storax sedan (12. 561)

On this day in 1962 in Area 10 of the Yucca Flat testing grounds of the Nevada National Security Site in the US southwest, as part of Operation Plowshare, an investigative programme to explore the use of thermonuclear devices for mining, tunnelling, damming, the creation of harbours and other infrastructure applications—first pioneered and continued by the Soviet Union—a mixed yield hydrogen bomb, calibrated for fission of thirty percent and fusion of seventy percent, was detonated at a shallow depth of some two hundred meters underground. Instantly displacing eleven million tonnes of rock and soil, resulting in the title crater and minor earthquake. The project was abandoned after some thirteen million residents to the east of the blast site were exposed to radioactive fallout in the name of public safety. Native flora, aside from itinerant tumbleweeds, have yet to recover in the immediate area.