Easy was the largest detonation of Buster-Jangle, the 1951 series that turned the Nevada desert into the permanent home of American nuclear testing. Fired as an airdrop over Yucca Flat at the Nevada Proving Ground on 5 November 1951, it produced 31 kilotonnes — roughly twice the Hiroshima yield — the most powerful shot of the series and one of the larger detonations then conducted on the continent. Buster-Jangle mattered less for any single device than for what it set in motion. It was only the second test series held in Nevada, and it established the pattern that would define the site for a decade: rapid, low-cost weapons trials conducted a short flight from Las Vegas rather than in the distant Pacific, with soldiers brought in to train alongside the blasts. Under the first of the Desert Rock exercises, thousands of troops observed the series' shots and, at one of them, advanced on foot toward ground zero minutes after the detonation — the start of a programme that would expose tens of thousands of servicemen to nuclear tests in the years that followed. Easy itself was a Los Alamos weapons-development shot, one of a run of trials refining the fission designs then entering the American arsenal. Like the rest of the continental programme, it cast a longer shadow than its military purpose implied: the Buster-Jangle troops and the civilians living downwind of the Nevada site were among those later recognised as carrying the health costs of the tests, and compensated, decades afterward, for cancers linked to the radiation.