. 8 a.m., CBS, NBC, ABC). From Yucca Flat...