Las Vegas is the Bomb

Brian Balogh: Today on the show, we’ll be exploring the history and culture of the atomic age, when the mushroom cloud cast a long shadow over American life. …

Ed Ayers: We’ll find out how the atom powered America’s superheros, and listen to the voices of a female scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project. …

Joanne Freeman: Now, if you grew up in America in the 1950s, chances are you thought a lot about the possibility of a nuclear attack. School children were drilled to duck and cover under their desks. Many families built fallout shelters stocked with food, water, and medical supplies to survive the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.

Ed Ayers: It was all to prepare for what felt like the very real chance that the United States might be drawn into nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Brian Balogh: But for some Americans, the thought of a nuclear bomb falling wasn’t just an existential threat, it was also a fact of life.

Speaker 1: Nevada, USA. … This is the valley where the giant mushrooms grow. More atomic bombs have been exploded on these few hundred square miles of desert than on any other spot on the globe.

Joanne Freeman: The valley where the giant mushrooms grew was known more formally as the Nevada Proving Ground. The US government would drop at least 100 atomic bombs at the test site. Some were more powerful than the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mary Wammack: The test site is located in Central Nevada. It was carved out of the old Las Vegas bombing range that was set up during World War II to train pilots and bombers.

Joanne Freeman: That’s historian Mary [Wammack 00:06:59]. Wammack says that the scientists running the tests, the Proving Grounds were the perfect location. Like the original test site in Trinity, New Mexico, the Nevada Proving Grounds were huge and remote.

Mary Wammack: There were a few miners that lived there, little towns on the perimeter. Other than that, it’s kind of a mix of high desert scrub and mountainous terrain. Because of the low population density in Nevada, and also in Utah, it was felt that the fallout would disperse before it got to any kind of major metropolitan area.

Joanne Freeman: At the same time, it was also just a quick plane ride for scientists coming from nuclear research labs in Northern California and New Mexico to watch their bombs in action.

Speaker 1: Little bomb. … Big bomb. … Within the last two years, 20 of these colossal blasts have echoed across the great barren stretches of the Southwest. This testing ground in our own backyard, just an aerial stone’s throw from the Los Alamos Laboratory.

Joanne Freeman: There was just one problem: it was also a stone’s throw from a growing town of 25,000 people less than 100 miles to the South. Of course, you may have heard of it: Las Vegas. …

Joanne Freeman: For most of the 20th century, Vegas had been a sleepy vacation town. It was known mostly as a place where you could get a quick divorce. By 1951, when the first bomb was dropped at the Proving Ground, it was beginning to transform into an international gambling mecca.

Joanne Freeman: The tests, while officially secret, were close enough that the explosions lit up the sky over Las Vegas. Mushroom clouds were clearly visible from downtown casinos. Some of the blasts were even powerful enough to shatter windows and short circuit the city’s power grid. Many worried that the testing ground would end Las Vegas’ boom years before they even began. After all, who would pay to come gamble while bombs that could level the city were being dropped on the horizon? Others saw the bombs as a golden opportunity.

Mary Wammack: What they did was they sort of turned it into our own little circus.

Joanne Freeman: Two of the city’s biggest boosters were Hank Greenspun and Al [Cahlan 00:09:54], the publishers of the Las Vegas Sun and the Las Vegas Review Journal. Rather than trying to hide the tests, they publicized them. They encouraged local businesses to do the same. Remember those blasts that shattered glass downtown?

Mary Wammack: What they did was they put the glass shards into a barrel, and then said ‘Free atomic souvenirs,’ and people walked by and that barrel was empty by the end of the day. …

Mary Wammack: All the casinos would do packed lunches for people who were visiting who might want to go out and look at the bombs in the desert. They provided maps to places that you could go watch the bombs go off. …

Joanne Freeman: They also quite literally hedged their bets when it came to nuclear blasts.

Mary Wammack: The casinos made sure that they posted signs and let everybody know that in the case of an atom bomb that might disrupt the roulette tables or craps, that the house would [crosstalk 00:10:57] …

Joanne Freeman: The house did win. Wammack said that over the next decade, as test bombs continued to fall, Las Vegas would experience explosive growth.

Mary Wammack: In 1951, Las Vegas itself proper has a population of about 24,000. The flights coming in are about 12 per day. By the time testing is done, there are a million people a year with 99 flights a day coming in to Las Vegas. The two intersections of those things are nuclear weapons testing, of the growth of Las Vegas and the growth of the casino industry. At the same time, you have atmospheric weapons testing being promoted by the Atomic Energy Commission and the military.

Joanne Freeman: To boosters like Greenspun, atomic tourism wasn’t just good for Las Vegas, it was a patriotic duty. He argued that these bombs wouldn’t hurt Americans, but they’d show the might of our nuclear arsenal to the world.

Speaker 3: Be brave, face squarely to the North, and breathe a silent prayer every time another nuclear device hits the dust of Yucca Flat. At last, Las Vegas has found a good reason for its existence.

Joanne Freeman: Wammack says that all of this publicity around the tests was a boon to the military as well. Having the tests out of the open, watched by anyone who cared to, let the Soviet Union know what American bombs were capable of while the science behind them remained secret. It also gave the impression that these tests were no risk to American civilians. …

Mary Wammack: That was a real contradiction, because this testing gives a visual to the idea of what a Russian bomb might do to us if it fell, and what Russian fallout might do to us, or Soviet fall out. At the same time, they’re saying, ‘But ours is safe. Everything we do is safe.’ Then in 1955 when the fallout controversy started flaring up, in 1955 the New Yorker runs a 12 page article on the dangers of fallout, and should we be worried about our own weapons testing? There was real pushback from both the local press, but then also the United States government through the AEC and the military branches.

Joanne Freeman: Now of course, the tests were not safe. Prevailing winds at the site carried the fallout East into communities in nearby Utah. A town called St. George saw a massive spike in childhood cancers beginning in the mid 1950s, which was later linked to fallout coming from the Nevada test site. Thousands of people who lived in Southern Utah during the tests would eventually die of cancer, including nearly half of the cast and crew of a John Wayne movie that happened to film just outside St. George in 1953. As time went on, winds and storms would spread the fallout from the Proving Ground far beyond the Southwest.

Mary Wammack: Some of them got trapped into thunderstorms, so it … this is why no county in the nation was free of radioactive fallout either. In fact, some of the highest levels were registered in New York.

Joanne Freeman: In February of 1955, as some politicians from Nevada and Utah pushed for an end to testing, city residents woke up to a strongly worded editorial in the Las Vegas Sun.

Speaker 3: Another of our sterling members of the legislature has made an ass of himself for all the world to see. This isn’t the first crackpot who has voiced such sentiments without taking the trouble to learn the facts. The friendly people of the AEC have spared no effort, nor expense to ensure public safety. Yet every time a test series is held, all sorts of wild rumors circulate over back fences.

Mary Wammack: They really kept plugging it as a positive thing right up until the end. They never, never lost their enthusiasm for weapons testing. This idea in the news … that communism has to be defeated, that this is the only way we can win the nuclear arms race. Of course, at the same time, you have the Soviet Union setting off bombs, too. Really, Nevada just kind of sees … at least its pitched as though we’re just playing our bit for the national good.

Speaker 3: These gossipy individuals who spread witch tales succeed only in frightening old ladies and simple minded citizens. Sensible people of Nevada are glad for the fine publicity the state receives. We might suggest the senator take a vote of the more intelligent majority. Las Vegas Sun, February 18th, 1955.

Joanne Freeman: Testing was eventually driven underground. But the loss of a major tourist attraction didn’t slow the city down. After all, Las Vegas has never been afraid of reinventing itself. And yet, Wammack says the city still hasn’t reckoned with its nuclear past.

Mary Wammack: It’s split. You have as many people, I think convinced as I am that the weapons testing was incredibly dangerous; that this nation, even, hasn’t fully lived up to how hazardous it was. I talk to people every month or so who had no idea atmospheric weapons testing was happening here. But the sort of boosterism that accompanied the development of the Nevada test site, Las Vegas is kind of trying to come to terms, still trying to come to terms with this idea that this was an essential part of America’s national defense. This was important for national security. Certainly once we started a nuclear arms race, we had to make sure that we stayed ahead of it. At the same time, … this is a chapter that could provide lessons for the future that we aren’t taking necessarily seriously. I don’t think these questions can be answered. I don’t think that anyone can kind of be reconciled at some point where they go, ‘Okay, good. That’s behind us now. We can move on.’ …

Speaker 4: Mary Wammack is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She’s currently working on a book on the history of nuclear testing policy.