The Divine Strake test was originally planned for June 2, but postponed indefinitely after a lawsuit and members of Congress challenged the plans for the test. In late May, the National Nuclear Security Administration withdrew its initial environmental study while it re-checked the data.
On Tuesday, the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency notified Rep. Jim Matheson that the test wouldn't go forward until "at least several months into calendar year 2007." "I think it's an acknowledgment that DTRA really didn't have the proof in hand to show that the test didn't create risk," Matheson said. "They said that it was safe but when it came time to actually see the data it turns out they didn't have it. . . . [Now] they have to go back and do their homework and find out if it was safe." And James A. Tegnelia, director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, "has agreed to assess possible other sites for the experiment," agency spokeswoman Irene Smith said Tuesday.
There was no indication where else the test might take place, but several similar blasts, some many times larger than Divine Strake, have been conducted since the early 1990s at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The Divine Strake test entails detonating 700 tons of explosives at the Nevada Test Site to measure the damage done to a tunnel by the blast and the 3.4-magnitude earthquake it would create.
Defense Department documents said the test was designed to help war planners choose the smallest nuclear yield to destroy underground targets and minimize collateral damage, but the Pentagon later said the reference to a nuclear weapon was a mistake.
The explosion would be roughly 50 times larger than the detonation of the largest conventional weapon in the U.S. arsenal and on par with small nuclear weapons.
It would use the same explosive mixture that blew up the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, only about 280 times more of it. Environmental studies say dust from the blast could reach 10,000 feet above sea level.
The decision to postpone the test came in mid-May, after objections were raised by Nevada environmental officials, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and Matheson, and a lawsuit by an American Indian tribe in Nevada and the Utah Downwinders, who blame deaths and illnesses on exposure to Cold War nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site.
Their concern was that the explosion could throw soil contaminated with radiation from past nuclear weapons tests into the air, creating a health risk.
"I suspect this thing is dead," said Bob Hager, the attorney representing the Indian tribe and Downwinders group.
He has received more than 30,000 pages of documents from the agency that runs the Nevada Test Site, but he said only 22 were relevant to testing for contamination at the site.
A status conference in the lawsuit is scheduled with government lawyers today.
