On March 30, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (nice newspeak name, isn´t it ) announced a June 2 test in the desert of Nevada. Said the agencies director James Tegnelia:

"I don’t want to sound glib here, but it’s the first time in Nevada that you’ll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons."

700 tons of conventional high explosives will be used in a single blast to test the effects against deeply buried targets. The Washington Post somehow managed to write about the test as a conventional enterprise:

The test is aimed at determining how well a massive conventional bomb would perform against fortified underground targets.
…
Such a bomb would be a conventional alternative to a nuclear weapon
proposed by the Bush administration, which has run into opposition on
Capitol Hill.

Sure, a 700 ton conventional bomb. And how many planes to you need to carry that one? Today the largest conventional bunker buster bomb in the U.S. arsenals carries only 680 pounds of high explosives. The maximum weapon load of a B-52 bomber is 70,000 pounds.

Some real journalists immediately caught up and found the obvious:

A Defense Nuclear Threat Reduction Agency spokeswoman would neither confirm nor deny the nuclear connection Friday, saying only that conventional mining explosives would be used in for the massive blast.

But a Pentagon budget request is explicit about its purpose: to "improve the warfighter’s confidence in selecting the smallest nuclear yield necessary to destroy underground facilities while minimizing collateral damage."

A team from Los Alamos National Laboratory is involved in the project.

The experts agreed as did the washingtonpost.com’s Bill Arkin.

There is just no doubt that this test is an evaluation of a nuclear "bunker buster" bomb.

Still today the same Washington Post writer, Ann Scott Tyson, manages to stenograph only the military’s explanations: Pentagon Clarifies Nevada Intent

Officials said the test, code-named Divine Strake, is part of research to "determine the potential for future non-nuclear concepts" — such as high-energy weapons or the simultaneous use of multiple conventional bombs to destroy deeply buried and fortified military targets. They said the budget documents’ references to simulating a nuclear explosion were in error.

…
Tegnelia has consistently described the test as applying solely to conventional weapons. "The purpose of the test is to advance conventional weapons," he said in an interview Wednesday.
…
But he said that the test could help determine the damage if an underground target were struck simultaneously with multiple conventional bombs. "You can’t do it with one, but you might be able to do it with multiple efforts," he said.

So there will be 700 bombs delivered into one tight hole. They will explode within milliseconds to deliver the single strong seismic wave that is needed to brake an underground bunker. Thanks for that clarification.

Of course the test is designed to evaluate nuclear bombs. The timing is part of the War on Iran preparations. One may doubt that such a test will further the goals of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

But the Washington Post writer is not able or not willing to straighten the story herself, to set it into context, or to find a voice that could at least provide a he said/she said ambiguity.

It is obvious that the military is lying here. The Washingon Post and Ann Scott Tyson are nothing but the megaphones used to distribute these lies.