For the Livermore weapons laboratory, Tesla was the breakthrough it had waited two and a half years for: its first nuclear device that actually worked. The University of California Radiation Laboratory had been founded in 1952 as a rival to Los Alamos, but its earliest test devices fizzled — an institutional embarrassment — and Tesla, a compact "linear implosion" design of a kind narrow enough to be fired from artillery, was the lab's first clear success. Like many shots in Operation Teapot, it also served as theatre: under Exercise Desert Rock VI, around 8,000 soldiers were brought to the Nevada desert across the series to watch detonations and afterwards walk through displays of military equipment positioned to be wrecked by the blast — instruction in fighting on a nuclear battlefield. Fired upwind of the populated Southwest, Teapot added significantly to the fallout that continental testing spread across the region.