In all my wanderings of Nevada, one of the highlights has been all of the military machinery that I've encountered. There's nothing like the thrill of a supersonic jet rupturing my eardrums as it thunders by a few dozen feet off the ground; or climbing up on some rusting Cold War tank, while inwardly hoping the silent bomber circling above isn’t actively lining up a practice run on the very thing you’re standing on. Those experiences generate a kind of adrenaline you don’t get from a slot machine.
Still - for no reason that I can put my finger on - I've never really had an overwhelming desire to visit the multitude of nuclear test sites that seem to consume much of the Nevada landscape. The thought of wandering around craters - wondering if I'll start to glow in the dark - hasn’t had the same appeal as crawling over decommissioned armor and scheduling appointments for early-onset hearing aids.
Anyway, I figured I'd give one a shot. Maybe it'd be yet another rabbit hole I don't have time for. Because clearly, what I need is one more obsession to chase down on my adventures.
So, January 1968. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) decides the Nevada Test Site is getting a little crowded and maybe it’s time to try out a new patch of desert. They pick the Central Nevada Test Area (CNTA) - managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) - in Nye County. If you’ve ever driven through there, you know it’s the kind of place where you can get a flat and not see another human being until the next presidential administration. Perfect spot for a nuclear test, right? They decided to call it Project Faultless. Which was hilarious, because the ground was about to prove them very, very wrong.
Amazingly well-graded approach.
Now, if you’re a paperwork person, Faultless shows up under the official, bad-ass, test series name of Operation Crosstie. But if you talk to the scientists who actually cared about the data, they’ll tell you it was a Vela Uniform calibration shot. Crosstie was just the filing cabinet it got shoved into; Vela Uniform was the reason it existed.
Whatever it was called, the mission was simple enough: drill a shaft 3,200 feet deep, drop in a megaton device, and set it off on January 19, 1968. The goal was to see if this new site could handle big underground detonations without wrecking the countryside or alarming the neighbors, and to generate seismic data that would prove you could tell a nuke apart from an earthquake.
Not much out here under the clouds.
If you’re picturing Doom Town - mannequins in 1950s dresses, cars parked like it’s Sunday at the grocery store - forget it. Faultless wasn’t that. The Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963 forced the AEC to go underground and changed nuclear explosions from atmospheric spectacles to seismic events.
Ahh, the good old days.
(Grabel - A 1953 test of a nuclear artillery projectile at the Nevada Test Site as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole.)
That meant that Faultless was bare‑bones desert science. Really, the only thing of note - besides some seismic gear scattered around the desert - was an 8-foot diameter steel pipe that was lowered into the shaft, to make lowering the device a little safer. Safer is important when you can be incinerated.
Desert designs around ground zero.
Pulling up to the glow stick.
When the device went off, the ground didn’t just rumble - it broke wide open. Two parallel faults ripped across the surface, boxing in that 340‑acre block of land, which pillowed up 15 feet, then dropped down ten feet below its previous elevation. The fractures stretched nearly 9,000 feet, with vertical displacements up to 15 feet and sideways shifts of 3 feet.
The shockwave was strong enough to rattle Ely - almost ninety miles away - where windows at White Pine High School shattered and residents got a very loud reminder of what experiencing an earthquake is really like. The one piece of good news: the radioactivity stayed underground. Still, the ground deformation was far worse than anyone had expected, it looked like the desert got punched in the face.
The radioactivity may have stayed underground, but everything was not OK. Lots of warnings about not excavating or drilling.
That steel pipe? After the blast collapsed the area around ground zero, it left the top ten feet naked in the desert. It’s still there today, sticking out of the ground with a plaque bolted on, like some kind of grim roadside attraction.
Smile!
Why clean up the site when it's cheaper to just add a plaque?
Plugged for safety.
The scientists didn’t need long to make their call. The CNTA was geologically unstable and not suitable for more high‑yield underground tests. They had another shaft nearby, codenamed Adagio, ready for a second shot, but that plan was quickly scrapped. Instead, the megaton‑class tests were moved to Amchitka Island, Alaska, where the next round was carried out in the early 1970s.
The seismic data from Faultless was still useful - it did help prove that nuclear blasts could be distinguished from earthquakes - but the CNTA was retired after just this one test. Crosstie got to keep it in the ledger, Vela Uniform got the science, and the BLM got their face-punched land back.
Pretty much par for the course for the BLM.
At least the camping wasn't crowded.
Sunset below the Hot Creek Range.
A new day, and as far as I could tell, I wasn't glowing.
It'd been an interesting few hours in the middle of nowhere, Nevada. I'd gotten a great night's sleep, so maybe that will be what brings me to nuclear test sites in the future. For now, I was off to more familiar grounds - assuming I wasn't abducted as I drove the extraterrestrial highway along the edge of Area 51.
The Whole Story
