Las Vegas Residents Have Some Surprises In Store For Them
Posted on March 30, 2006
A Senior Defense official announced that the U.S. military is going to detonate a 700 ton explosive charge in a test called "Divine Strake." The test will result in a large mushroom cloud forming over Las Vegas.
"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," said James Tegnelia, head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Tegnelia said the test was part of a U.S. effort to develop weapons capable of destroying deeply-buried bunkers housing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.So, let's see. The Bush Administration is enacting Operation Divine Strake in which it looks as if"We have several very large penetrators we're developing," he told defense reporters. "We also have - are you ready for this - a 700-ton explosively formed charge that we're going to be putting in a tunnel in Nevada," he said. "And that represents to U.S. the largest single explosive that we could imagine doing conventionally to solve that problem," he said. The aim is to measure the effect of the blast on hard granite structures, he said.
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He said the Russians have been notified of the test, which is scheduled for the first week of June at the Nevada test range. "We're also making sure that Las Vegas understands," Tegnelia said.
In any event, they're going to need someone with excellent communicaton and organizational skills to get the word out to the Las Vegas populace beforehand, so everybody doesn't totally freak out when a mushroom cloud appears over the city after everyone hears a deafening "BOOM." Maybe Andy Card has some free time on his hands.