Question: What New Mexico structure is 12 stories tall, built entirely out of wood and helped win the Cold War? (Hint: It is NOT the “Rattler” rollercoaster at Uncle Cliff’s Amusement Park.)
Answer: “The Trestle” at Kirtland Air Force Base.
The Trestle at Kirtland Air Force Base supports a wooden runway that faces an arsenal of spotlights and rusting signal-generating equipment that have not been turned on in over 20 years.
The Trestle, or “ATLAS-I” (short for Air Force Weapons Lab Transmission-Line Aircraft Simulator) was the brainchild of my boss, Dr. Carl E. Baum, who worked at the Base for 42 years and is now a Distinguished Research Professor at The University of New Mexico. The Trestle, inspired by a railroad bridge, is a test stand for the world’s largest electromagnetic pulse simulator. It is two football fields long and was built over an enormous, bowl-shaped arroyo, deep inside this high-security military complex. This is not your typical military base or average airport. You would not see commercial airlines or purchase cheap flights here.
Between 1980 and 1990, military aircraft were towed onto the deck of this wooden mesa and bombarded with electromagnetic pulses, or “EMP,” like the kind made by an exploding nuclear bomb. The purpose of these classified experiments was to measure the effects of these electromagnetic waves on the delicate electronics and soft underbelly of military aircraft.
Atomic tests like these used to be conducted in a grand, theatrical style during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a time when military money flowed like water. It was the ultimate “Reality Show”: If you want to see how a 100 ton, 185 ft.-wide B-52 Bomber was affected by an H-Bomb, you simply wheeled the plane onto the Trestle’s deck, charged up its Marx capacitors with 0.2 terawatts of electricity (that’s 10 to the 12th watts), aimed, and fired.
“That’s only a tiny percentage of a nuclear weapon but it’s a lot of energy for a short period of time in a limited space,” Baum said to me during an exclusive interview that I conducted with him in the fall of 2007.
“Instead of detonating a nuclear bomb to produce an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) covering the continent, we produced similar fields over a smaller region of space. The total energy produced was about 200 kilojoules. Human beings are essentially not affected by this, only the electronics.”