Formerly known as the Nevada Proving Grounds of the United States Army, the site was acquired in 1951 to be the testing venue for the American nuclear devices.

The first atmospheric test was conducted at the site's Frenchman Flat area by the United States Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC) on January 27, 1951.

The site is privately managed and operated by Mission Support and Test Services LLC, a joint venture of Honeywell, Jacobs, and Huntington Ingalls, on behalf of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

[8] The site was established as a 680-square-mile (1,800 km2) area by President Harry S. Truman on December 18, 1950, within the Nellis Air Force Gunnery and Bombing Range.

The city of Las Vegas experienced noticeable seismic effects, and the distant mushroom clouds, which could be seen from the downtown hotels, became tourist attractions.

[11] In 2018, the State of Nevada sued the federal government to block a plan to ship "more than a metric ton" of plutonium to the site for temporary storage.

Many kinds of vehicles (ranging from cars to aircraft), nuclear-fallout and standard bomb-shelters, public-utility stations and other building structures and equipment were placed at measured distances away from "ground zero", the spot on the surface immediately under or over the center of the blast.

In such a typical test, several of the same buildings and structures might be built using the same layouts and plans with different types of materials, paints, general landscaping, cleanliness of the surrounding yards, wall-angles or varying distances from ground zero.

Typical imagery from these cameras shows paint boiling off the buildings, which are then pushed violently away from ground zero by the shock wave before being drawn toward the detonation by the suction caused by the climbing mushroom cloud.

[15] This testing allowed the development of Civil Defense guidelines, distributed to the public, to increase the likelihood of survival in case of air- or spaceborne nuclear attack.

[16] When underground explosions ended in 1992, the Department of Energy estimated that more than 300 megacuries (11 EBq) of radioactivity remained in the environment at that time, making the site one of the most contaminated locations in the United States.

Although radioactivity levels in the water continue to decline over time, the longer-lived isotopes like plutonium or uranium could pose risks for thousands of years.

[19] Two American men, one from West Germany and one from the United Kingdom hiked 30 miles on foot to hide in the desert near ground zero at Yucca Flats.

[21] From 1986 through 1994, two years after the United States ended nuclear weapons testing, 536 demonstrations were held at the site involving 37,488 participants and 15,740 arrests, according to government records.

From 1986 through 1994, two years after the United States ended nuclear weapons testing, 536 demonstrations were held at the site involving 37,488 participants and 15,740 arrests, according to government records.

Five Democratic members of Congress attended the rally: Thomas J. Downey, Mike Lowry, Jim Bates, Leon E. Panetta, and Barbara Boxer.

At the invitation of the Western Shoshone Tribe and Corbin Harney, an anti-nuclear activist and spiritual leader for the Newe people, over 2000 protesters from 12 different countries gathered for "Healing Global Wounds".

They planned actions and demonstrations, eventually using culverts and other means to enter the Test Site where 530 were arrested by Wackenhut Security forces on charges of trespassing.

[31] Download coordinates as: A table of interesting places in and around the NNSS is presented here, which corresponds with many of the descriptions in the Nevada Test Site Guide.

[37] A 1962 United States Atomic Energy Commission report found that "children living in St. George, Utah may have received doses to the thyroid of radioiodine as high as 120 to 440 rads" (1.2 to 4.4 Gy).

[38] A 1979 study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that: A significant excess of leukemia deaths occurred in children up to 14 years of age living in Utah between 1959 and 1967.

[39]In 1982, a lawsuit brought by nearly 1,200 people accused the government of negligence in atomic and/or nuclear weapons testing at the site, which they said had caused leukemia and other cancers.

Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, Director of Health Physics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, testified that radiation protection measures in the tests were substandard to best practices at the time.

In 1955, a Civil Defense experiment (called Operation Cue in the press) studied nuclear blast effects on various building types; a few structures still stand.

[9] As part of Operation Tinderbox, on June 24, 1980, a large satellite prototype (DSCS III) was subjected to radioactivity from the "Huron King" shot in a vertical line-of-sight (VLOS) test undertaken in Area 3.

The Baneberry 10 kt (42 TJ) test detonated 900 feet (270 m) below the surface but its energy cracked the soil in unexpected ways, causing a fissure near ground zero and the failure of the shaft stemming and cap.

The "John" shot of Plumbbob, on July 19, 1957, was the first test firing of the nuclear-tipped AIR-2 Genie air-to-air rocket designed to destroy incoming enemy bombers with a nuclear explosion.

Information from the test was used in designing hardened missile silos and the North American Aerospace Defense Command facility in Colorado Springs.

Extensive plant and soil studies evaluated the uptake of pollutants in farm-grown vegetables and from the forage eaten by a dairy herd of some 30 Holstein cows.

[57] Area 30 was the site of a single nuclear test, the Crosstie Buggy row charge experiment, part of Operation Plowshare, which involved five simultaneous detonations.