For more than 40 years, like little boys with a big box of firecrackers, U.S. government officials used the Nevada Test Site like an atomic playground.
    They dropped bombs from planes and balloons. They attached them to towers and fired them from cannon. They exploded them inside craters, tunnels and shafts.
    Until July1962, many of the weapons were detonated in the atmosphere or on the ground, and many downwind residents, having been told the tests were safe, paid with their health as radioactive fallout scattered to the winds.
    Each test had its own name, from Aardvark to Zuni.
    Some seem quite fitting for atomic weapons: Ticking, Red Hot, Pile Driver.
    Others - Tomato, Tuna, Salmon - sound more like lunch.
    They gave them sweet names, like Chocolate and Gumdrop, Milkshake and Sugar.
    They gave them silly names: Danny Boy and Johnnie Boy. Little Feller and Tiny Tot. Russet and Spud.
    They named them after persons: Ray, Ruth, Romeo. After places: Sacramento, San Juan, Santa Fe. And after things: Mallet, Mullet, Mushroom.
    Nuclear weapons testing ceased altogether in 1992 with the signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but the residue remains from the bombs that keep on giving. The test site has been dusted with fallout from more than 900 tests, and now Pentagon officials seem intent on stirring it up again.
    There's a test planned for this year that could raise a cloud of radioactive dust 10,000 feet in the air. It would probably settle downwind, perhaps in southern Utah, where some citizens still suffer from illnesses related to radiation exposure.
    This time it will be a regular bomb, but a big one, 700 tons of conventional explosives, the mother of all bombs.
    They'll blow up an underground tunnel to determine if underground bunkers on distant battlefields can be destroyed by smaller-sized bombs. Nuclear bombs.
    And, in keeping with tradition, they've given the test a name - Divine Strake - and they've labeled it harmless. We have a better suggestion.
    How does "Divine Cancer" grab you? Or "Divine Leukemia"? Or "Divine Thyroid Disease"?
    Let's call it like it is. Let's call a bomb a bomb. Better yet, let's call the whole thing off.

* (Posted for educational and research purposes only, in accordance 
     with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107) *