Joseph A. Burton Forum Award Talk

At the end of August 1967, while a summer visitor to Los Alamos, I witnessed two atomic bomb tests in Nevada. One of these was ``Smoky'' which became notorious because of the use of American soldiers in close maneuvers. This is depicted in the documentary The Atomic Cafe. This test, one of 29, was part of the Plumbbob Series in which over 300 kilotons of nuclear explosions took place above ground some sixty miles from a major American city, Las Vegas. As insane as this may appear to us now, it did serve to make concrete the menace of nuclear weapons which have come to seem more and more like an abstraction.