Monday, February 14, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Museum a blast from the past

Exhibits document genesis, evolution of Nevada Test Site

In less than a week, tourists and residents alike can take a 50-year walk through time in a museum about the Cold War and one of its major battlefields: the Nevada Test Site.

After a decade of "thinking and dreaming" by veteran Energy Department defense chief Troy Wade and other so-called Cold War warriors, the Atomic Testing Museum at the Desert Research Institute's East Flamingo Road campus will open its doors at 1 p.m. Sunday.

The public will see not only relics and photographs of Cold War nuclear tests but also videos and some of the tools government scientists used to answer the former Soviet Union's effort to develop superior nuclear bombs. Some items are on loan from the Smithsonian Institution.

"This museum is about nuclear weapons and the testing of nuclear weapons, pro and con. It shows both stories," Wade said earlier this month on a preview of the museum, which features a 90-second video as visitors enter.

"It kind of sets the stage for what the world was like and why we got into this business," he said, standing by a display of the 1950 letter signed by President Truman that created the test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

In one corner is a reproduction of the office of Frank Rogers, the first chief operating officer at the test site. A radio in the office plays a 1951 news report from the test site.

Visitors can follow a timeline that shows how atomic testing events and milestones paralleled other historical and cultural events and popular TV shows and commercials.

In the "duck-and-cover" heyday of atmospheric nuclear testing, the test site became the focus of international attention, although more sizeable tests were being conducted in the South Pacific.

The museum, designed by a British Columbia firm, has enough displays, movies, literature and hands-on exhibits that it takes five hours to see it all, Wade said.

In an hour or two, most visitors can absorb the highlights, including a movie that features atmospheric tests and video interviews with pioneers in the field such as Al O'Donnell and state Sen. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, a longtime Las Vegas resident.

Titus -- the author of "Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing and American Politics" -- describes the effects of fallout associated with the tests and public skepticism of what citizens were being told by the government.

"In the next half a century, you had Vietnam, you had Watergate, you had the assassination of presidents and high figures," Titus says. "People just became more and more (cynical) about government and they ceased to believe what government told them."

The movie features the arrests of some of the thousands of anti-nuclear protesters that often gathered at the main, cattle-guard entrance to the test site.

O'Donnell, a former field test engineer who watched early atmospheric tests through cobalt goggles, asserts his dismay with the protesters.

"The very thing you're protesting against is what gives you freedom to protest," he says.

Visitors step down into a concrete bunker that has been turned into a theater to watch the movie as observers would have through a porthole.

"Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero," the announcer says. Then the benches rumble, the light of the detonation lights up the sky and the bomb thunders. In seconds, a windlike shock wave from the blast whisks through the bunker.

Wade noted that Mercury, the government town at the test site, became Nevada's third largest city in the early 1960s, and the test site had the largest single payroll in the state, an indication of the government's rapid pace for developing new bombs after the 1958 moratorium on nuclear testing was lifted.

The 1,350-square-mile test site became the most atomic-bombed place on the planet. From the first test in 1951 to the last full-scale test in 1992, a total of 928 nuclear tests were conducted at the test site, 100 in the air and 828 below ground. Some tests included multiple detonations.

The United States has observed a moratorium on full-scale nuclear weapons tests since 1992.

"The whole issue of war fighting has changed," Wade said. "We've moved from superpower-to-superpower confrontation where the goals were mutually assured destruction to dealing with terrorists and extremist groups."

After Sunday, the museum at 755 E. Flamingo Road will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays and from 1 to 5 p.m. on Sundays. General admission is $10 with discounts for seniors, students and military personnel with proper identification. Children under age 6 are free.

All proceeds go to the nonprofit Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation.