Road Trip: Las Vegas

Although not as popular as the sexy sailor-and-siren review at the Treasure Island Casino, the Atomic Testing Museum draws a fair number of Las Vegas tourists. We took a cab from the ridiculously opulent entrance of the Venetian, past the gondolas and the campanile and the winged lion, and pretty soon we were on a godforsaken, dusty stretch of Flamingo Road.

In the parking lot of the Atomic Museum, you feel like you’re really in the desert.

The Nevada Proving Ground (now known as the Nevada Test Site) is about 65 miles away, to the northwest. The museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian, documents the various stages of atomic testing in Nevada, first above and then below ground.

During the above-ground tests, which lasted from 1951 until 1963, the mushroom clouds were visible from Vegas, and were actually a tourist attraction.

Las Vegas began billing itself as Atomic City. At the Sky Room in the Desert Inn, tourists drank Atomic Cocktails and took in panoramic views of the desert and the nuclear explosions in the distance.

The Atomic Testing Museum does a good job of merging the pop culture aspects of the atomic age with the science, the military history and the spectacle of the Bomb. A big disappointment is that photography is not allowed — I can’t remember all the stuff in the glass case dedicated to products branded with rockets and explosions. The candy Atomic Fire Balls was one of them.

There’s a recreation of a 1950s living room, with a mannequin family and nuclear safety films playing on the vintage TV. Nearby are slides of all the tests done on mannequins in the desert, with before and after photos.

There are big pieces of equipment, video displays, and interactive bits like a Geiger counter and a set of half-life projections that are compared with how long the planned containment systems will last (example: the former 30,000 years; the latter, 100 years).

The museum is a manageable size and has a great gift shop.

The main event is a 10-minute film in a small theater about the history of the testing site. The film is fairly balanced, although several talking heads claim that America’s nuclear weapons program was necessary because it ended the Cold War. (Really? I thought that was the Cold War.) The overall impact of the film is chilling.

As it ended, there was a strange silence in the room. “Should we clap?” asked my friend.

Among other things, the film touched on the Downwinders, the residents in the path of fallout from the tests whose communities had high cancer rates in the years to follow. Several people from the testing program said that they felt terrible about it, they didn’t know the effects could be so deadly and far-reaching.

But this is Las Vegas. It’s pretty easy to believe that they were deluding themselves all along.

Cocktail Recipe: The Atomic Cocktail

1 ½ ounces vodka

1 ½ ounces brandy

1 teaspoon sherry

1 ½ ounces dry Champagne

Shake first three ingredients with ice and strain into a martini glass. Top with Champagne. (This is the original Las Vegas recipe, I haven’t tried it myself yet.)