This will make a big boom:

The test, named "Divine Strake," will involve nearly 40 times the amount of commercial ammonium nitrate and fuel oil explosive set off in the largest open-air, non-nuclear blast at the site to date. In 2002, 18 tons of explosives were set off at the Nevada Test Site.

700 tons of explosives. This isn't a weapons test--there'd be no way to deliver that size of ordnance. I've got to think that they're trying to figure out just how small they can size a nuke to (pardon the inadvertent alliteration) bust a bomb-building bunker.

yup

I love this line:
"I am concerned that tests of this magnitude have been planned without providing Nevadans with any information about the possible impact on their health or safety," said Demcratic Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid in a statement Thursday.

How about the impact on the health and safety of Nevadans if some bunch of damn islamist terrorists detonate an Iranian nuke in Las Vegas, because we didn't work on such weapons now?

"How about the impact on the health and safety of Nevadans if some bunch of damn islamist terrorists detonate an Iranian nuke in Las Vegas, because we didn't work on such weapons now?"

Yeah, let's all go and burn some tires!

One thing to understand is that there is a difference between studying weapons effects and developing a weapon. It appears that here they are studying the effects. They want to determine how the shock wave travels through the ground, etc. They have done these things before and I suspect that much of it has to do with calibrating seismic sensors for monitoring underground explosions elsewhere. So this is probably being used to determine how well the US could monitor an underground test in North Korea.

What I find interesting is the resistance to this test. Is this routine and only something that the media has finally noticed? Or something new?

It seems to be new. It will be the largest explosion there since the nuke testing went underground.

Simple Karl, the military wants to do it so Democrats don't want it to be done.

Hehe, I though Karl was asking if the "resitance to this test" was new; not the test itself.

Or, perhaps, the effects of a depleted uranium payload from a suborbital device. I believe I saw a reference that they are converting some Tridents to conventional payloads.

Hey, Las Vegas can make money on this. They used to have people up on top of the hotels watching the nuclear tests (no kidding).

Speaking of which, if you do go to Las Vegas to watch (and i sure wish they'd schedule it during the Return to the Moon conference so I could be there...), check out the Atomic Testing Museum on East Flamingo (www.atomictestingmuseum.org). They have Fat Man and Little Boy tie tacs... Just the thing to wear to the big blast!

-jcp-

Speaking of Iran, has anybody checked Curmudgeon's Corner today?

WHAT IS UP WITH THAT?????????

I was just telling Mark Whittington (in my mind, since I don't know him, never met him, only sent him one e-mail that he never replied to), I said, "Mark, you should really be careful about postings like this. Somebody's not going to notice the date and will take it awfly seriously, and there goes your credibility down the chute. You and Rand get into enough kerfluffles as it is over real issues when you should be buddies, so why go out of your way to look for trouble?"

Googling around, I see that some government official stuck their foot in their mouth.

"We have several very large penetrators we're developing," James Tegnelia, head of the Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) told US defence reporters. "We also have - are you ready for this? - an explosively formed charge that we're going to be putting in a tunnel in Nevada ... and that represents to us the largest single explosive that we could imagine doing conventionally to solve that problem."

The explosive used will be ammonium nitrate soaked in fuel oil - a cheap but potent combination. "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," Mr Tegnelia said.

As it turns out, this statement is incorrect. It is claimed unlikely that anyone not on the property will actually see the mushroom cloud.