Nine Hundred Twenty-Eight Tests: The Nevada Test Site in Numbers

The first test was called Able. It detonated on January twenty-seventh, nineteen fifty-one, at six forty-five in the morning, above a dry lake bed in the Nevada desert. The blast was visible from Las Vegas, about sixty-five miles to the southeast. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported it on the front page, between hotel advertisements.

The last test was called Divider. It detonated on September twenty-third, nineteen ninety-two, underground, at the Nevada Test Site. By then the tests were no longer front-page news. The Cold War was ending. The Soviet Union had dissolved nine months earlier. The moratorium that followed Divider became permanent.

Between Able and Divider, the United States detonated nine hundred twenty-eight announced nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site. That number, nine hundred twenty-eight, does not include tests that were initially classified and acknowledged later. The exact total remains a matter of ongoing historical inquiry. What is established is the range: from January of nineteen fifty-one to September of nineteen ninety-two, forty-one years, the Nevada desert absorbed more nuclear detonations than any place on earth outside the Soviet test sites in Kazakhstan.

Above-ground testing ended in nineteen sixty-three with the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Underground testing continued for nearly thirty more years, the detonations muffled by thousands of feet of rock, producing craters visible on satellite imagery of the test site today.

The Nevada National Security Site, as it is now called, covers about one thousand three hundred fifty square miles of federal land in Nye County. It is slightly larger than Rhode Island. Public tours are available through the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas. The site itself remains an active federal installation.

The highway you are on, heading north from Las Vegas, passes within sight of the test site boundary.