Recovery and Calibration of Legacy Underground Nuclear Test Seismic Data from the Leo Brady Seismic Network

The Leo Brady Seismic Network (LBSN, originally the Sandia Seismic Network) was established in 1960 by Sandia National Laboratories to monitor underground nuclear tests (UGTs) at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS, formerly named the Nevada Test Site). The LBSN has been in various configurations throughout its existence, but it has generally been comprised of four to six stations at regional distances (∼150–400 km) from the NNSS with approximately evenly spaced azimuthal coverage. Between 1962 and the end of nuclear testing in 1992, the LBSN—and a sister network operated by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories—was the most comprehensive United States source of regional seismic data of UGTs. Approximately 75% of all UGTs performed by the United States occurred in the predigital era. At that time, LBSN data were transmitted as frequency-modulated (FM) audio over telephone lines to a central location and recorded as analog waveforms on high-fidelity magnetic audio tapes. These tapes have been in dry temperature-stable storage for decades and contain the sole record of this irreplaceable data; full waveforms of LBSN-recorded UGTs from this era were not routinely digitized or otherwise published. We have developed a process to recover and calibrate data from these tapes. First, we play back and digitize the tapes as audio. Next, we demodulate the FM “audio” into individual waveforms. We then estimate the various instrument constants through careful measurement of “weight-lift” tests performed prior to each UGT on each instrument. Finally, these coefficients allow us to scale and shape the derived instrument response of the seismographs and compute poles and zeros. The result of this process is a digital record of the recorded seismic ground motion in a modern data format, stored in a searchable database. To date, we have digitized tapes from 592 UGTs.

Ecofeminist ‘lines of convergence’: Remapping the American West in Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams

This article examines the ways Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams (1994) (re)maps two key locations in the American West. The text centres on Yosemite National Park and the Nevada Test Site, locations emblematic of histories of colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and the military in the United States. Considering how Solnit constructs a counter-map of these places, this article argues that by tracing ‘lines of convergence’ on a landscape deemed empty by the dominant culture, Solnit both documents and is part of resistance to power structures upheld by traditional cartography. Using an ecofeminist framework based on drawing connections in the face of the dominant culture’s emphasis on fragmentation and separation, I discuss how Solnit exposes the silence and violence of the map. I then consider the ways she constructs a ‘testimonial network’ that counters both. Finally, I suggest that Solnit’s textual counter-map prompts us to re-read the traditional map on connective, ecofeminist terms.

In the Shadow of the Mushroom Cloud: Nuclear Testing, Radioactive Fallout, and Damage to U.S. Agriculture, 1945 to 1970

In the 1950s the United States conducted scores of atmospheric nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site. This article studies the effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests on agriculture in regions hundreds of miles from the NTS. While research has shown that this radioactive material posed a health risk near the NTS, little is known about the direct economic effects nuclear testing may have had. I find that fallout from nuclear tests adversely affected U.S. agricultural production, and this result suggests that nuclear testing had a much broader economic and environmental impact than previously thought.

Exploding the 1950s Consumer Dream

While the nuclear mushroom cloud rising above the Nevada desert is an iconic and familiar image, what went on beneath the cloud is hazier and less well understood. At the surface level nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s entailed extensive scientific, military, and social experiments. This article focuses on two projects overseen by the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), Doom Town I and II, and their ties with 1950s cultural values and the consumer landscape. This article situates the two mock American townscapes as part of the cultural battlefield of the Cold War and explores how they served as powerful but also deeply flawed symbols of U.S. capitalism and a new suburban way of life.

Framing the Bomb in the West

Focused on the period of atmospheric (above-ground) nuclear weapons testing in the continental United States, from 1945 to 1963, this chapter, written by Susan Courtney, does two things. First, it describes some of the basic conditions and infrastructure that shaped the proliferation of films of nuclear weapons tests, including the U.S. government’s secret military film studio dedicated to this work in the hills above Los Angeles, known as Lookout Mountain Air Force Station or Lookout Mountain Laboratory. Second, it turns to the representational legacy that resulted, which was by no means limited to films made by or for the military. More specifically, it considers how footage of atomic tests in New Mexico and at the Nevada Test Site helped to shape the filmic record of nuclear weapons—and popular cultural memory—by framing the bomb in the desert West, arguably the screen space of American exceptionalism.