Atomic museum traces history of nuclear arms

LAS VEGAS (AP) — It's chilling to walk by a dented Army helmet with big tinted goggles on the brim, a frayed "atomic cocktail" recipe book and then come face to face with a family of mannequins, frozen in time in a fallout shelter.

Baby boomers will recognize the Civil Defense character Bert the Turtle and know by heart the instructions droning in black-and-white on the family's boxy Packard Bell TV: When sirens sound, find shelter. Don't look at the light. Duck and cover.

A digital countdown across the way tells when the steel doors of a cement-walled Ground Zero Theater will open.

Curators of the new Atomic Testing Museum hope the setting stirs the imagination for those with no memory of mushroom clouds and the role the Nevada Test Site played in the development of nuclear deterrence.

"Nuclear weapons aren't gone," museum Director William Johnson says as he leads the way through the $3.5 million facility that opened last month just east of the Las Vegas Strip. "The world is just a different place now."

The museum traces a half-century of nuclear weapons testing in a nation that grew to love or hate the bomb. It describes developments that let scientists peer into the first millionth of a second of a nuclear blast before instruments vaporized, and it charts research that continued after earthshaking explosions ended in 1992 at the test site.

It also has drawn criticism as revisionist history among advocates who call it a forum for nuclear apologists, and it has reopened wounds for "downwinders" sickened by fallout from atmospheric atomic blasts.

"Once you've been a victim of nuclear weapons you're less enthusiastic about it," said Michelle Thomas, 52, a lifelong resident of St. George, Utah. "I don't hate or fear anyone bad enough to want to see happen to them what happened to us."

Johnson doesn't deny that testing caused problems. He points to exhibits describing the plight of downwinders and of test site workers sickened by silicosis, and to a reading room and nuclear testing archive containing more than 310,000 documents.

"I want people to come here and learn," he says. "But if there's only one message taken away, it's that the Cold War was a war. It was a struggle with the Soviet Union."

The story is told with a timeline, artifacts, interactive and touch-screen displays and several films, including the 10-minute presentation in the Ground Zero Theater.