At Elm & Main

On the grey-green desert basin at Yucca Flat, Nev., some 1,500 G.I.s and technical observers huddled face down in deep, narrow trenches. If they were tense and nervous, they had reason. Never before had willing men waited so near the site of an imminent atomic explosion. Only two miles away, an A-bomb (officially called a "Nuclear Diagnostic Device") was perched on a tall steel tower, 300 feet above "Ground Zero."

To the east, the Federal Civil Defense Administration had built a simulated suburb: two typical frame houses, looking prim and white among the yucca trees. Nearby a typical signpost read Elm & Main. Typical U.S. cars were spotted in the imaginary parking places of the imaginary town.

Inside the two houses, little had been left to the imagination. Simpering store-window dummies posed on the uncomfortable upholstery of government-surplus furniture. A laughing two-year-old perched precariously on the back of a chaise longue; a young woman postured in leg-revealing shorts. Upstairs a sleek blonde feigned innocent sleep. In one cellar, pajama-clad parents had herded their kids into wooden FCDA shelters, as if they had just been awakened by the wail of a warning siren. In every room, dummy Americans waited for the works.

New Sun. Promptly at 5:20 a.m., in pre-dawn darkness, observers stared at nothing through their heavy protective goggles and listened to the ominous "Count Down." "Zero minus five seconds," chanted the loudspeaker, "four three, two, one, zero." There was a searing flash of light and heat like the rising of a new sun. Then a dirty orange fireball rose lazily over the desert. Now visible were the high-climbing, vertical trails left by the rockets set off to measure the passage of the shock wave (see opposite page). Almost half a minute later, the shock wave itself roared out to the observers--a violent bang and a rush of air against tense faces.

The radioactive cloud drifted eastward. A thick, dense column of dust reached into the sky behind it; below, a flat lake dust covered vast acres of desert. An hour passed before Army helicopters brought surprisingly chipper G.I.s from the trenches. Only two miles from Ground Zero, heat and light had passed over them as they crouched face down. The grey dust cloud they saw later, they were told was not dangerously radioactive. They had learned the lesson that atom bombs may spare careful soldiers who keep their distance and are well dug in.

Wild Contortions. Reports from the simulated suburb came in more slowly and were far less cheerful. Surface wind had carried radioactive products of the explosion away from the troops and dumped them on the houses. Three hours later the ruined structures were still radioactive. "House Two," 7,500 feet from Ground Zero, could be entered for only a few minutes; "House One," 3,500 feet from the explosion, not at all. Beams in House Two were broken or torn from their supports. Windows were gone; rooms were littered with broken glass. The railing dummies had been tossed into wild contortions. House One looked like a match box crumpled on a table.

The dust cloud with its waning radio activity drifted harmlessly eastward ,but the ruins left behind at Yucca Flat impressed some observers more than others. For an area nearly a mile and a half long and almost as wide, the desert had been made dangerous with radioactivity. Hopefully, FCDA men announced that the bomb shelters in the cellar of House Two would have saved real inhabitants. Perhaps said dubious AEC officials, but it would be helpful to remember a few facts. The "Diagnostic Device" was less powerful than the primitive A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It probably packed the punch of a single atomic artillery shell. (Its energy equivalent: 15,000 tons of TNT as compared to 20,000 tons at Nagasaki.) In an actual attack, if an A-bomb exploded higher than 300 feet above ground, its radiation would penetrate cellar shelters with more ease.

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