The Nevada Test Site, known throughout the world as the NTS, will celebrate its 50th birthday in January of the year 2001. The contributions of the NTS over those years, to Nevada and to the nation, has been remarkable, and the current view of the future shows as remarkable a transition as we have seen in the past.
The NTS was officially "founded" by President Harry Truman in the latter months of 1950. The cold war with the Soviets was in its infancy, and as the United States determined that nuclear deterrence would become the foundation of our national defense, the need to develop a system that supported nuclear research, test and production became paramount. After the end of WWII, brought on by the use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. began a series of nuclear weapons development tests in the Marshall Islands (Bikini Atoll, etc.). It soon became apparent that logistics and costs issues associated with testing only at the Pacific Proving Ground, as it was called, were neither necessary nor affordable, so a decision was made to locate a domestic nuclear testing site. In late 1950, a recommendation was made to President Truman that a site located on the Nellis Bombing and Gunnery Range, north of the small city of Las Vegas, would be the most appropriate and safe site to conduct the weapons tests then proscribed as necessary to build, and maintain, the nuclear deterrent. Accordingly, in October of 1950, the first contingent of construction workers arrived at the NTS, and the first nuclear test was conducted on January 29, 1951.
Over those intervening years, the NTS has played a major role in the defense of the United States. Scientists from the national laboratories at Livermore, California; Los Alamos, New Mexico and the Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico have used the NTS as the engineering development center for designing, building and maintaining the nuclear deterrent that has kept the United States and the World free from a world war since the end of WWII. From that time to the present, the major emphasis of the NTS has been to support the national defense needs of the Nation. Over those many years, and projected into the future, that basic mission will not change; only the method of carrying out that mission will change.
National and international politics have always dictated how the missions at the NTS were conducted. In the early years, all nuclear testing was conducted in the atmosphere, both in Nevada and in the Pacific. Except for the U.S. self-imposed moratorium (signed by Pres. Eisenhower) that lasted from late 1958 until 1961, atmospheric testing continued until August of 1963 when the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting testing in outer space, underwater or in the atmosphere. As a result of that agreement, all nuclear tests were conducted underground until testing ended in 1992. Another important milestone was the signing of the Threshold Test Ban Treaty in 1974, which limited all nuclear tests to yields of less than 150 Kilotons. In October of 1992, President Bush signed a nine-month moratorium.
The last test was conducted in 1992, followed shortly by a decision by President Clinton that the U.S. would conduct no more nuclear tests pending the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, now pending before the U.S. Congress.
The NTS contribution to the Nation has been enormous, providing a safe and reliable location for testing that indeed maintained our prominence as a Super-Power, and provided a venue fro the kinds of state-of-the-art science that was necessary to achieve those goals. The NTS contribution to the economy of Nevada has been equally impressive, providing thousands and thousands of jobs over almost fifty years, and billions of dollars invested in the economy of Nevada. In fact, in the late fifties and sixties, the NTS was the largest single employer, behind the gaming industry, in the State, and enjoyed a prominent economic role in Southern Nevada. Thousands of Nevadans proudly worked at the NTS and proudly contributed to the sense of patriotism that has always dominated the work ethic at the NTS.
Currently, the NTS continues to play a major role in the defense of the Nation, although in a reduced way. Although nuclear testing is now prohibited, the defense of the Nation still depends on a nuclear deterrent made up of thousands of nuclear weapons. The challenge now presented to the National Labs and to the NTS is to maintain the safety and reliability of the enduring stockpile without nuclear testing. The NTS role, therefore, has now moved from atmospheric testing to underground testing to the current role of non-nuclear testing, using the NTS for a series of tests involving high explosives and nuclear material known as sub-critical tests.
Thus, another major transition of NTS has begun. From the mushroom clouds of atmospheric testing to the bricks and mortar of underground testing, the NTS is now moving toward a role of major scientific contribution to the continuing defense needs of the Nation. There are two small facilities now planned for the NTS in the next few years; one described as a two-stage gas gun, an experimental system that will measure materials' behavior, and a accelerator that will begin to develop advanced x-ray techniques. Both of these facilities are precursors to major physics research machines that will be required over the next several decades to maintain the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent without testing. The major facilities now on the drawing boards include such things as the Advanced Hydrodynamic Facility, a kind of three-dimensional x-ray machine that could be built at the NTS toward the middle of the next decade. A facility of that magnitude would mean that instead of fly-in science, with experts coming to the NTS and then returning to their respective Labs, the machines and the scientists would reside in Nevada, and would bring world class basic physics research to the NTS and to the University System in Nevada. When one thinks of diversifying the economy of Nevada over the next couple of decades, what could be better than a preeminent Nevada role in international science?
Nevadans can be proud of the contribution they have made to this nation as individuals, and as supporters of the Nevada Test Site. The future of the NTS now takes on a tone of international science, something that should continue to make all Nevadans proud.
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