A Vegas Act That Bombs On Purpose

Next time you're in Las Vegas and you become a little bored with the shows, gambling, and sight-seeing, here's a new attraction that you might want to visit (from The Wall Street Journal):

On Jan. 27, 1951, an Air Force B-50D flew from its base in New Mexico to Nevada, where it circled over a point in the desert 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas and dropped a one-kiloton nuclear bomb. Thus was the Nevada Test Site christened.

Soon the sight of fireballs erupting on the horizon became yet another tourist draw in burgeoning Las Vegas--where the Sky Bar at the Desert Inn boasted that it had the best views of Armageddon, dice throws could be redone if a test shook the table, and local stylists offered bouffant 'dos in the shape of mushroom clouds.

Over the next 40 years, 928 nuclear devices were exploded at the site--although atmospheric blasts eventually gave way to underground testing.

The fascinating, often surprising, story of the site's four-decade history is the subject of the new Atomic Testing Museum (www.ntshf.org), not far from the Las Vegas Strip, a place where levity and holocaust often go hand-in-hand. In the museum gift shop, for example, I picked up a postcard. "Greetings from the Nevada Test Site," it proclaimed, showing a collage of doomsday clouds floating above a scraggly desert. I half expected to see a postmark from hell.

And how about this little dose of reality:

And, for perspective, you can watch film from a 1953 test on a mock American community and see what happens when a 16-kiloton bomb goes off 3,500 feet from a house: First one side catches fire, then the shock wave blows it out, and in less than three seconds the whole structure dissolves like a puff of smoke.

Those test bombs were babies compared to what's in the arsenal today. Let's hope the only place we ever get to see these blasts is at the museum.