REHEARSAL FOR DISASTER

THE soldier often feels a strange disappointment when he sees his first battlefield. A barn still stands with cattle waiting to be fed ; a tree is green and straight against the sky; hollyhocks are in bloom. Later he realizes what has happened to the people.

It was like that last week when reporters first visited the village on Yucca Flat built to test the effect of an atomic blast. The reporters, who had waited 13 days for the explosion and another day to see what had happened, were primed to be shocked. They had seen the fireball dwarf the tiny village on the desert (three houses can be seen in the lower right corner of the picture above ), watched a train of dust follow the shock wave across the desert, felt its punch eight miles away.

But when they arrived at the village, they first noticed what had survived. A reinforced cinder-block house and another made of precast concrete slabs still stood, less than a mile from the blast. One iso-ft. guyed radio tower was erect. A 15,4000-gal. tank of liquefied petroleum gas was intact; only its handrail was bent. Shelves of groceries seemed unharmed. A power substation was 95% operable. The telephone system showed little damage. The blast had blown out fires that had been started by the searing heat of the explosion. Underground gas lines to houses less than a mile from ground zero were undamaged. And the Atomic Energy Commission could report: "Out of the ten houses included in the test, the condition of seven was such that they could be made habitable for emergency occupancy by shoring and repairs." Most radios in the houses ran, and not a TV picture tube was found broken.

But then reporters realized that if real people instead of mannequins had inhabited the village, only a few would have survived. Inside the standing houses, Venetian blinds had been tossed around like bundles of spears, furniture hurled in grotesque stacks, cloth torn and seared. A refrig erator had exploded from the change in air pressure. Two of three steel industrial buildings were ruined. A doorknob had been torn from a door and cast half through a wall, so that there was a doorknob where there was no door. Each of two typical American houses, one brick, one wood, was a pile of rubble and jackstraws. A mannequin still sat at a kitchen table in another house, but her wig had been stripped off; it was found in the remains of the refriger ator; another dummy was skewered with jagged glass. Cars were smashed as if a monster fist had crashed down on the roof; one hood had flown up and stood gaping open with a frozen look of surprise.

Harold L. Goodwin, test operations director of the Federal Civil Defense Administration, said that anyone within one mile of the blast would have been killed by radiation or flying debris. A few people in deep bomb shelters might have survived, but even two miles from the blast injuries would have been serious and few would have escaped.

And the device at Yucca Flat was a small one. An H-bomb tested in the Pacific was 500 times more powerful.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.