It was still night in Los Angeles at 5:15 a.m. today when the 'early sunrise' flashed momentarily on the northeastern horizon. For four decades, the U.S. Department of Energy tested more than a thousand nuclear devices at the Nevada Test Site, a desert expanse just 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. These extraordinary but fairly regular events were covered in leading newspapers with photographs accompanied by nonchalant captions. So it went until 1963, when the Limited Test Ban Treaty ended above-ground nuclear trials following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Because of heavy layer of clouds between here and there, they saw only a faint glimmer. City Hall and its beacon clearly show.". In retrospect, however, the event has an unsettling naïvete, like a photo of school kids playing with mercury or a home movie of a parent renovating a baby’s bedroom with lead-based paint. The National Atomic Testing Museum is a repository for one of the most comprehensive collections of nuclear history. It's pretty significant. “But there was absolutely an underlying fear—we were so close by.” It was a fear pronounced enough that the government issued military-style dog tags to local schoolchildren. Get a round-up of all our stories published during the past week delivered to your email every Saturday. Blazing light from biggest atomic blast in current Yucca Flats, Nev., tests illuminates Valley skies -- 275 air miles away -- at 5:20 a.m. today, 20 minutes after explosion. According to cancer.org, you have a 1 in 5 chance of dying from cancer, and a 1 in 4 chance of developing it. Cancer is caused by a virus; while exposure to certain things makes you more likely to be affected by the virus, if you're not exposed to the virus, you probably won't get cancer. As part of its mission, the National Atomic Testing Museum seeks to collect and preserve a wide variety of materials and artifacts relating to atomic testing, the Nevada Test Site, the Cold War, and nuclear and radiological science and technology. "Evidence that today's atomic bomb, detonated at Yucca Flat, Nevada, was the most powerful of all in the series is revealed in this picture taken here. “They would light up the sky,” says Allen Palmer, executive director of the National Atomic Testing Museum. “It turned night into day.”. Staff photographer Perry Folwer was ready with his camera on a tripod on the roof of the Herald-Express building when the blast occurred at 5:48 a.m. Reporter Jack Smith, who also saw yesterday's explosion, points towards the great white flash that clearly silhouetted mountains to the east." An atomic bomb lights up the night sky over Los Angeles City, on March 7, 1955. NTS was the country’s nuclear testing location just 65 miles outside the city. So I personally think the whole cancer risk issue is overblown. “The best thing to happen to Vegas was the Atomic Bomb,” one gambling magnate declared. All Rights Reserved. Nevada's nuclear-bomb testing spawned a spectator culture tinged with both profound fear and Sin City delight. The risk of cancer is not overblown. Between 1951 and 1992, the U.S. government conducted a total of 1,021 nuclear tests here. .And by the way, I was one of those kids that played with mercury; we found a blob of it in the playground one day and just started passing it around, enjoying the cool way it sort of slithered around in our hands. Photo credit: Perry Fowler, February 2, 1951. That the terrifying and sublime effects of atomic explosions have always lent themselves well to photography takes on an especially strange irony here, in this metropolis of film and sunlight: that a city would so casually use this unnatural luminosity to take a photo of itself for the morning paper, careless of the danger as the seductive allure of these midcentury detonations drew near. Then a "fantastically bright cloud... climbing upward like a huge umbrella.". Exactly one hundred of these tests were atmospheric, whose mushroom clouds could be seen for almost 100 miles (160 km), drawing fascinated tourists to the desert city of Las Vegas. Photo taken from the roof of the Herald-Express building, shows blast lighting up the northeastern horizon.". Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. Cluster of lights at left is Lockheed Air Terminal. Check out the cancer rates in St. George Utah, etc. This was a bit like putting Christmas lights on a stainless steel bunker. The 1951 detonation of a warhead 1,060 feet over the desert floor marked the beginning of the above-ground trials, whose famous mushroom clouds were easily visible from the nearby tourist magnet. On January 27, 1951, nuclear testing at the NTS officially began with the detonation of Shot Able, a 1-kiloton bomb, as part of Operation Ranger. Talk of the Apocalypse became mainstream vernacular, wrote Scientific American's David Ropeik in a review of a memoir on that era. Atomic Blasts Drew Tourists to Las Vegas. The event got surprisingly high ratings for 5:30 in the morning. The best views were had from Las Vegas, and the city fully capitalized on the atomic spectacle. Today, downtown Las Vegas’ Fremont Street is canopied by 90 feet of LED lights, all twinkling images for passing tourists below. Long before sunrise on April 22, 1952, the lights of a motor caravan snaked through the desert darkness on a 65-mile trip from Las Vegas to the nuclear testing ground at Yucca Flat. The National Atomic Testing Museum thanks the following corporate donors for their support of the museum. Photo credit: McCarty/USC Digital Library. There are also pictures of people enjoying the spectacle that demonstrate the morbid fascination that many Americans had with nuclear weapons at the time. Test facilities for nuclear rocket and ramjet engines were also constructed and used from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.T… From the Herald-Examiner, May 7, 1952. {{posts[0].commentsNum}} {{messages_comments}}, {{posts[1].commentsNum}} {{messages_comments}}, {{posts[2].commentsNum}} {{messages_comments}}, {{posts[3].commentsNum}} {{messages_comments}}, Kowloon Walled City, a Population Density Nightmare, George Cayley: The Man Who Invented Flight, Anatoli Bugorski: The Man Who Stuck His Head Inside a Particle Accelerator.

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