For the moment, Utah has dodged Divine Strake.

The government agreed to delay the bunker-busting bomb test indefinitely. It was originally slated for June 23 at the Nevada Test Site, where the government had exploded nuclear weapons for decades.

Government officials say the delay is intended to provide time to answer legal and environmental questions about the test.

The original object was to determine what effect detonating 700 tons of ammonium nitrate-fuel oil explosives would have on an underground structure. It would help planners develop a bomb that can destroy underground bunkers inhabited by terrorists.

Utahns became alarmed when James Tegnella, director of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency said the blast would be "the first time in Nevada that you would see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons."

Even though Divine Strake was using a conventional explosive, its detonation would have been on ground that has been repeatedly exposed to radiation in nuclear blasts. The soil is so radioactive that workers at the site advise visitors not to take any rocks home as souvenirs.

Utahns fear that the blast would throw radiation-laced rock and dust high enough into the atmosphere to cause it to fall in Utah, just as radioactive fallout from the above-ground tests of the 1950s blanketed not only Utah but much of the nation.

Government assurances that Divine Strake would be perfectly safe, and that any radioactive release would be confined to the test site, were not reassuring. They were an eerie echo of the assurances the Department of Energy gave southern Utahns that fallout from the atomic bomb tests was harmless even though it was hot enough to set off Geiger counters.

While we are grateful that the test has been postponed, we are not about to declare victory just yet. We cannot be blamed if we are skeptical about the government's sincerity.

If government officials truly want to show that they are serious about protecting downwinders from harmful fallout, they will move the test to a place without the history of the Nevada Test Site. The Utah Test and Training Range and Dugway Proving Ground are two sites that could be considered as alternatives. The facilities have not been used to test nuclear weapons and, as the Air Force has recognized, the ranges provide a real-world place for practice at fighting in the high deserts of Afghanistan or Iraq.

Another option is to consider computer modeling alone, without a live test. The United States has set off enough bombs in the 20th century to provide a mountain of data from which to construct a model that accurately reflects how a bomb would work.

If the government were to take those steps, rather than restate old platitudes and scientific jargon to sell us on a Nevada test, Utahns might be more willing to get behind the development of new weapons.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A8.

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