Written by mahogany jones   

A critique of the Atomic Test Museum in Las Vegas, NV. by Mahogany Jones

The Atomic Test Museum has a slick look, major corporate/affluent individual sponsorship and funding, and the heftiest entry fee I’ve seen at a Southern Nevada Museum. It was quite different from the other museums I’ve visited in Nevada, which seem to be hanging by a thread and a donation box for their very existence. Fittingly so, for Atomic Testing and the Nevada Test Site have always been packaged for sale to Nevadans.. not much difference here. Despite all the "great" jobs (where you could soak up delightful gamma waves on a daily basis until you received a dose sufficient to cull your want of money while helping to develop WMDs) and delicious if duplicitous propaganda the NV state citizens have enjoyed for the dubious honor of hosting the Test Site project an hour up the road from Las Vegas, I’m often stunned that some people still think they can beat the odds with Plutonium.

I’m reminded of the old play by Henrik Ibsen, “An Enemy of the People,” where a lone scientist discovers industries upstream have contaminated his town’s local water supply. A health spa had been established in town at quite an investment, fed by the same contaminated springs. The local mayor and his cronies discredit the scientist and paint him as the enemy of the people to protect their investments. They're perfectly content to destroy the scientist and his family and to allow people to bathe and sicken in the decrepit waters which generate capital for the elite about town. But I digress..

Though not quite the price of a Strip show like “Le Reve” or “O”, I still got one of the best song-and-dance routines and stand-up comedy shows (albeit a bit darker than Carlin's act) I’ve had to date in Las Vegas at the Atomic Testing Museum.

Before I get to the description of the place, I must give you some background. I grew-up in Las Vegas from 1980 on, and I was around way before any moratorium shut down the below-ground nuclear testing. I remember vast camps of protesters at the Mercury gate site (I was a minor and the designated driver for a cadre of Punkers), and seeing my peers not only cross the line and be arrested, but chain their necks to the axles of buses carrying workers to the site. Not drugged out hippies, Red sympathizers, and marginalized maverick Shoshone Indians as portrayed in the press then, mind you, but mothers, fathers, businessmen, scientists and college professors, actors and soldiers.. Americans. How can the few who will profit dismiss the demands of the many who will suffer? Or in the case of Yucca Mountain, how can the many heap their deadly garbage onto the few here in Nevada? Are we so brainwashed as to think 49 states have the right to foster their will onto one and make it bear the burden of their poor choices and folly when they feel the might and power of crony capitalism is with them? Oops, I’m probably sounding a bit naive at this point. I know historically this has been the M.O. of the power brokers of this world. The puppet majority is mostly uninformed, authoritarian, and dependent on others for their opinions. It seeks relief from ignorance by dragging others into their quagmire of foolishness and making a few slick salesmen very wealthy. With such notions, I entered the bowels of the Test Museum.

The museum is located on E. Flamingo Rd. in Las Vegas, NV. The corrugated fee booth inside the doors was a quaint mock-up of the military-esque public motif of Mercury and the test site you're allowed to see from the road, complete with Wackenhut guards (the seemingly omnipresent soldiers of Corporate Earth). There is a wealth of dates, numerical facts, and timelines throughout the museum: all told there were 928 tests from 1951-1992, the 1st U.S. test was the Trinity test, the Manhattan Engineering Project 07-06-45 that was 19 kilotons, 100 atmospheric tests where performed, 828 underground tests were performed, etc. Real history book stuff.

The Pacific Island tests were extremely appalling. Entire populations of people were forcibly relocated to provide test sites for the U.S. Military to try out its "toys" and rattle some sabers. The next display discussed the fate of a crew of Japanese fishermen who ventured to close to one of these post war, nuclear bomb island vaporization U.S. experiments that was taking place.. they all died, bleeding out of every orifice and their organs and connective tissue turning to sludge. It was blamed on unpredictable “fallout drift.” Fascinating admission and a massive P.R. disaster at the time. The tone was, "Pesky Mother Nature can really spoil some nuclear fun!"
Even the soldiers at these tests suffered. Evidently, the Constitutional provision against cruel and unusual punishment doesn't apply to military draftees and indigenous peoples, only criminals. Learning from their heroism, I concluded you'd have to be at a "Darwin Award" level of stupidity to willingly put yourself into the arms of these Joint Chiefs, once you know the historical track record. Patriotism has nothing to do with it. The following account is one of thousands of abuses heaped on soldiers by our leaders that was not discussed at the Atomic Testing Museum, but should've been:

" For 360 days, starting in November 1957, Army sergeant Orville Kelly called the white-sanded beaches of Japtan Island in the Eniwetock atoll home. He was the non-commissioned officer in charge of an inter-service squad of men assigned to the isle for Operation Hardtack. As island commander, it was Kelly's job to record measurements of radiation at various locations on Japtan Island where pools of water were present. He used a Geiger counter and reported the measurements to his superiors by radio. It was also Kelly's duty to muster the men to watch each of the Atomic blasts.
The soldiers and sailors would gather before dawn at the lagoon side of the island nearest the blast centers and don protective goggles. Without exception, they were ordered to face the blast and watch the rising mushroom cloud five miles away.
There were problems. Many of the men didn't want to watch the explosion-desperately! Kelly represented authority and hence became the target of his subordinates' hostility. One Navy petty officer told Kelly he'd kill him if he had to watch another shot. Everyone was scared. Things were getting out of control.
The men witnessed 22 separate nuclear blasts during Operation Hardtack. For many the bombs left deep psychological scars.
'I told them (a board of officers) I just couldn't control things anymore,' sergeant Kelly recalled. 'The men were scared and anxious. So was I. I wanted to be replaced, but they just told me I was doing a great job and to get back to my island. I wasn't coaxed, I was ordered.'
When Sergeant Kelly continued to complain about problems on the island, a medical officer was sent to Japtan for a consultation.
'We talked,' said Kelly. 'I told him about my problems and fears. He seemed to be interested and concerned. On the next boat of supplies a bottle of phenobarbital arrived. I guess they thought that sedatives would solve all the problems on Japtan.'
Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, the AEC's foremost authority on the health effects of radiation had an association with atomic testing dating back to the Manhattan Project 1958 director of health physics at the government's Oak Ridge, TN. National Laboratory complained that the film badges and portable survey meters being used to evaluate the radiation doses on Eniwetok were clearly inadequate.
'The film badges and survey meters in use by the military during those tests,' Morgan remembers, 'gave essentially zero response to the beta radiation dose. And the beta dose was three times higher than the gamma dose. In some places, for example on the ships, the beta emitting radionuleides were absorbed into the paint and tar resins so the dose was 600 times the gamma dose. It was so hot down below (on the radioactive ships), the sailors would sleep out on the decks at night, and they'd wake up with erythema“-sunburns that weren't from the sun. The burns were from beta radiation.'
Morgan wrote several papers about his findings, but, as usual, whenever scientific evidence was proffered that differed from the official government line, the evidence was ignored." Atomic Soldiers, Howard L Rosenberg, 1980, pgs. 132-134

"The atomic soldiers number in the hundreds of thousands...Any admission that radiation exposure at the low levels received by the atomic soldiers can be linked to increased incidence of leukemia and cancer could prove devastating. It is not the few million dollars (1980) that might have to be paid to veterans that has the bureaucrats in DC on edge. Rather, it is the fear that admission of a causal relationship between low-level radiation and cancer might open up the government and the nuclear industry to a host of lawsuits by current and former nuclear workers and fallout victims exposed to radiation levels that have always (1950's) been considered safe."
Atomic Soldiers, Howard L Rosenberg, 1980, pgs. 174-175

My guess is the few atomic soldiers still alive when H. Rosenburg wrote his account in 1980, still seeking compensation, were all gone a few years later.

Meandering thru the exhibits I found a 16mm movie screen. The projector flickered and came to life. A mid 20th century propaganda film, “The Age of the Atom” (https://youtu.be/PH3BYpSeTk0) runs when it senses viewers. The films condemnation of America's prewar isolationism and its optimistic portrayal of Nuclear Energy and War as the cure for all modern woes reminded me how new and novel it was at the time. In typical commercial style, Nuclear Energy was to to be sold to a wary consumer. Based on its simplicity, the implied target audience was no doubt school children.

A display called, “Life in Mercury” shows how happy, but a little bored all the test site workers were then, "Nothing to see here, ignore the occasional massive explosions and lean on your shovel, guys! What a life!"

A copy of a letter sent to FDR from Albert Einstein was prominently displayed, telling FDR of the potential for developing a “powerful bomb,” and that he feared the Nazis were trying to make one as well. Well if EINSTEIN is pro-nuke it must be okay, right? Only within a few years he wasn't. Of course Einstein's later horrified retraction and warning were not mentioned. Before the bomb was even completed he stated, ".. when the war is over, then there will be in all countries a pursuit of secret war preparations with technological means which will lead inevitably to preventative wars and to destruction even more terrible than the present destruction of life." Einstein: The Life and Times, Ronald Clark, pg. 698

Next were the displays describing the atom bombs Fat-man and Little-boy; how they were manufactured and subsequently dropped on an already defeated Japanese citizens and industries. The justification for the 225,000 deaths (only the initial and 1st year deaths are included in that number; mostly non-combatants) was to spare precious American lives. This has been refuted on so many levels. Japan had already begun the motions via 3rd party for a surrender with dignity, but that wasn't good enough.. theirs would be an "unconditional surrender" where the U.S. could show off its new nuclear toys to a war-weary public and Soviet Union. 225,000 souls slaughtered by science at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a vastly under-estimated, conservative number. To quote Rosenburg, "Many cancers induced by radiation remain latent for years. They only show up decades later after festering and growing, hidden among the body's cells. Cancers that may have been triggered by fallout or other radiation decades ago are beginning to appear after years of dormancy.
According to a 1978 study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb survivors conducted by Drs. Gilbert Beebe, Hiroo Kato and Charles Land of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, 'in addition to leukemia and cancer of the thyroid, breast, and lung, now cancers of the esophagus, stomach, and urinary organs, and the lymphomas, should be included among the forms of cancer caused by ionizing radiation from the 1945 atomic explosions.'" Atomic Soldiers, Howard L Rosenberg, 1980, pg. 167

With the end of blowing up Japan and Pacific islands, it was time to begin blowing up America itself. One of the exhibits brags that within no time the Nevada desert was, “Blooming with Atoms!”

In 1952, with promises of federal housing and infrastructure benefits to the "backward, poor Nevadans," Truman declared the LV valley a critical defense area. Doom towns, fake cities in the desert, were built to annihilate with the above ground blasts, complete with manikins of families. Cute. You could use a dial to run through these filmed demolitions and fake people being burned alive on a viewer over and over at the Test Museum. Said Monroe Glezer, a pit boss at the Dunes Hotel during the above ground testing phases here in NV, “The dice kept rolling thru it all, we had maintenance men standing by (if anything got knocked down or broke from the seismic waves)…”

“Act Fast” was the advice to people under nuclear attack at the next display. It had some positive mental attitude value and some practical advice, like lay down and cover your head in a nuclear blast.

Underground testing would end the danger of “fallout drift’ and it gave better readings to the scientists who interpreted such data as could be gathered. That is, until venting accidents like the Baneberry incident. Oops, just a little boo-boo where radiation could be detected as far away as New York state.

A plaque on the wall discussed the Native Americans of the region and admitted how the Nevada Test Site was actually their land. Between 1940-45 the Shoshone who dwelt in the newly designated site were “forcibly relocated” and told never to return. They protest this treatment and treaty violation to this day.

I thoroughly enjoyed the hypocrisy and thinly veiled fascism of the Atomic Testing Museum for what it is: classic propaganda. I especially loved the plaque as you leave spelling out the contributors. Many were the very companies that became wealthy developing and testing the devices enshrined therein. I think the conclusion I was supposed to reach wasn’t “never again,” but: "Why did we stop, and what’s next?"

I was told what's next if the crony-capitalists of the Nuclear Industry get their way at one of the last exhibits leaving the museum: its "NUKES IN SPACE," in violation of international treaty. Appalling.