In the What the Bleep Are the Bushies Thinking?!? Department

What indeed? From an Australian paper (because God forbid American news media tell us these things):

THE United States military planned to detonate a 700 tonne explosive charge in a test called "Divine Strake" that would send a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, a senior defence official said."I don't want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," said

James Tegnelia, head of the Defence Threat Reduction Agency.
Mr Tegnelia said the test was part of a US effort to develop weapons capable of destroying deeply buried bunkers housing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

"We have several very large penetrators we're developing," he said.

"We also have - are you ready for this - a 700 tonne explosively-formed charge that we're going to be putting in a tunnel in Nevada.

"And that represents to us the largest single explosive that we could imagine doing conventionally to solve that problem."

The aim was to measure the effect of the blast on hard granite structures, he said.

And scaring the shit out of the inhabitants to justify more Pentagon spending perhaps? In other words, a terrorist act by our own government perpetrated against its own people.

Lovely. Just lovely.