Vital Water Data: How an unbuilt nuclear-missile silo complex became a failed Las Vegas housing development, 1977-2012

• In Event: Critical Things: Extraction and Environmental Governance in the Long Twentieth Century

Abstract

In 1977, the Carter administration proposed the “Missile, Experimental” nuclear-warhead silo project—known simply as the MX. A complex of hundreds of underground bases, connected by thousands of miles of “racetrack”-style roads, it was to be the “largest construction project in human history,” according to Defense Department engineers. But the plan fell apart. Overly ambitious even by Cold War standards and widely detested by locals near the proposed site along the border of southern Nevada and Utah—downwind of the Nevada Test Site—the MX succumbed to political pressure under the Reagan administration. While some supported its jobs and federal infrastructure investments, more opposed its waste of resources and dangerous sacrifice of desert land: from Las Vegas environmentalists to Paiute and Shoshone land-rights advocates to conservative Sagebrush Rebels. Many in the Desert Southwest are familiar with the MX story. However, few have heard about its unexpected afterlives. While construction never took place, federal hydrologists in the planning phase—in part to satisfy NEPA requirements—drilled nearly 300 test wells to locate groundwater, a vital resource for the project’s most critical component, concrete. Soon after plans folded, these valuable data passed hands from the Defense Department to the State of Nevada, which later parceled them out and quietly sold their proprietary secrets to private developers. This presentation traces the history of one dataset to its eventual use in the controversial 2000s exurban real estate development known as Coyote Springs, about 50 miles outside Las Vegas, complete with a golf course, country club, and possibly as many as 575 single-family homes. Coyote Springs failed too, collapsing under litigation and accusations of corruption. But its story reveals how national security frameworks and infrastructure projects—even those unbuilt—have shaped development in the American West.

Author

• Taylor Elliott Rose, Yale University