Protesters Say They’ll Try to Stop Nuke Test

Anti-nuclear protesters reversed themselves late Monday and announced that they would try to sneak onto the Nevada Test Site in an effort to halt the third announced underground nuclear test of 1986.

Apparently caught off guard by the Defense Department’s announcement that the test, code-named “Jefferson,” would be conducted today instead of Wednesday, the activists first had decided against trying to invade the site at Pahute Mesa, 104 miles northwest of here.

But later, Jessie Cocks, coordinator of the American Peace Test, said three people from Colorado “will infiltrate. . . . They will attempt to delay Jefferson and stay on the test site to continue delaying the test.”

Cocks said there also would be a demonstration outside the test site on Wednesday, including Senji Yamaguchi, 55, a survivor of the 23-kiloton atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.

Jefferson, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory weapons-related experiment, is buried in a vertical shaft 2,000 feet below the desert surface and is designed to have an explosive force of from 20 to 150 kilotons, equal to a maximum punch of 150,000 tons of TNT. The 6:30 a.m. blast will be the 649th announced nuclear test at the site since the beginning of nuclear weapons tests there in January, 1951.

For security reasons, not all tests are announced.

Before the last underground nuclear test, “Mighty Oak,” on April 10, more than 100 protesters were arrested on trespassing charges. After that detonation the Soviet Union announced it was ending an eight-month unilateral nuclear test moratorium and would resume testing.