I thought that earth-shaking explosions were a thing of the past for Las Vegas–there haven’t been any nuclear detonations at the Nevada Test Site since 1992 (according to the LV Sun, anyway), and above-ground testing stopped way before that.
And it’s not as if the federal government is detonating a weapon of mass destruction a few miles from the Strip. If anything, it might be an anti-WMD. Read about it , from Breitbart.com:
The US military plans to detonate a 700 tonne explosive charge in a test called “Divine Strake” that will send a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, a senior defense official said.
“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.
Tegnelia said the test was part of a US effort to develop weapons capable of destroying deeply buried bunkers housing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
“We have several very large penetrators we’re developing,” he told defense reporters.
“We also have — are you ready for this – a 700-tonne explosively formed charge that we’re going to be putting in a tunnel in Nevada,” he said.
“And that represents to us the largest single explosive that we could imagine doing conventionally to solve that problem,” he said.
The aim is to measure the effect of the blast on hard granite structures, he said.
“If you want to model these weapons, you want to know from a modeling point of view what is the ideal best condition you could ever set up in a conventional weapon — what’s the best you can do.
“And this gets at the best point you could get on a curve. So it allows us to predict how effective these kinds of weapons … would be,” he said.
He said the Russians have been notified of the test, which is scheduled for the first week of June at the Nevada test range.
“We’re also making sure that Las Vegas understands,” Tegnelia said.
Because I didn’t find much coverage in the news, I thought this might be a hoax. But you can read this EPA Pre-Approval Draft that says pretty unambiguously that there will be a huge detonation in Tunnel 16 of the Test Site as part of “Divine Strake.”
That being said, I guess I do “understand” the test. But I’ve got to confess that I’ve got no idea what a “strake” is. So I looked it up on Wikipedia:
1. part of a boat or ship. It is a strip of planking in a wooden vessel or of plating in a metal one, running longitudinally along the vessel’s side, its bottom or between them on the turn of the bilge.
2. a device for controlling air flow over an aircraft.
3. a tool for tamping down and levelling semi-fluid materials into a mould.
I guess that they’re using the tertiary definition here: “The word Strake also refers to a straightedge used for levelling a bed of sand, or striking poured concrete or plaster level with the edges of the formwork or mould into which it has been poured. (from Wikipedia)” Still, it’s a little confusing, because it sounds like they want to penetrate the hardened bunker, rather than just plane off sand or plaster. But I guess “Divine Penetrator” is just too over the top, even for these purposes.
I wonder if they’re going to bring back mushroom-cloud parties and that sort of thing, or just ignore it?