Today in 1957, the United States conducted Shot HOOD—a reduced-yield, 74-kiloton thermonuclear test—even as the Atomic Energy Commission insisted that no such tests were taking place at the Nevada Test Site due to concerns over radioactive fallout. Hood was largest-ever atmospheric test in Nevada.
Exercise Desert Rock VII, conducted in conjunction with Shot HOOD, included troop indoctrination and maneuvers by more than 2,000 Marines (many placed in trenches just 2 miles from ground zero)—the largest such exercise held in Nevada—as well as air operations by 124 military aircraft.
Here is a contemporary British Pathé newsreel report about the test, which misleadingly asserts that because the device was suspended 1,500 feet above the ground by a balloon, the resulting mushroom cloud was “purified of much of its radioactive poison.”
The Hood test holds a strange fascination for director David Lynch, who was born in 1946. A small framed photograph of its large mushroom cloud rising over the Nevada desert appears on the wall in Henry Spencer’s sparsely furnished bedroom in Lynch’s experimental 1977 horror film “Eraserhead.”
And a blown-up black and white version of the same photograph can be seen on the wall directly behind the desk in the office of FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole, the profoundly hard-of-hearing character reprised by Lynch in his 2017 Showtime limited series “Twin Peaks: The Return.”
