The massive Divine Strake non-nuclear explosion planned for the Nevada Test Site won't be detonated -- if at all -- until next year and possibly at another site, outside of Nevada, defense officials said Tuesday.

The 36-foot-deep pit that was dug this year near the top of Syncline Ridge, 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to hold 700 tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil as well as the limestone tunnel that the blast was intended to crush, has been mothballed, said Irene Smith, a spokeswoman for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

"We've secured the tunnel. We've gone in and covered all the electronic wiring so you can go back at a later time," she said late Tuesday in an telephone interview from Fort Belvoir, Va.

A statement from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency says the agency's director "has agreed to assess possible other sites for the experiment."

Smith said she didn't know for sure what other locations will be considered. However, she said, "Places that we tested before are possibilities: Indiana and White Sands."

She was referring to the White Sands, N.M., missile range and a limestone quarry near Bedford, Ind., where the agency conducted a pair of medium-scale explosions in 2004 and 2005 using 3,000 pounds of nitromethane.

The $23 million Divine Strake test was shelved on the eve of a court hearing on the blast's environmental issues and after months of pressure to curtail it by Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev.; Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah; and a Nevada environmental group, Citizen Alert.

The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection also raised questions about radiological contamination from past nuclear tests that could be injected into the atmosphere and carried in the blast's mushroom cloud.

The test was designed to explore futuristic conventional bombs and fine-tune the capabilities of existing nuclear weapons for destroying deep tunnels where an enemy might store weapons of mass destruction.

Originally planned for June 2, it was pushed to June 23 after some members of the Winnemucca Indian Colony and some downwinders in Nye County and Utah took legal action to force the government to show that the blast and its mushroom cloud would not disperse radioactive materials.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, which operates the test site, withdrew its revised finding of no significant impact on May 26, and the test was delayed indefinitely. Officials later said they would wait until September when weather conditions were right.

Robert Hager, the Reno attorney representing the plaintiffs, said he believes the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the National Nuclear Security Administration don't want to disclose what's in the test site's soil.

"The agencies' pursuit of data regarding 'background radiation and global fallout' is a dead-end path that will not put to bed public health concerns about resuspension of radioactivity," Hager said in a statement.

"People do not die from inhaling background radiation. Until the agencies analyze what is in the soil, and disclose that data, this blast will never be allowed by the court," Hager stated.

Berkley said concerns of Nevadans and their neighbors about Divine Strake have never been adequately addressed. She also wondered about the purpose of the test.

In a statement released by her spokesman, Berkley said, "Important questions also remain about the real intentions behind this test and whether or not the results were to be used in the development of new nuclear weapons.

"Should this plan resurface next year, as DTRA (Defense Threat Reduction Agency) has indicated, I will be raising the same objections, in large part because they were never fully answered the first time around," Berkley said.

A DTRA document that Berkley's office received Tuesday says the agencies are developing a plan to conduct Divine Strake if it is determined that the experiment can be conducted safely, is in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act "and there is a favorable court ruling."

"Public information sessions will be part of the plan," the document states. "The earliest point at which the Divine Strake experiment can be conducted would be at least several months into calendar year 2007."

Citizen Alert Executive Director Peggy Maze Johnson said she suspected the government agencies behind the test would not go forward with Divine Strake at the Nevada Test Site because of public outcry.