Chapter XII
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The same emptiness that made the state impossible to settle made it perfect for the two things nobody wants near a city — and Nevada has spent seventy years being paid for one and fighting the other.
first shot 27 January 1951; testing to 1992
The first device was fired over Frenchman Flat in January 1951, sixty-five miles from Las Vegas. Between then and 1992 the government detonated 928 nuclear devices there — 100 in the atmosphere and 828 underground. Mushroom clouds were visible from downtown, one shot broke shop windows in the city, and Las Vegas advertised the schedule: calendars of shot times, hotel rooms sold on the view, a beauty queen crowned Miss Atomic Bomb.
why it is Nevada’s This is the clearest statement of the arrangement Nevada has with the country. The state was chosen because it was empty and because the wind blew east over almost nobody — and “almost nobody” was ranchers, Mormon settlements in southern Utah, and Western Shoshone land. Las Vegas sold the spectacle. The people downwind carried the cost, and the compensation came four decades later.
928 tests, 100 atmospheric and 828 underground, 1951–1992. First shot 27 January 1951, Operation Ranger, Frenchman Flat. ⚠ The atmospheric fallout and downwinder health record is genuinely contested in its detail and should never be quoted casually — cite the compensation legislation, not a casualty figure.
created 30 June 1987; dissolved 3 May 1989
To fight the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, the Nevada legislature carved a 144-square-mile county out of Nye County around the site. It had no residents, no businesses, no buildings, no roads and no private land of any kind. Its property tax was set at the constitutional maximum and, having no voters, it was governed directly from Carson City. The courts struck it down for violating equal representation and it dissolved back into Nye after twenty-two months.
why it is Nevada’s One of the shortest-lived counties in American history, invented as a taxing instrument and staffed by nobody. It is the purest artefact of the whole relationship: a state that holds 20% of its own land arguing with the government that holds the other 80%, and reaching for the only lever it actually owns — the power to draw a line on a map and tax whatever falls inside it.
Created 30 June 1987, dissolved 3 May 1989; 144 square miles; ruled unconstitutional on equal-representation grounds.