Report: US to test 700-ton explosive in Nevada this June

Snip from Agence-France Presse Reuters item by Will Dunham:

The Pentagon plans to detonate 700 tons of conventional high explosives in Nevada in a June 2 test designed to gauge the effectiveness of weapons against deeply buried targets, officials said on March 30.

"I don’t want to sound glib here, but it’s the first time in Nevada that you’ll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," James Tegnelia, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, told a small group of reporters.

The test, dubbed "Divine Strake," is sponsored by Tegnelia’s agency and is set to be conducted at the Energy Department’s Nevada Test Site in Nye County, about 65 miles (105 km) northwest of Las Vegas.

Link to Reuters item via DefenseNews.com. (Thanks, John Parres!)

A cursory Google search for "Divine Strake" yields some interesting docs. Link: cover from a 1950's atomic kitsch comic, via ep.tc.