Come Down (or Up) Somewhere?
On July 16, 1945, the United States conducted a test of the world’s first nuclear weapon, an event now known as Trinity. It came about after months of tireless research and development by a group of scientists living and working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, who had been authorized by President Roosevelt, in response to fears that the Nazis had already begun work on just such a weapon. The test took place in the early morning hours in a remote-but-not-actually-too-remote stretch of desert near Alamogordo. Radioactive fallout plagued the area unrecognized for months after the test, poisoning local residents, as well as their livestock and water supplies.
However, on August 6, 1945, with the U.S. at war against Japan, President Harry Truman authorized the dropping of an atomic bomb named Little Boy over Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on August 9, a nuclear bomb called Fat Man was dropped over Nagasaki. Two hundred thousand people, according to some estimates, were killed in the attacks on the two cities and, on August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers.
The test–and the bomb–had done exactly what the United States hoped it would do. But, when the Soviet Union tested their own nuclear weapon on August 29, 1945, stunning both scientists and government officials, the United States realized the Manhattan Project success couldn’t be just a one and done thing.
Nuclear weapon development would need to continue.
But the New Mexico desert was no longer a viable option for a testing ground. It was, to quote one official, “too populated.” Instead, they moved testing to areas in the Pacific as well as parts of the Nevada desert, where it continued for much of the 1950’s. The problem with these places, however, was the same problems the scientists had encountered in New Mexico. The dangers of nuclear fallout were just now starting to be understood; no place on earth was truly remote enough to safely test these types of weapons. However, amid rapidly intensifying tensions with the Soviet Union, simply stopping the nuclear arms race was not an option either.
And so, sixty-eight years ago today, on September 19, 1957, the United States detonated a 1.7-kiloton nuclear weapon in an underground tunnel at the Nevada Test Site (NTS), a 1,375-square-mile research center located 65 miles north of Las Vegas. The test, known as Rainier, was the first fully contained underground detonation and produced no radioactive fallout. A modified W-25 warhead weighing 218 pounds and measuring 25.7 inches in diameter and 17.4 inches in length was used for the test. Rainier was part of a series of 29 nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons safety tests known as Operation Plumbbob that were conducted at the NTS between May 28, 1957, and October 7, 1957.
In total, 928 tests took place at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1992, when the U.S. conducted its last underground nuclear test. In 1996, seven years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and official end of the Cold War, the U.S signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear detonations in all environments both above and below ground.
PS–Want to know more about the human side of the Trinity Test? Check out my novel Come Down Somewhere, available wherever books are sold! 
