The Nevada National Security Site (N2S2), previously the Nevada Test Site (NTS), is a United States Department of Energy reservation located in southeastern Nye County, Nevada, about 65 mi (105 km) northwest of the city of Las Vegas. Formerly known as the Nevada Proving Grounds, the site, established on 11 January 1951, for the testing of nuclear devices, is composed of approximately 1,360 sq mi (3,500 km2) of desert and mountainous terrain. Nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site began with a 1-kilotonne-of-TNT (4.2 TJ) bomb dropped on Frenchman Flat on 27 January 1951. Many of the iconic images of the nuclear era come from NTS.
The Nevada Test Site contains 28 areas, 1,100 buildings, 400 miles (640 km) of paved roads, 300 miles (480 km) of unpaved roads, ten heliports and two airstrips.
Read more about Nevada National Security Site: History, Destruction and Survivability Testing, Environmental Impact, Protests and Demonstrations, NTS Today, Landmarks and Geography, Cancer and Test Site, Nuclear Test Series Carried Out At The Nevada Test Site, Areas
Famous quotes containing the words national, security and/or site:
“It is to be lamented that the principle of national has had very little nourishment in our country, and, instead, has given place to sectional or state partialities. What more promising method for remedying this defect than by uniting American women of every state and every section in a common effort for our whole country.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“... most Southerners of my parents’ era were raised to feel that it wasn’t respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn’t elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)
“It’s given new meaning to me of the scientific term black hole.”
—Don Logan, U.S. businessman, president and chief executive of Time Inc. His response when asked how much his company had spent in the last year to develop Pathfinder, Time Inc.’S site on the World Wide Web. Quoted in New York Times, p. D7 (November 13, 1995)