Museum revisits science and sickness of nuclear era

LAS VEGAS — Descending into a dark tunnel past Civil Defense relics toward a digital countdown on a bomb shelter's concrete walls might chill those from a Cold War generation weaned on nuclear fallout drills.

But curators of the new Atomic Testing Museum said they hope it stirs the imagination of those with no memory of mushroom clouds and the role the nearby Nevada Test Site played in the development of nuclear deterrence.

"Nuclear weapons aren't gone," museum director William Johnson said as he led the way through the $3.5 million facility that opened in February just east of the Las Vegas Strip. "The world is just a different place now."

The museum traces a half-century of nuclear weapons testing in a world that grew to love or loathe the bomb. It describes developments that let scientists peer into the first millionth of a second of a nuclear blast before instruments vaporized, and it charts research that continued after earthshaking explosions ended in 1992 at the Nevada test site.

It also has drawn criticism as revisionist history among advocates who call it a forum for nuclear apologists, and it has reopened wounds for "downwinders" sickened by fallout from atmospheric atomic blasts.

Johnson doesn't deny that testing caused problems. He pointed to exhibits describing the plight of downwinders and of test-site workers sickened by silicosis, and to a reading room and nuclear-testing archive containing more than 310,000 documents.

"I want people to come here and learn," Johnson said. "But if there's only one message taken away, it's that the Cold War was a war. It was a struggle with the Soviet Union."

Information

The Atomic Testing Museum:

Online: www.atomictestingmuseum.org

702-794-5151; 755 E. Flamingo Road, Las Vegas, NV 89119

The story is told with a timeline, artifacts, interactive and touch-screen displays and several films, including a 10-minute presentation in the concrete bunker dubbed the Ground Zero Theater.

Visitors sit on varnished wooden seats modeled after the warped, weathered benches still on News Nob, a rocky outcrop overlooking Yucca Flat where news reporters observed atmospheric nuclear tests beginning with "Charlie" in April 1952.

Light bursts as the big screen shows a nuclear test. The room rumbles with embedded speakers. Air blasts tousle the hair, imitating a shock wave.

This is no theme park. It is as somber as the 230,000 deaths and injuries in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945; as sober as the concept of "mutually assured destruction" that shadowed the world for half a century afterward.

Michelle Thomas, 52, a lifelong resident of St. George, Utah, remembers a fine ash falling like snow across the little town. When fallout warnings sounded, her mother would don an old straw hat, pull on rubber dish gloves and tie a dish towel around her own mouth to pluck laundry from the outdoor drying line.

"She would wash the sheets twice in hot water so her kids wouldn't have to sleep with radioactive fallout," Thomas said.

Thomas said she started developing maladies as a junior in high school: ovarian cysts, breast cancer, a benign salivary gland tumor. She said she was diagnosed in 1974 with polymyositis, an autoimmune system disease similar to lupus. She and two siblings each received a one-time "downwinder" payment of $50,000 under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990.

"I think we've learned that the government is fallible and may not be entirely upfront," Thomas said. "But it was considered unpatriotic in those days to question the government."

Johnson said the displays try to put the nation's 1,054 above- and below-ground nuclear tests in context. Of the 928 detonated at the test site, 100 were atmospheric tests. Seven tests were exploded elsewhere in Nevada, three each in New Mexico and Alaska, two each in Colorado and Mississippi and 106 on Pacific islands. Three tests were conducted in South Atlantic islands.

The number of nuclear tests peaked at 96 in 1962 — the year the United States and the Soviet Union stared each other down with their fingers on the button during the Cuban missile crisis.

"The paradigm of the 1950s, '60s and '70s was that the Northern Hemisphere was going to be blown to bits," Johnson said. The scientists, technicians and administrators at the test site, he said, "were thinking they were saving the world."