Atoms for Peace, Explosively
At 10 a.m. local time on July 6, 1962, a quiet stretch of Nevada desert near Las Vegas erupted in violence. The ground shook and bulged skyward almost 300 feet, then exploded in a blast that kicked up more than 12 million tons of soil. The resulting dust cloud rose 12,000 feet. The latest underground atomic test, codenamed Sedan, was taking place 65 miles north of Sin City at the 1,400-square mile Nevada Test Site, pockmarked with craters from dozens of nuclear and conventional weapons tests dating to 1951.
However, Sedan was special.
At 104 kilotons, Sedan was the largest underground nuclear test on record. Nearly seven times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945, Sedan left history’s largest manmade crater, 330 feet deep and 1,280 feet across. No nuclear test conducted in the United States produced more fallout; radioactive detritus from Sedan showered several states.
Sedan was an exercise meant to advance Project Plowshare, a Cold War-era effort to employ nuclear weapons for infrastructure projects. The idea of harnessing the atom for civilian use dated to the end of World War II. Scientists, some of whom had worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, saw nuclear energy as a tool for more than merely leveling cities. These advocates believed the technology had potential utility in medicine, the study of elements, and power generation. They also wanted to take things a step further by using targeted nuclear explosions to reshape America’s waterways, carve roads out of mountains, and mine for oil and natural gas.
Atomic Energy Commission in 1950 about using atomic bombs “in such activities as mining, where the fission products would be confined to relatively small regions,” or to “divert a river by blasting a large volume of solid rock.” Mathematician John von Neumann and colleagues at the University of California Radiation Laboratory near San Francisco, now known as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, expressed similar ideas.
