A Blast from the Past: Preserving and Interpreting the Atomic Age

The Atomic Testing Museum, Las Vegas, Nevada

The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, Las Vegas, Nevada

The Nevada Testing Archive, Las Vegas, Nevada

Has anything been as controversial or consequential in global politics and history as atomic weapons and nuclear technology? In America, proponents have argued that atomic weapons were necessary to end the cycle of world wars that marred the first half of the twentieth century and that, if properly harnessed, nuclear power can provide viable alternatives to fossil fuels and lessen our dependence on foreign oil. Opponents have argued that while the development of such weapons was inevitable, they should never have been used, and that nuclear power is inherently unsafe and poses unacceptable future risks to our health and environment.¹ They also fault the government and its private contractors for failing to adequately address the damage to the environment and to public and individual health that they believe nuclear testing has already caused. Questions about the past and future of nuclear weapons and energy have gained new significance and urgency in the post–Cold War, post–9/11 world, where superpowers can no longer control the peace through doctrines of deterrence and mutually assured destruction and where a terrorist group with a nuclear weapon could, in effect, turn what was once our best defense against us. In addition to serious reconsiderations of geopolitics, foreign policy, and environmental health and safety—not to mention the nagging little issue of human extinction—nuclear technologies raise general issues about the role of technical knowledge in shaping both societies and everyday lives and in sparking contests between groups who view the technologies in radically different ways. Behind all of these questions and conflicts stand the complicated and intricate histories that produced them, histories that until recently have been shrouded in secrecy.

On July 15, 1945, scientists associated with the Manhattan Project conducted the first successful test of an atom bomb. Although that first test, dubbed Trinity, was conducted in New Mexico's eerily named Jornada del Muerto desert, after 1951, subsequent tests were conducted in the immense desert expanse of the Nevada Test Site (NTS), sixty-five miles northwest of the city of Las Vegas. Over the next forty years, the United States spent nearly $6 trillion performing 1,054 nuclear tests, both above and underground, and the NTS was the primary proving ground for all but one hundred of them.² While the 1992 testing moratorium prohibited full-scale tests, subcritical tests continue at the NTS today. The NTS also happens to be right next door to Yucca Mountain, the sole proposed site for dumping the nation's nuclear waste. Over the course of six decades, the NTS was quite literally the epicenter of nuclear technologies and nuclear experiences. More than a hundred thousand employees worked at the secure site, toiling in hundreds of different occupations at varying levels of secrecy. Over time, the site, as well as the people who worked in and around it, became a massive repository of hidden knowledge, a vast accumulation of technological secrets, clandestine scientific artifacts, and stories that remained untold during much of the Cold War. The NTS became, in a very literal sense, a buried archive, sedimented layers of technoscientific history waiting to be revealed.

Beginning with the end of the Cold War and the signing of the testing moratorium, there were discussions both public and private about what to do with the site, and it was in this context in the early 1990s that the idea of an atomic testing museum first took shape.³ Although scores of individuals were directly involved in the creation of the museum, most credit Troy E. Wade with having the charisma and the connections that made the vision a reality. A longtime test site official and a former assistant secretary of energy during the Reagan administration, Wade persuaded others of the intellectual and educational value in preserving artifacts and...