The NTTR land area includes a "simulated Integrated Air Defense System", several individual ranges with 1200 targets, and 4 remote communication sites.

The NTTR is at the serpentine section of the Great Basin Divide in southern Nevada and uses numerous landforms for military operations, e.g., Groom Lake near the northeast NTTR border is the airstrip for Area 51, the 1955 Site II west of the lake's WWII field.

[11] The Formerly Used Defense Site north and northeast of the NTTR with "Stone Cabin, Hot Creek, Railroad, Tikaboo, and Sand Spring valleys" is a "former portion of the Tonopah Bombing Range", includes "Permit Required Confined space", and prohibits vehicles in "suspected ordnance impact area[s]" (e.g., "green markings" indicate chemical agents).

[12]: 68  Precambrian and Paleozoic marine sediments form an "almost uniform thickness of 40,000 feet", and surface geology is "typically the Cenozoic Era continental deposits and some Paleogene volcanic rocks".

[2]: 3–3  Located at the southern tip of the Great Basin tribes area, the eventual range area was crossed by the Old Spanish Trail (trade route), was south of the Pony Express route, and was split by the 37th parallel north of the 1850 New Mexico & 1863 Arizona territories' northwest corner.

[citation needed] In June 1947 Tonopah AAF was declared excess along with its 3 auxiliary areas (Mizpah and Butler housing terraces and Columbia Junction gasoline unloading station).

[18] On June 28, 1949, the "Gunnery Range of the Tonopah Air Force Base" had about 30 sq mi (78 km2)[19] and after the 1949 Las Vegas Air Force Base was renamed on April 30, 1950, a United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) committee selected the "Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range" [sic] for a nuclear test site on December 12, 1950.

[21] A 680-square mile section of the Nellis Air Force Gunnery and Bombing Range was designated the Nevada Proving Grounds (NPG) on December 18, 1950.

[23] In 1955 on the southwest corner of Groom Lake, a survey team laid out the 5,000-foot (1,500 m) north–south "Site II" runway for Project AQUATONE.

[27] A 1961 Public Land Order transferred USAF land to the AEC, and after the 1962 RBS Express #2 near the Hawthorne Naval Ammunition Depot was used for Radar Bomb Scoring of flights over the range, the Hawthorne Bomb Plot radar station operated in Babbitt until c. 1993.

[32] Circa 1980, NAFR received 806L "Range Threat" systems for electronic warfare simulation and from 1983 to 1985, the area of South Antelope Lake was used for two Tomahawk missile targets.

[1] In June 2019, a joke Facebook event was created rallying the public to storm the training range on September 20 that year.

[41] A public information officer at Nellis Air Force Base told KNPR that "any attempt to illegally access the area is highly discouraged".