At the center of a desolate valley in the middle of Nevada, more than a dozen miles from the nearest paved road, one of the few signs of human activity is a rusty steel well casing that juts oddly out of the desert floor.
Nobody lives here, but it has a name: the Central Nevada Test Area. It was once a hub of scientific activity. Today, it is an abandoned outpost of the Cold War.
In the lore of the nuclear arms race, the Central Nevada Test Area has occupied a special place of mystery. Only one test was ever conducted there, and even for aficionados, the reasons have never been entirely clear.
Amid the emptiness, an 8-foot-tall cylinder bears a message to future generations from Glenn T. Seaborg, once chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
"Project Faultless January 19, 1968: A nuclear detonation was conducted below this spot at a depth of 3,200 feet," reads a brass plaque attached to the casing.
The explanation of its purpose is terse: "The device, with a yield of less than one megaton, was detonated to determine the environmental and structural effects that might be expected should subsequent higher yield underground nuclear tests be conducted in this vicinity."
At the bottom of the vertical shaft, there's a load of radioactive rubble.
"No excavation, drilling and/or removal of materials is permitted without U.S. government approval within a horizontal distance of 3,300 feet from the surface ground zero," the plaque warns visitors.
Just why the federal government detonated a bomb here is even more puzzling given that the sprawling Nevada Test Site was already set up officially for nuclear testing about 100 miles south.
Philip Coyle, the former test director of the Nevada Test Site, has rarely spoken about the issue, but he does know the answer. It involves a peculiar effort by the federal government to placate one of the wealthiest men in the world.
In the 1960s, the U.S. and Soviet Union were engaged in an all-out nuclear arms race to see who could build and then detonate the biggest weapons -- almost a nuclear war by proxy. But in this fight, each side bombed itself.
Every time a big hydrogen bomb was detonated on the Nevada Test Site, the tremors would shake the penthouse suite atop the Desert Inn in Las Vegas about 75 miles away and the frayed nerves of its sole resident, multibillionaire Howard Hughes.
