Without it, scientists needed a new way to prove America’s arsenal was safe and reliable. Testing showed the world that a nuclear strike, by anyone, would be suicide. For generations, mutual assured destruction had been the cornerstone of military might. Bush reluctantly signed a nine-month moratorium on nuclear weapons tests. In the years that followed, the Cold War would end, and so would the days of shaking the desert.īy 1992, President George H.W. would never be the same,” says Hecker, whose job was first held by Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb. Later, his Soviet counterpart congratulated him over lunch. Ninety miles away in Las Vegas, lamps danced over pool tables at the Tropicana.Īn above-ground nuclear bomb test in 1957. One hundred thousand raw data points fed into computers, eventually confirming theory with reality. Vital signs from the bomb raced up cables as they vaporized. Kearsarge exploded with 10 times more energy than Hiroshima. If today’s nuclear test went well, it might be among the last. Each country would test its monitoring techniques on the other side’s bomb. The adversaries were willing to permanently stop blowing up the biggest bombs, but first scientists needed a way to verify violations. The United States and Soviet Union had long conducted test explosions of the bigger weapons in their arsenals, both to make sure they really worked and as a show of force.
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Officials had negotiated this Joint Verification Experiment for years. What happens to America’s nuclear deterrent? What if the bomb fizzled, Hecker thought. Seven top Soviet nuclear scientists watched intently. Thirty miles away, Los Alamos Director Siegfried Hecker sat nervously in the control room. It was called Kearsarge.Īnd on a hot August day in 1988, a crew lowered the bomb through a hole drilled thousands of feet into the Nevada Test Site, then entombed it beneath millions of pounds of sand. Workers assembled the device behind steel-reinforced concrete walls in the desert, mating radioactive materials with high explosives.