In Slate Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger tour the most beautiful nuclear test craters in Nevada:

NEVADA TEST SITE, Nev.—Rumor had it she was a whore from Pahrump. But it didn't matter to those who knew her: Everyone agreed Priscilla was the most beautiful.

On June 24, 1957, the U.S. military touched off a 37-kiloton nuclear device over Frenchman Flat, a dry lake bed about 75 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The atmospheric test, code-named Priscilla, was one in a series called Operation Plumbbob. The provenance of the code name remains obscure; the earliest tests were ordered on the old military alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie), but several tests in the 1950s were named after women. Test site lore persists that some were named for local prostitutes.

In The New Yorker Louis Menand looks back at Herman Kahn, the Fat Man who helped bring us this beauty:

Herman Kahn was the heavyweight of the Megadeath Intellectuals, the men who, in the early years of the Cold War, made it their business to think about the unthinkable, and to design the game plan for nuclear war—how to prevent it, or, if it could not be prevented, how to win it, or, if it could not be won, how to survive it. The collective combat experience of these men was close to nil; their diplomatic experience was smaller. Their training was in physics, engineering, political science mathematics, and logic, and they worked with the latest in assessment technologies: operational research, computer science, system analysis, and game theory. The type of war they contemplated was, of course, never waged, but whether this was because of their work or in spite of it has always been a matter of dispute. Exhibit A in the case against them is a book by Kahn, published in 1960, “Of Thermonuclear War."