Shot Stokes was a Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) test detonated on 7 August 1957 at 5:25 a.m. from a balloon at 1,500 feet above Yucca Flat, Nevada Test Site — part of the sprawling Operation Plumbbob series. Stokes was a proof test of the LASL XW-30 multi-purpose warhead, an all-oralloy (highly enriched uranium) DT gas-boosted system intended for use in the TADM tactical atomic demolition munition and the Talos surface-to-air missile. The shot produced 19 kilotons. This photograph, taken by Lookout Mountain Laboratory, USAF, captures the Stokes cloud at its peak — the mushroom cap already breaking from the stem as it rises and begins to dissipate in the pre-dawn sky. A US Navy dirigible in temporary free flight five miles from ground zero collapsed from the shock wave of the blast. LASL shots in the Plumbbob series were named for deceased scientists; Stokes honours the Irish-British mathematician and physicist Sir George Gabriel Stokes (1819–1903).