Test ban treaty: Relic of the nuclear ageU.S. plans tours at former test site: Nevada facility, deserted for years, shows signs of life
U.S. plans tours at former test site: Nevada facility, deserted for years, shows signs of life
 Associated Press For years, nuclear tests at the Frenchman Flat, such as this one on April 15, 1955, reassured Americans about their country's strength. Today, they look at this vast wasteland and see only an environmental menace. |
NEVADA TEST SITE -- It was a perfect morning for an airdrop. No clouds, no wind -- nothing stirring in the big sky except the B-50 bomber circling the desert like a buzzard.
Bob Freiter crouched in the roaring bird's belly. He was 24, an Air Force tailgunner on a secret mission. Beside him sat Dixie, an atomic bomb as big as a Studebaker.
The bomb bay doors opened. The B-50 shuddered, then lurched upward. Dixie was gone.
The radioman shouted:
"Bob! We're making history here!
Residents suffer
In all, they blew up 928 nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site, an expanse of basins and ranges slightly larger than Rhode Island. After 1963, all were underground tests. But for the first 12 years, scientists detonated 100 atomic devices in Nevada's open air.
The fallout drifted far and wide, all the way to New York, contaminating milk, wheat, soil and fish, killing sheep, horse and cattle. Every American in the Lower 48 was exposed to iodine-131, a radioactive form of iodine. The National Cancer Institute says the releases were at least 10 times larger than those from the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl.
For decades, there was no place for life on Frenchman Flat. That is changing. Today, the flies, the sage -- even the tourists -- are back.
The site was carved out of the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range in 1951, a time when Americans did not question their government, when Nevadans stood on porches and saluted the giant, pink plumes as signs of strength and protection.
To many Americans, this wasteland is now little more than a Cold War artifact, an environmental menace that causes cancer, a reminder of the dark side of the human spirit and the terrible damage a cracked atom can do.
The shafts have been quiet since 1992, when President Bush declared a moratorium on nuclear testing.
Last week, the U.S. Senate rejected the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty after opponents argued the ban would allow other countries -- India, Pakistan, China, Russia -- to overtake the United States in modernizing their arsenals.
Like many places that tied their fortunes to the arms race, this one is looking for a new role in new times. So the government is considering another idea: To open this top-secret area to big-time tourism.
A prototype tour already exists. Once a month, the Energy Department takes a busload of visitors through the site at no charge. Visitors need security clearances.
Still, Americans like historical sites of tragedy and pain. They flock to the Sixth Floor Museum of the School Book Depository in Dallas. They gather in Gettysburg's fields. They visit the Birmingham, Ala., church where four black Sunday school pupils died in a bombing.
Tour hits home
On this tour are 24 female passengers, 13 male, from different corners of America, different generations.
Celia Owens, 50, an artist and writer who lives in New York City, gazes out at the desert. Her father was a foreman for seven years at a nuclear weapons assembly plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn. He died in January, 1961, of a rare blood disorder that Owens attributes to radiation exposure.
"I guess I needed to see this for myself," she says, "to see where profit and greed can lead people."
Lew Thompson, 78, a World War II veteran, says the atom bomb saved many American lives.
Beside her sits Lew Thompson, 78, from Santa Fe, N.M. In July of 1945, Thompson was an army lieutenant in the 40th U.S. division on Panay Island in the Philippines, waiting for the final assault on Japan.
His eyes glisten. "A month later, after they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the colonel came and told us that our division had been chosen for a suicide mission on Tokyo. Today, the thought of dropping H-bombs on people makes me sick to my stomach. But I am alive only because of one thing -- the bomb."
