Vegas: Blast From the PastNewsweek


Feb. 28 issue - Rarely do museums blow you away. Yet at the new Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, guests experience a simulation of an aboveground nuclear test—complete with trembling benches, explosive noise and a swoosh of air. After that, the audience watches a film about the history of testing at the Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas. Those tests were a huge spectator event from 1951 until an international treaty ended aboveground testing in 1962. "This doesn't even do justice to what it was really like: the heat, the light, the intensity," says director Bill Johnson, whose 8,000-square-foot museum is a Smithsonian affiliate.

Museum displays include a collection of pop-culture items from the Ike era, like an atomic-themed "Li'l Abner" comic and postcards pushing Vegas as "The Up and Atom City."

Anti-nuke protesters and advocates for the thousands of "downwinders" who suffered cancer caused by the radioactive residue are irked that their side of the story is barely mentioned at an institution largely funded by former test-site workers. (The museum's curator says a changing-exhibit gallery will "expand on those ideas.") Critics have likened the blast simulation to turning the collapse of the World Trade Center into a thrill ride—a "carnival attraction," says Ivan Eland, director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute in Washington, D.C. "That may go over the top a bit." In Vegas? Imagine that.

—Steve Friess

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

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