1951: From Korea to Fallon Part 2

Seventy-five years ago, the two big issues that captured the national press were the Korean War and the development of nuclear weapons. The two issues were intertwined, and both came close to home for those living in Fallon, Nevada.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, on January 29, 1951, local eyes turned south toward the Nevada Test Site (NTS), 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, where an above ground atomic test was detonated at dawn on that day. During the remainder of 1951, 11 more atmospheric tests lit up the southern sky to the delight—or dismay—of watchful Fallonites. Not all the tests could be seen from here, but many were, and, as became common in Las Vegas, a few locals held “dawn parties” and drank “atomic cocktails” to commemorate the unprecedented events. Splashed across the front page of the “Fallon Eagle,” February 10, 1951, was a photo of the night sky lighted by an atomic bomb test as seen from the AI Williams ranch in Wildes District, some 220 air miles from NTS. 

Many of the early NTS tests (1951-1953) were designed in direct response to the war in Korea. General MacArthur was in favor of using atomic weapons on the battlefield, and so the race was on to develop a “tactical nuclear device”—one small enough to be used in close combat but accurate in its targeting. The problems of accuracy and limiting radiation exposure to our own troops were never solved, but the experiments go down in history with images of soldiers ducking down in trenches dug only a short distance from the explosion of an atomic bomb. In retrospect, we now know the price they paid.

Each atomic test was assigned a code name. Thus, the January 29, 1951, test was code-named Able after the military alphabet, followed by Baker, Easy, Baker-2, and Fox (the test seen in the “Fallon Eagle” photo). In October 1951, another test series at the NTS included tests named Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, and Easy. The first series of tests conducted in 1952 included Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, and How. The duplicate names were creating obvious problems for the records keepers, so the system was changed and, following test How, tests were assigned unique codenames.

In May 1953, an atomic test was detonated at the NTS bearing the codename Grable, named after the screen actress Betty Grable. That test illustrates the effort to develop a battlefield weapon as it involved an atom bomb shot from a cannon, or to be more precise, from a 280 mm gun. Grable then, at the risk of a bad pun, became a real bombshell. 

Of local interest is the fact that an underground atomic test conducted at the NTS on May 23, 1974, was codenamed Fallon. I can only guess why Fallon made the list of codenames, but our city has at least two direct connections to US atomic testing history. The first is that Fallon was named on a 1949 short list of five sites considered for a national atomic proving ground. The report described the proposed test site as “a 60-mile-wide strip of land along Highway 50 between Fallon and Eureka (Project Nutmeg, 1949). The second connection is that an underground atomic test, codenamed Project Shoal, was detonated near Fallon in the Sand Springs Range in 1963. Thus, our town had nuclear x’s placed on it twice before the test codenamed Fallon was undertaken at the test site.

Throughout 1951, an almost obsessive interest in “the bomb” permeated local culture. High school classes debated whether the bomb should be used in Korea. The “Fallon Eagle” ran a lengthy article in September 1951, announcing that Evangelist E.R. Priebe would conduct a series of lectures at the Seventh Day Adventist Church, beginning with “The Atom Bomb in Bible Prophecy.”

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