History
The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 banned atmospheric nuclear testing. This led to a requirement for an underground test area that could accommodate higher yield tests than Yucca Flat.
Pahute Mesa was seen as ideal due to its geology and distance of over 160 kilometres (99 mi) from Las Vegas. Holes can be drilled to a depth of more than 1,370 metres (4,490 ft). This allows tests in the megaton range to be fully contained with minimal ground motion being felt in Las Vegas.
Pahute Mesa was thus incorporated into the boundary of the NNSS in late 1963 under an agreement between the United States Atomic Energy Commission and the U.S. Air Force.
Read more about this topic: Pahute Mesa
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)