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This posting is from: Carla
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Another tourist attraction in Las Vegas

Carla
. . .

Having a Blast in Vegas

By MICHAEL J. YBARRA
April 12, 2005

Las Vegas

On Jan. 27, 1951, an Air Force B-50D flew from its base in New Mexico to
Nevada, where it circled over a point in the desert 65 miles northwest
of Las Vegas and dropped a one-kiloton nuclear bomb. Thus was the Nevada
Test Site christened.

Soon the sight of fireballs erupting on the horizon became yet another
tourist draw in burgeoning Las Vegas -- where the Sky Bar at the Desert
Inn boasted that it had the best views of Armageddon, dice throws could
be redone if a test shook the table, and local stylists offered bouffant
'dos in the shape of mushroom clouds.

Over the next 40 years, 928 nuclear devices were exploded at the site --
although atmospheric blasts eventually gave way to underground testing.

The fascinating, often surprising, story of the site's four-decade
history is the subject of the new Atomic Testing Museum
(www.ntshf.org1), not far from the Las Vegas Strip, a place where levity
and holocaust often go hand-in-hand. In the museum gift shop, for
example, I picked up a postcard. "Greetings from the Nevada Test Site,"
it proclaimed, showing a collage of doomsday clouds floating above a
scraggly desert. I half expected to see a postmark from hell.

The 8,000-square-foot museum, which opened in March, is the fruit of a
decade of work by the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation. The ticket
booth resembles the site's guard station; the movie theater looks like a
bunker. "Countdown to next show," flashes an ominous red clock. A roar
and a blast of air greet visitors in the concrete theater.

The museum sketches the history of the nuclear age, which started with
the first atomic bomb test in the New Mexico desert in 1945. After
dropping two bombs on Japan, the U.S. moved its postwar weapons testing
to the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, but massing equipment and personnel
halfway around the world every time the Pentagon wanted to explode a
bomb was an enormous hassle. Not to mention a public-relations problem.
A continental test site, one Air Force official noted, would have the
positive effect of "educating the public that the bomb was not such a
horrible thing that it required proof-testing 5,000 miles from the
United States."

With the Soviet Union exploding its own bomb in 1949 and the Cold War
turning hot in Korea the following year, the U.S. launched a crash
program to develop a permanent test site. The desert outside Las Vegas
provided the best combination of remoteness and infrastructure.

America is fortunate that the only atomic bombs dropped on it were those
dropped by the U.S. military. The above mushroom cloud is from a blast
nicknamed Betty Grable.

"The government, and most residents of the other forty-nine states, have
always considered Nevada a fitting place to do unpleasant things,"
Gerard J. DeGroot observes in his new book, "The Bomb." "...There are
few other places in the United States where a 50-kiloton bomb has little
noticeable effect on the landscape. Nevada is proof that man's bomb is
big, but God's earth is bigger."

By the 1980s the test site, which included a full-fledged town called
Mercury, was the state's second-largest employer. "One of the major
battlegrounds of the Cold War," a film at the museum proclaims.

An aerial photo of the test site shows a lunar landscape pocked by
craters big enough to swallow buildings. I wasn't surprised to learn
that Apollo astronauts trained at the area.

The bomb cast a shadow over everything from politics and science to pop
culture. The Boy Scouts gave a merit badge in atomic energy. Fiestaware
had to stop making its red pottery because the U.S. needed the uranium
used to produce the color. There was even a salt and pepper shaker set
in the shape of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

My favorite part of the museum is the interactive gallery, where you can
wave a Geiger counter over various objects to measure the gamma rays
thrown off or, like Homer Simpson, play with a pair of the manipulators
used to handle radioactive objects behind safety glass.

And, for perspective, you can watch film from a 1953 test on a mock
American community and see what happens when a 16-kiloton bomb goes off
3,500 feet from a house: First one side catches fire, then the shock
wave blows it out, and in less than three seconds the whole structure
dissolves like a puff of smoke.

Peaceful uses for explosions were also explored, such as nuclear
propulsion for space flights and even civil engineering. In 1962, for
instance, a 104-kiloton blast moved more than six million cubic yards of
earth, leaving a 1,200 foot crater. But somehow digging harbors with
nuclear bombs never caught on, especially when radioactive iodine turned
up in the milk supply of Salt Lake City after the earth moving test.

One of the great ironies of the Cold War is that the only nuclear bombs
to ever fall on America were those dropped by the U.S. itself. "What we
did made the world safer," says one test-site veteran in a film.

By 1988, the Cold War had pretty much run its course. One of the weirder
mementoes on display is a T-shirt marking the official Russian visit to
the test site that year, when the Soviet flag flew above the facility.

Yet there was a cost. In 1990 Congress passed the Radiation Exposure
Compensation Act, which paid damages to people who contracted certain
cancers that could be linked to nuclear testing or uranium mining. To
date, more than 12,000 people living downwind from the NTS have filed
claims. While the museum devotes a whole gallery to how underground
testing advanced drilling technology, the human consequences of
atmospheric testing are buried beneath the institution's celebratory
exhibits.

In 1992 an international test ban put the site out of business, although
it remains ready to resume its grim work should the U.S. decide that its
nuclear arsenal needs more proving.

One can only hope that the Atomic Testing Museum never needs an
expansion.

Mr. Ybarra is the author of "Washington Gone Crazy," about Nevada Sen.
Patrick McCarran, recently published by Steerforth Press.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111327114701904307,00.html

Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1) http://www.ntshf.org
(2) http://www.ntshf.org

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(This posting was entered by Carla, an external user of MyDLV.)