Beyond Ground Zero

f all the signs that the Nevada Test Site's heyday has passed-the closed bowling alley, the shuttered pool, the vacant tennis courts-the most striking may be the 19 newspaper vending boxes outside the cafeteria at the site's Base Camp Mercury, located about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Back in the days when the site's 11,000 bused-in employees were united in the well-paying enterprise of exploding nuclear devices, each of the newspaper boxes sold out their copies before breakfast was over. Since an international moratorium on nuclear weapons testing was declared in 1992, however, test site employment has shrunk to about 3,000 people, and most of the newspaper boxes just sit there, empty.

Starting in 1951, the test site played host to almost 1,000 nuclear explosions, about 100 of which were above ground, including tests set off near ersatz homes containing fully dressed mannequins and shelves of canned food. The remaining test site employees display a wry sense of humor about their assignment. In the dining hall, a vending machine that sells microwaveable dinners is adorned with a big mushroom cloud and the phrase, "Nevada Test Site Nukeables."

But in the post-Cold War world, the Nevada Test Site is in a crucial period of transition. The site, which is owned by the Energy Department and operated by contractor Bechtel Nevada, is implementing the controversial Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship program, under which it will conduct "subcritical" tests of the chain of events that lead to a nuclear explosion.

The 1,350-square-mile facility is also repositioning itself to go into new lines of work. Negotiations are ongoing to build a solar power plant at the test site. An aerospace firm made up of NASA veterans wants to launch as many as 600 low-earth-orbit satellites from the site. Test site officials are also hoping to create an international counter-terrorism center.

Meanwhile, DOE is preparing for the possibility that it may someday be called upon to begin testing again-long after the highly specialized technicians of yesterday and today are either retired or dead. The recent flurry of activity for Stockpile Stewardship is intended, in part, to keep those skills alive.

"In the final analysis, it's the people who design the systems and interpret the data that matter," says Troy E. Wade, a former senior test site official who now chairs the Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business, a group that represents firms that supply the site. "You have to keep active the kinds of people who can diagnose the input that has to go into those computers. It's a challenge for the next decade. In fact, some say-and I tend to agree-that it's as much of a technical challenge as the original Manhattan Project was."

History's Tests

When President Truman ordered the construction of the Nevada Test Site in 1951, federal officials carved it out of a patch of land bigger than the state of Rhode Island-not to mention 21 countries. Yet the population was, and remains, scarce: Nye County, the test site's home, has a population density of only 0.5 residents per square mile. Far more abundant are deer, wild horses, coyotes, birds, tarantulas, scorpions and jackrabbits.

The Nevada site had a few other factors in its favor. Elevations range from 3,200 feet at the southern end to 7,200 feet at the northern end, allowing officials a broad selection of terrain for their tests. In addition, local aquifers are unusually deep, lowering the risk of contamination spreading beyond the site's borders. And the prevailing winds carried the early atmospheric fallout away from most population centers.

Not to say that testing at the site has only had benign effects. Though site officials insist that epidemiological studies are not conclusive, Congress decided several years ago to pay benefits to residents who may have become sick from fallout during the days of atmospheric tests. Officials are still studying to see whether water contamination is more extensive than previously known.

In the early 1960s, the test site would sometimes set off as many as 100 blasts a year. The bigger and more complex explosions required thousands of employees-drillers, miners, road-maintenance people, power-distribution staff, diagnostic technicians and firefighters. Sometimes scientists would set off a blast near sacrificial satellites to see if they remained operable. Other times, they would test their weapons' tolerances if dropped accidentally-a chilling scenario that actually happened in real life 36 times, though thanks in part to the tests, none detonated.

In a typical underground test at the site, once detonation keys were turned, much of the soil near the nuclear device would be vaporized or contaminated with radioactive materials. However, officials say that the radiation would not spread far; it would be held tightly in the soil, "just like cat litter." In the meantime, as the air pressure underground decreased, the ground above the blast would collapse and fill with dirt from 1,500 feet above. A crater would result, though it might take days or years to become noticeable.

Officials say the test site seems to have weathered the constant pounding rather well. Only 119 of the test site's 1,350 square miles were ever significantly disturbed, and the site "still has vast pristine areas," says Derek Scammell, a test-site public affairs officer and unofficial historian.

The 'Ultimate Tool'

By the mid-1980s, the Nevada Test Site's test load had dropped to about 25 a year. By the end of the decade, it shrank to fewer than a dozen annually.

The effects of the slowdown were felt sharply by test-site employees. The site's annual budget dropped from about $1 billion in 1990 to $400 million today.

"If we have to go down further than this, we might as well shut the doors and leave the guards behind to watch," says Ghazar Raffi Papazian, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who's heading an experiment at the test site.

For several years, the mood at the site was "definitely downcast," recalls Wade, the former test site official who now runs the advocacy group. "Between 1992 and 1997, we not only saw the numbers of people decrease but also saw very large morale problems, because it became clear to some very talented people that there may not be a job for them in the future."

The recent Stockpile Stewardship program has boosted morale, Wade says. But it has prompted a difficult shift in mind-set, scientists say.

"In our previous program of testing, we had the ultimate tool: the integrated test," Papazian says. "We built it, we took it outside, we blew it up, and we understood the performance characteristics of it. Today we don't have that tool. Today we have to understand the fundamentals of how and why a device works, or what happens when it ages."

Gene Christensen and Harold R. Kiechler are typical of test site employees who are working on new-generation testing programs. They work at the Big Explosives Experimental Facility (known, winkingly, as BEEF), doing scientific work that keeps their skills sharp. "Some knowledge has been lost, but this bunker enables us to keep some of it alive," says Christensen. "We used some of these very diagnostics when doing the weapons tests."

Whether challenges like those at BEEF will be enough to retain top scientists remains to be seen, experts say. "Testing had always been interesting, and it kept the technical people involved," Wade says. "Now we've taken away the showy aspect. It's more drudge work."

Yet the job at hand is one that's long-term, Scammell notes. "No one really knows how long we will have to maintain the nuclear stockpile. We have to be realistic-the longer we go without testing, the more knowledge we lose, and the more physicists retire. It's a very complex process. You can't just dig a hole and put a bomb in it and explode it."

So in addition to training a new generation of specialists, officials at the test site have undertaken a crash effort to archive everything they possibly can, especially the "black arts" that were learned from experience rather than through a training manual. "If you don't archive, it's a death sentence of sorts," says Papazian.

Test-site officials also keep on file several hundred names and addresses of former employees who would be willing to return to work if the need arose. The officials send them notices periodically to make sure their addresses and willingness to serve have remained constant.

"I can think of no other project like this of the same magnitude," says Wade. But he and others don't want to shout too loudly about the importance of keeping nuclear testing expertise in the government.

"It all has to be done very carefully so you don't create a bad image for Congress," Wade says. "Otherwise, they may think they're paying for a high-priced fire department for a very low-probability fire."

Louis Jacobson has written about nuclear weapons for Government Executive, The Economist and National Journal, where he is a staff correspondent.