At 755 East Flamingo Road, a short way east of the Strip, is the most serious museum in Las Vegas and among the least visited: the National Atomic Testing Museum, on the forty-one years of nuclear weapons testing carried out some sixty-five miles to the north-west.
The name has changed since most accounts were written. It opened in March 2005 as the Atomic Testing Museum, and at the end of 2011 was designated a national museum affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution.
The first test took place at Frenchman Flat on 27 January 1951, in the open air. Between that morning and 1992 there were 928 announced nuclear tests on the site — 100 of them atmospheric and 828 underground, or 1,021 separate detonations counting those fired simultaneously. It is, by a considerable margin, the most heavily bombed place on earth.
Atmospheric testing there ended with a shot called Little Feller I on 17 July 1962, and the United States gave up atmospheric testing altogether the following year. Everything after that went underground. The last test of all was an underground shot named Divider, on 23 September 1992, days before the moratorium took effect.
One detail that confuses older accounts: the place has been renamed twice. It was the Nevada Proving Ground until 1955 and the Nevada Test Site until 2010, when it became the Nevada National Security Site. The museum's name therefore refers to a site that no longer carries it.
The clouds were visible from the city — from the hotels downtown, from almost a hundred miles away — and the shaking was felt in the buildings. What is extraordinary is that this was treated not as a hazard but as an attraction. Test schedules were published so that visitors could plan around them, hotels held dawn parties on their roofs, and the publicity of the period produced the much-reproduced "Miss Atomic Bomb" photographs.
For roughly a decade, the bomb was a selling point for a holiday destination. The museum's pop-culture collection is where that is laid out, and it is stranger than any exhibit designed to be strange.
This is the part that older accounts of the testing programme leave out, and the museum does not.
Westerly winds carried fallout from the atmospheric tests across Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Communities in southern Utah — St George, Cedar City, Enterprise — took repeated doses. Rates of leukaemia, thyroid, breast and other cancers rose from the mid-1950s onwards. An Atomic Energy Commission report in 1962 had already estimated high thyroid doses among children at St George; a study in 1979 found an excess of childhood leukaemia deaths in Utah; and in 1997 the National Cancer Institute estimated that iodine-131 fallout from the tests would ultimately cause somewhere between ten thousand and seventy-five thousand thyroid cancers.
The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 established fixed payments for qualifying downwinders, for uranium miners and millers, and for people who worked at the tests. Tens of thousands of claims have been paid under it.
An account of this programme that treats it only as spectacle is omitting the people it fell on, and no visit to the museum leaves that impression.
The Bikini Atoll photographs. These are often described as showing one of the earliest American nuclear tests. They do not. The first American test was Trinity, in New Mexico, in July 1945; testing at Bikini began in 1946; and the 1954 Castle Bravo shot usually reproduced came nearly a decade after the first. Bikini is also in the Marshall Islands, which is a long way from Nevada and a separate programme.
Einstein. It is sometimes said of the Einstein souvenirs that he neither worked on the project nor did research in atomic physics. The first half is true — he had no part in the Manhattan Project. The second half is plainly wrong: mass–energy equivalence is his, and it is the reason a nuclear weapon is possible at all. What the museum is actually pointing at is his signature on the 1939 letter to Roosevelt that helped set the American programme in motion.
It is east of the Strip, a short drive or bus ride away, and not a walk worth attempting in summer. Two hours is about right, longer if the staff are willing to talk.
Tours of the Nevada National Security Site itself do run, but they are booked a long way in advance, require identity documents, and carry restrictive eligibility rules for non-US citizens — so anyone travelling from Britain should check the current position well before arranging a trip around one.
General practicalities for the city are on the Las Vegas page.