The Nevada Desert Experience's Lenten vigils at the nuclear test site drew what became the largest sustained civil-disobedience campaign in American history: between 1986 and 1994, more than 15,000 arrests at the cattle guard on Mercury Highway, with single actions — the Mothers' Day and "Reclaim the Test Site" gatherings of 1987–88 — producing one and two thousand arrests at a time. Franciscans and Shoshone elders, physicists and celebrities (Martin Sheen, repeatedly; Carl Sagan, twice) cycled through the Beatty and Tonopah jails.

The Western Shoshone National Council issued permits to the trespassers — the land, under the Treaty of Ruby Valley, being theirs — turning every arrest into a sovereignty case. When the United States halted full-scale testing in 1992, the desert campaign, with the downwinders and the global test-ban movement, had made the moratorium politically irreversible.