Anatomic Bombs: The Sexual Life of Nuclearism, 1945–57

An atomic reaction / Has not the attraction / You'll find in a beautiful girl.

Ziegfeld Follies, Las Vegas Sands Hotel, 1955

Late one summer afternoon in 1957, in the swirling dust east of the Nevada Test Site (NTS), a Las Vegas dancer who used the stage name Lee Merlin donned a swimsuit covered with a fluffy cotton mushroom cloud and posed for photographs. In some shots, she twined her hands up in her curly blond hair. In others, she extended her long arms up toward the sky in a gesture of happy triumph, her mouth open in a wide smile. Newspapers across the country reproduced her image, declaring Merlin—in language that combined sexual desire with brute survival—"the girl" who men "would most like to survive the A-Bomb."¹

Figure 1.

Lee Merlin posed as "Miss Atomic Bomb," first photographed by Don English for the Las Vegas News Bureau in 1957, has become an icon of atomic testing. Here, she greets visitors on the landing page of the National Atomic Testing Museum website (https://nationalatomictestingmuseum.org).

Merlin's photo shoot was part of a campaign by Las Vegas nightclub owners to make atomic testing sexy. Doing so was good for business. After all, patrons could see the frequent bomb blasts from the rooftops of their clubs. Merlin was the last and most famous of a series of Las Vegas women to be crowned "Miss Atomic Bomb," an honor bestowed at least seven times to various women, most of them dancers in the city's nightclubs. Despite the pageantry implied by the title, none of these women actually won beauty contests. Rather, they were hand-selected by the owners of the clubs where they worked. Miss Atomic Bomb was a publicity campaign that wove together two spectacles unique to the Southwest: sexy Las Vegas dancers and routine explosions of nuclear weapons at the nearby NTS.²

The underlying logic of the campaign was to tether something unfamiliar and frightening—the new technology of nuclearism—to something more palatable: the bodies of sexualized white women posing for the pleasure of male spectators. In this sense, Miss Atomic Bomb represented a hypersexualized, low-culture version of what the theorist Iyko Day calls the "beauty of annihilation," one way in which the terror of nuclear modernity came to be deflected through hegemonic cultural aesthetics.³

This essay tracks the sexual and gendered life of the atomic bomb from 1945 to 1957, roughly the first decade after its creation. Within the American atomic imaginary, white women emerged as mascots whose sexualized bodies were conscripted into the project of acculturating the postwar public to nuclear technology. This conscription was complex. On the one hand, the presence of the white female body within the atomic imaginary effaced the political economy and infrastructure of atomic power, which relied on the racial and colonial seizures of Indigenous land and resources.⁴ From extraction to development to testing, the sacrifice zones of the early atomic era were located disproportionately on nonwhite lands and harmed nonwhite people, particularly Indigenous people in the US Southwest, Canada, and Australia. The racial violence inherent to atomic weapons testing and development pitted white, capitalist, settler empire against (and above) the nonwhite empire of Japan, Indigenous Marshall Islanders, and the Native people of the atomic intermountain West from Diné uranium miners to the Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute, whose unceded homelands encompassed the desert land where Lee Merlin posed for cameras. Thus the hegemonic power of the mascots—and the steady reproduction of images of white women in the desert—resided in what was excluded from the picture.

However, the hegemonic power of the mascots was also limited. One could even argue that the campaign to make atomic bombs sexy ultimately failed. This is because, in the end, the mascots could not mitigate public anxieties surrounding the sexual and reproductive threats posed by nuclear technology. While beauty queens dominated the visual iconography of the atomic age, women at the grass roots contested the proliferation of nuclearism and became...