At 1 o'clock in the afternoon, a small cloud of sand puffed over Rainier Mesa, Nev. From a tunnel deep below the mesa's sandy surface, a muffled thud rose to shake the desert silence. Minutes later in Washington, President John F. Kennedy announced that the U.S. had "reluctantly" completed its first nuclear-weapons test in nearly three years.
Compared to some of the atomic devices that the Russians have exploded since Sept. 1, the low-yield (probably not more than one kiloton) U.S. test seemed as tame as a firecracker. But it carried the U.S....
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