Dec 28 1985
From The Space Library
The Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory supervised detonation of a hydrogen bomb buried in a box-car sized canister 1,800 feet below the Nevada desert floor in a test of technology for President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the Washington Post reported. An Energy Department official declined to discuss the test's purpose, but Defense Department and congressional officials said earlier that it was designed to test the concept of harnessing X-rays produced by a nuclear explosion into a laser cannon to destroy Soviet missiles.
The nuclear explosive had a force of 20 to 150 kilotons, the Energy Department spokesman said, registering 5.6 on the Richter scale, according to an official at the National Earthquake Information Center in Boulder, Colorado. It measured 5.3 at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
The Energy Department postponed the test several times because of unfavorable winds and the Christmas holidays. Scientists routinely delayed underground nuclear tests in the Nevada desert when winds were blowing toward the south and west because of the possibility that in an accident a radioactive cloud might drift over a populated area. (W Post, Dec 29/85, A5)
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