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Article Excerpt
Tree hundred and twenty feet deep and nearly a quarter of a mile wide, the Sedan Crater still radiates energy from the explosion of a 104-kiloton nuclear bomb on July 6, 1962. One of ninety-eight nuclear devices exploded that year, the Sedan "shot" was detonated 635 feet beneath the surface of the Nevada desert. In less than thirteen seconds, the earth was emptied of 6.5 million cubic yards of sand and rock, some of which was lofted up into the atmosphere to return later as dust and rain, and the remainder of which was driven down into the earth or simply vaporized.
The Sedan Crater is perhaps the only place in the world where it is possible for a layman to comprehend the full force of a nuclear explosion. A wooden viewing platform stands above the hole like an abandoned lifeguard's tower, offering a quiet vantage from which to contemplate the implications of a giant radioactive sand trap that seems to absorb sound the way a black hole swallows light. The similarity between the cratered stretch of desert where I am standing and the moon was strong enough that the Apollo astronauts trained here and radioed back precise comparisons of the craters they found on the moon to the man-made craters of the test site.
The paucity of visitors to this silent and instructive place can be explained by the fact that the Sedan Crater is locked deep within the Nevada Test Site, a 1,375-mile preserve the size of the state of Rhode Island, surrounded by fences and itself contained within an even larger secure archipelago of military bases where America's most advanced weapons are tested and stored. In the years since the Trinity test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, there have been a total of 1,054 acknowledged American tests (twenty-four of them conducted jointly with the British), 928 of which took place at the Nevada Test Site. (1)
This proving ground, on which the American nuclear telegraph fluttered seismic messages to the Soviet Union, was built by humble craftsmen who used recondite technologies to create a string of production plants and thousands of bombs that reshaped the geography of continents and redrew the boundaries between nations. The weapons that made American power possible were designed by teams of physicists and metallurgists and engineers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, and the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. The secondary parts and components of the arsenal came from the Y-12 production plant located on the 35,000-acre Oak Ridge Reservation, about fifteen miles west of Knoxville, Tennessee. The plutonium and tritium that fueled the bomb came from reactors at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina. The plutonium "pits" that powered the bombs were manufactured at Rocky Flats in Colorado. The finished weapons were assembled at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas.
Eighty-five percent of the weapons in the current nuclear stockpile were designed by Los Alamos. The youngest warhead, the W-88, was introduced in 1991, and several of the key materials used in all nukes--including plutonium "pits" and tritium fuel--were last produced in the late 1980s. (2) By 2014, the W-88 and every other weapon in the stockpile will have reached the end of its intended life, and by then the United States might not have a single weapons designer left with test experience.
Responding to this possibility, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has recently appointed a Task Force on Nuclear Capabilities, whose job it will be to breathe new life into our capacity to design, produce, and test atomic weapons. But it may very well be that our chance to refurbish the nuclear program has already passed, and that a resumption of testing is no longer practical or possible. As luck and time would have it, we still have with us people in a unique position to understand what a resumption of testing will mean, and what its effectiveness might be, men and women who saw firsthand what their countrymen had for decades been conditioned to ignore and who spent the best years of their lives driving to work every day for the express purpose of setting Toff nuclear bombs.
The first successful containment of an underground nuclear explosion took place beneath the Nevada Test Site on September 19, 1957. When the test site miners drilled back into the cavity after the blast, they first hit a layer of black frothy rock. Further inside they found gunk filled with little beads of radioactive glass. Frozen inside the glass were pockets of gas that contained a perfect microcosm of the universe in which they had been formed.
In the microseconds after the bomb was detonated, an egg-like cavity began to bloom beneath the desert floor, quickly reaching temperatures of over 100 million degrees Celsius. A few seconds after the shot, the temperature inside the cavity had cooled to between 800 and 1,000 degrees centigrade, which is close to the melting point of the rock, allowing a mantle of glass to start to form inside the cavity. Over the next few minutes, the temperature dropped again, and some of the glass fell to the bottom. By measuring the refraction of the light and the amount of water vapor dissolved in the glass, scientists found that they could estimate the size of the explosion with a very high degree of precision. Each kiloton of nuclear yield created approximately one kiloton of glass.
The last American nuclear test was conducted on September 23, 1992. A laconic press release issued by the Department of Energy on that date stated simply, "An underground nuclear test was conducted at 8:04 A.M. (PDT) today at the U.S. Department of Energy's Nevada Test Site." Codenamed Divider, it was the sixth American nuclear test that year. Jim Magruder was running the Divider test from the Department of Energy's office in Las Vegas. A fit, taciturn man in his early sixties who looks like a retired astronaut and dresses like a real estate agent, he accompanies me on one of my first visits to the test site.
"I think once you shut a program down it's awfully hard to start it up," Magruder says in a flat Kentucky twang, as he gazes out at the crater through big, square, gold-rimmed glasses, "whether you have the personnel that used to do the work or not."
His companion, Larry Krenzien, dresses like an engineer, with a silver watch on his wrist and a practical, short-sleeved shirt. His voice is confident, easy, and deep, as befits a man who has worked on 400 or 500 nuclear tests during his lifetime, including Divider. He transferred permanently out to the test site in 1964, after working at Los Alamos and in the South Pacific during the atmospheric-testing program. Back when the Air Force would fly through the clouds after each test collecting debris, Krenzien was in charge of analyzing the radioactive samples from the clouds.
"I went out to Enewetak in '58 for two tests out there," he tells me. "Butternut, I think was one. Cactus was the other. They had steak every night, as many as you wanted. The beer was selling for five cents a can. It was pretty good living."
When I ask Krenzien about the glory years of exploding nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site, his face creases with pleasure.
"I can remember that C-47 coming in with the device, and I would drive down in a regular flatbed truck and load it myself, get up there, put it in the building, lock the door, and go away," he recalls.
"The two-man rule wasn't very much respected," Magruder adds.
"Back in the early days, they shipped it complete," Krenzien explains. "It was one box, and that was it. At one time our warehouse man said he had more weapons than the U.S.S.R., and he probably was right."
Over the life of the American nuclear-design program, the scientists at Los Alamos and Livermore designed 71 different warheads for 116 nuclear-weapons systems, at a total cost of nearly $800 billion. This year, the Department of Energy will spend $6.5 billion on nuclear weapons, and it plans to spend a total of $35 billion over the following four years, an amount that in real dollars equals what Ronald Reagan spent in eight years on nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War.
"Do you think you saw the last American nuclear test?" I ask Krenzien.
"I don't know if I want to answer that," Krenzien says, turning to Magruder. "We have inexperience on the test site and inexperience in the labs."
"The last time we did a test there was nothing over fifteen stories in Las Vegas," he reflects. But with the revitalized plutonium-pit production scheduled for 2007, a multibillion-dollar tritium-production program funded by Congress, deliveries of refurbished nuclear weapons scheduled for 2006, and billions of dollars earmarked for the computers and visualization theaters at Livermore and Los Alamos, it is impossible to ignore what's in the offing. Both Stephen Younger, the former associate director of the weapons program at Los Alamos, and C. Paul Robinson, the current director of Sandia, have publicly advocated the development of a new generation of strategic nukes. As the Defense Department's Nuclear Posture Review explained to Congress at the beginning of 2002, "While the United States is making every effort to maintain the stockpile without additional nuclear testing, this may not be possible for the indefinite future."
Magruder, Krenzien, and I drive through a dry lake bed called Yucca Flat. The desert outside our tinted windows is dotted with juniper and yucca plants. The surrounding mountains are made of layers of welded volcanic ash. On our right are two skeletal frame structures and a lone wall, the remains of a remarkably detailed Japanese village built to scale in the middle of the desert as part of a 1962 experiment to determine the radiation levels experienced at Hiroshima.
We stop at a four-story square granary tower that stands over the 1,557-foot-deep hole dug for Icecap, the shot scheduled to go off...
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