US to Test 700-ton Explosive

Headlines

Military.com | March 31, 2006

WASHINGTON - The last time a U.S. government official was quoted prominently on the subject of mushroom clouds, it was Condoleezza Rice talking about the risk of discovering too late that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapon.

On Thursday it was a Pentagon official musing about the spectacle of detonating a 700-ton (635-metric ton) explosive in the Nevada desert, a test blast dubbed "Divine Strake" that the official said might remind some of the days of open-air nuclear testing.

The tests were moved underground to avoid the danger of radioactive fallout in 1963.

"I don't want to sound glib here, but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," said James Tegnelia, head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a Pentagon unit that is working on technical aspects of how to destroy deeply buried enemy weapons.

Tegnelia's use of the term "mushroom cloud" seemed to unsettle some in Washington. In an entirely different context, Rice spoke before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 of the risk of waiting too long to confirm with complete confidence that Iraq had a nuclear weapon. The first confirmation, she said, could be a mushroom cloud over the United States. It turned out that Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program.

Several hours after Tegnelia made the mushroom cloud remark to a group of reporters, his office put out a written statement stressing that Divine Strake was not a nuclear blast, it poses minimal health and safety risks to the public, and there are no radioactively contaminated soils in the vicinity of the planned detonation.

And the mushroom cloud?

"All explosives, given the right thermal characteristics, will create a cloud that may resemble a mushroom cloud," the statement said, adding that the "dust cloud" from Divine Strake - scheduled for June 2 - may reach an altitude of 10,000 feet but "is not expected to be visible from Las Vegas," about 90 miles (145 kilometers) away.

Tegnelia said the Russian government has been notified to avoid a misunderstanding about the nature of the blast.

Sound Off...What do you think? Join the discussion.

More Military Headlines

What's Hot