Sunday, April 02, 2006

Vegas, baby!

Vegas is getting set for it's biggest light show ever. That's right. "I don’t want to sound glib here," says James Tegnelia, the director of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, "but it’s the first time in Nevada that you’ll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons."


The operation, dubbed 'Divine Strake' will detonate 700 tons of the Ammonium Nitrate-Fuel Oil, with the purpose of testing ground shock effects on deeply burried structures. It "represents the largest conventional explosion Pentagon officials could imagine triggering" to address the concern of enemy bunkers that have become too deep to destroy with conventional weapons.
"All explosives given the right thermal characteristics, will create a cloud that may resemble a mushroom cloud," the DTRA said in a statement. "The dust cloud from Divine Strake may reach an altitude of 10,000 feet (3,048 meters) and is not expected to be visible off the Nevada Test Site."
So, should intrepid tourists visiting Vegas be willing to do a bit of stealthy camping, they could be in for a special treat come June 2nd when the explosion is designated to occur.


[Image: Proposed area for Divine Strake test in Nevada, as detailed in GlobalSecurity.org.]

To me, it's interesting, however, to watch the layers of shameless corporate corruption become unearthed churning up infrastructural artifacts of a 'military industrial complex', while the urbanism of a counter-empire is busy entrenching itself further underground.
There's something evident in there about the morphology of militarism, the tectonic narrative of a U.S. hegemony shaping its own counter landscape, whose only response is to build, buy, and sell more weapons in order to supress it. Given our last post on the privatization of the apocalypse, there's an eerie Divine Strike of chords between the unseen bunkers of rampant capitalism and the scattered subterraneanism of a global insurgency. Vegas, the Pentagon, nuclear bunker busters, a bunch of tourists, and unknown sedimentary networks of forbidden activity pushing underground: I don't know, the ingredients of the end there, like the geology of Empire: Vegas mushrooming a terrestrial history of the imbalance of power destined to erode into a dusty crust, where clouds scorn geospatial riddles that go on burrying themselves further and further to where bombs can no longer find them. The secret to the rise and fall of all great superpowers is an Achilles urbanism half-mapped today by ground shock effects, seismic radar, semi-detectable gravitational fields, and the spectacular glimpse of another shock'n'awe lights show begging for attention just outside the world's surrealist casino capital.

(via: Boing Boing)

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

oh my , dang why do I live here,,,
as soon as you have any footage can you do me a huuuuge pleasure and ringeling my dingdong?

7:25 AM  

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