Today LIFE posted a number of pictures depicting the aftermath of a 1955 nuclear test in the Nevada desert. Some of these pictures were originally published in the magazine, but the majority of them were not. As the brief commentary accompanying the revisiting of these images puts it: “And yet today, six decades later, at a time when the prospect of nuclear tests by ‘rogue states’ like North Korea and Iran is once again making headlines and driving international negotiations and debate, the very banality of one long-forgotten atomic test in 1955 feels somehow more chilling than other more memorable or era-defining episodes from the Cold War. After all, whether conducted in the name of deterrence, defense or pure scientific research, the May 1955 blast. . . was in a very real sense routine.” A couple samples: