Monitoring Underground Nuclear Explosions focuses on the checking of underground nuclear explosions, including the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTB), seismological stations, earthquake-source models, and seismicity. The publication first elaborates on test-ban negotiations, nuclear explosions, seismological background, and explosions and earthquakes as seismic sources. Concerns cover comparison between explosion-source and earthquake-source models, theoretical calculation of seismic waves, earth structure, seismicity, nuclear test activities, bomb designs, and disarmament treaties. The manuscript then tackles seismological stations, detection, event definition and location, depth estimation, and identification. Topics include multistation discriminants, statistical aspects, long-period and short-period signals, near distances, location by a network of stations, international data exchange, station detection capabilities, and station networks. The book examines the monitoring of a comprehensive test-ban treaty, nonseismological identification, evasion, peaceful nuclear explosions, and yield estimation. The text is a dependable reference for researchers interested in the monitoring of underground nuclear explosions.

This document lists chronologically and alphabetically by name all nuclear tests and simultaneous detonations conducted by the United States from July 1945 through September 1992. Two nuclear weapons that the United States exploded over Japan ending World War II are not listed. These detonations were not "tests" in the sense that they were conducted to prove that the weapon would work as designed (as was the first test near Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945), or to advance nuclear weapon design, or to determine weapons effects, or to verify weapon safety as were the more than one thousand tests that have taken place since June 30,1946. The nuclear weapon (nicknamed "Little Boy") dropped August 6,1945 from a United States Army Air Force B-29 bomber (the Enola Gay) and detonated over Hiroshima, Japan had an energy yield equivalent to that of 15,000 tons of TNT. The nuclear weapon (virtually identical to "Fat Man") exploded in a similar fashion August 9, 1945 over Nagaski, Japan had a yield of 21,000 tons of TNT. Both detonations were intended to end World War II as quickly as possible. Data on United States tests were obtained from, and verified by, the U.S. Department of Energy's three weapons laboratories -- Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California; and Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico; and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Additionally, data were obtained from public announcements issued by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and its successors, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration, and the U.S. Department of Energy, respectively.

On September 24, 1996, President Clinton signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty at the United Nations Headquarters. Over the next five months, 141 nations, including the four other nuclear weapon statesâ€"Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdomâ€"added their signatures to this total ban on nuclear explosions. To help achieve verification of compliance with its provisions, the treaty specifies an extensive International Monitoring System of seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasonic, and radionuclide sensors. This volume identifies specific research activities that will be needed if the United States is to effectively monitor compliance with the treaty provisions.

In December 2016, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their iconic “Doomsday Clock” thirty seconds forward to two and a half minutes to midnight, the latest it has been set since 1952, the year of the first United States hydrogen bomb test. But a group of scientists—geologists, engineers, and physicists—has been fighting to turn back the clock. Since the dawn of the Cold War, they have advocated a halt to nuclear testing, their work culminating in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which still awaits ratification from China, Iran, North Korea—and the United States. The backbone of the treaty is every nation’s ability to independently monitor the nuclear activity of the others. The noted seismologist Lynn R. Sykes, one of the central figures in the development of the science and technology used in monitoring, has dedicated his career to halting nuclear testing. In Silencing the Bomb, he tells the inside story behind scientists’ quest for disarmament. Called upon time and again to testify before Congress and to inform the public, Sykes and his colleagues were, for much of the Cold War, among the only people on earth able to say with certainty when and where a bomb was tested and how large it was. Methods of measuring earthquakes, researchers realized, could also detect underground nuclear explosions. When politicians on both sides of the Iron Curtain attempted to sidestep disarmament or test ban treaties, Sykes was able to deploy the nascent science of plate tectonics to reveal the truth. Seismologists’ discoveries helped bring about treaties limiting nuclear testing, but it was their activism that played a key role in the effort for peace. Full of intrigue, international politics, and hard science used for the global good, Silencing the Bomb is a timely and necessary chronicle of one scientist’s efforts to keep the clock from striking midnight.

Project 1.7 of Operation TEAPOT was concerned with the measurement of surface and subsurface effects of an underground explosion of a 1.2-kt nuclear burst (Shot 7). The measurements included free-field earth and airblast effects, as well as loading on underground structural devices. This report deals with the presentation and analysis of the free-field data only; the structural data have been transmitted to the appropriate agencies for their analysis. From the 76 channels installed on TEAPOT Shot 7, 75 usable records were obtained. The free-field quantities measured include air-blast pressure, earth acceleration, earth stress and strain, and permanent earth displacement. The results are discussed by phenomenon and, in each case, the TEAPOT data are compared with pretest predictions. Also, where data are available, comparisons are made with previous underground nuclear test results. Some aspects of seismology and soil mechanics as applied to underground explosion phenomena are presented and, finally, the most pertinent high explosives results from subsequent tests conducted at the TEAPOT location are summarized. (Author).

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) was set up by Congress in 1990 to compensate people who have been diagnosed with specified cancers and chronic diseases that could have resulted from exposure to nuclear-weapons tests at various U.S. test sites. Eligible claimants include civilian onsite participants, downwinders who lived in areas currently designated by RECA, and uranium workers and ore transporters who meet specified residence or exposure criteria. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), which oversees the screening, education, and referral services program for RECA populations, asked the National Academies to review its program and assess whether new scientific information could be used to improve its program and determine if additional populations or geographic areas should be covered under RECA. The report recommends Congress should establish a new science-based process using a method called "probability of causation/assigned share" (PC/AS) to determine eligibility for compensation. Because fallout may have been higher for people outside RECA-designated areas, the new PC/AS process should apply to all residents of the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii, and overseas US territories who have been diagnosed with specific RECA-compensable diseases and who may have been exposed, even in utero, to radiation from U.S. nuclear-weapons testing fallout. However, because the risks of radiation-induced disease are generally low at the exposure levels of concern in RECA populations, in most cases it is unlikely that exposure to radioactive fallout was a substantial contributing cause of cancer.

To achieve successful solutions to the problems resulting from local, distant and global radioactive fallout after nuclear explosions and accidents and to achieve successful retrospective analyses of the radiation conditions from recent observations, certain information is needed: the distribution of the exposure dose rate in the atmosphere and in a country; the distribution of radionuclides in natural environments and the nuclide composition of the radioactive fallout; the features of formation of the aerosol particle-carriers of the radioactivity and of the nuclide distribution of the particles of different sizes formed under different conditions; the processes involved in the migration of radioactive products in different zones and environments; the external and internal effects of nuclear radiation on human beings.This monograph is devoted to a number of these problems, namely, to studies of the radioactive fallout composition, the formation of the aerosol particles that transport the radioactive products and to the analysis of the external radiation doses resulting from nuclear explosions and/or accidents. Problems of restoration and rehabilitation of contaminated land areas are also touched upon in the monograph. To solve such problems one requires knowledge of the mobility of radionuclides, an understanding of their uptake by plants, their transportation within the food chain and finally their uptake by animal and/or human organisms.The results of many years of study of radioactive fallout from atmospheric and underground nuclear explosions and accidents are summarized in this book. It is intended for various specialists - geophysicists, ecologists, health experts and inspectors, as well as those who are concerned with radioactive contamination of natural environments.

Consisting of more than 150 articles written by leading experts, this authoritative reference encompasses the entire field of solid-earth geophysics. It describes in detail the state of current knowledge, including advanced instrumentation and techniques, and focuses on important areas of exploration geophysics. It also offers clear and complete coverage of seismology, geodesy, gravimetry, magnetotellurics and related areas in the adjacent disciplines of physics, geology, oceanography and space science.

The use of infrasound to monitor the atmosphere has, like infrasound itself, gone largely unheard of through the years. But it has many applications, and it is about time that a book is being devoted to this fascinating subject. Our own involvement with infrasound occurred as graduate students of Prof. William Donn, who had established an infrasound array at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory (now the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) of Columbia University. It was a natural outgrowth of another major activity at Lamont, using seismic waves to explore the Earth’s interior. Both the atmosphere and the solid Earth feature velocity (seismic or acoustic) gradients in the vertical which act to refract the respective waves. The refraction in turn allows one to calculate the respective background structure in these mediums, indirectly exploring locations that are hard to observe otherwise. Monitoring these signals also allows one to discover various phenomena, both natural and man-made (some of which have military applications).