factual information from the nuclear tourist

Nuclear Tourism: When atomic tests were a tourist attraction in Las Vegas, 1950s

At night, the glow of the bombs lit up the sky, and mushroom clouds could be spotted rising over the horizon during the day.

In classical American fashion, fear was not the only reaction. Vegas started becoming a destination for a certain type of people — Nuclear Tourists.

Let’s roll back to understand why Nevada was selected for nuclear testing . The Yucca Flats of Nevada was located in the center of the American wasteland, making it the perfect place for nuclear testing. First off by being located in the middle of the desert, it created very few threats to surrounding homes.

Additionally, over 87% of the Nevada area is owned by the federal government. It had vast available lands, sunny weather, and good rail connections.

A Horseshoe Club advertisement touting its excellent views of nuclear tests.

The nuclear detonations provided a source of spectacles and entertainment for people who did live in this area. As a result, Vegas began to experience a new influx of people from across the country who would travel thousands of miles in order to catch a glimpse of this new show.

Soon after Las Vegas was transformed from the original city of 25,000 people to the world-renown spectacle of three million people.

Journalists everywhere began jumping on this new exciting event, and the topic of atomic tourism became the biggest headliner everywhere.

Even writers in the New York Times began referring to it as, “the non- ancient but nonetheless honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching.”

Witness the power of the Atomic Bomb. A mere $3 for a safe viewing distance.

Inherently speaking, Vegas was designed for showmanship. Visitors are encouraged to live in the moment and focus on what is in front of them, by masking the individual from all reminders of time and location.

Their motto: pay attention to what is in front of you. Therefore by taking advantage of this concept and its psychological effect, landowners and industry owners began turning these tests into spectacles of themselves.

The Vegas Chamber of Commerce promoted in advance the dates and times for these tests. Calendars and community announcements would be published months in advance for tourists to plan and enjoy the spectacle of the mushroom cloud.

Photos of these events began circulating across news sources everywhere and bomb-watching became such a rage that thrill-seeking tourists would make sure to get the closest spot possible to the ground-zero.

On the eve of detonations, many Las Vegas businesses held “Dawn Bomb Parties.” Beginning at midnight, guests would drink and sing until the flash of the bomb lit up the night sky.

Bombs over Fremont.

However, in addition to these parties, Vegas also capitalized on the nuclear tests by providing itself as a source of relief and nostalgia from the surrounding terror.

Gambling, games, and television were all sources of distraction that provided Vegas guests with an escape from the fear that was surrounding them.

Both Vegas itself and the Yucca Flats of the Nevada Testing Site were turned into tourist attractions of various sorts. The main spectacle of the site to date are the large craters currently scarring the desert surface.

The desert floor is sprinkled with craters of all shapes and sizes, ranging from nuclear warheads to smaller surface-level bombs.

Early morning bathers at a hotel pool in Las Vegas stop to watch the mushroom cloud of an atomic detonation at a test site about 75 miles from the city. May 8, 1953.

One of the more popular craters is Bilby crater, which was created in 1963 by an underground test. Producing about 249 kilotons of explosive power, the blast created a hole that was 1,800 feet wide (550m) and 80 feet (24m) deep and also resulted in an aftershock that was felt all the way in Vegas itself.

Sedan crater is also popular due to its large size. Sitting at about 1280 feet (1280m) wide and 230 feet (70m) deep, a 104 kiloton blast right beneath the surface of the desert floor produced this crater.

The effects compared to that of a 4.75 earthquake moved about 12 million tons of Earth in its passing.

Guests at the Last Frontier hotel in Las Vegas watch the mushroom from a detonation about 75 miles away. May 8, 1953.

One journalist, writing for the Department of State Washington Bulletin, described witnessing the blast: “You put on the dark goggles, turn your head, and wait for the signal. Now — the bomb has been dropped. You wait the prescribed time, then turn your head and look.

A fantastically bright cloud is climbing upward like a huge umbrella…. You brace yourself against the shock wave that follows an atomic explosion.

A heat wave comes first, then the shock, strong enough to knock an unprepared man down. Then, after what seems like hours, the man-made sunburst fades away.”

Watching poolside. Nuclear tests were a rather ordinary part of life in Las Vegas.

For twelve years, an average of one bomb every three weeks was detonated, at a total of 235 bombs. Flashes from the explosions were so powerful that they could reportedly be seen from as far away as Montana.

Scientists claimed that the radiation’s harmful effects would have dissipated and been harmless once the shock waves reached Las Vegas, and they scheduled tests to coincide with weather patterns that blew fallout away from the city.

However, as the tests continued, people in northeastern Nevada and southern Utah began complaining that their pets and livestock were suffering from beta particle burns and other ailments; by 1963 the Limited Test Ban was in effect, banning above-ground nuclear testing at the site.

Hotels offered panoramic views of the distant desert skyline for the optimum experience.

The Nevada Test Site wasn’t just a boom for travelers. The proving ground flooded the area with federal funds, and the site employed close to 100,000 men and women.

Nevada test site.

Reporters witness the nuclear test on Frenchman Flat, on June 24, 1957.

Operation Buster-Jangle – Dog test — with troops participating in exercise Desert Rock I, November 1, 1951. It was the first U.S. nuclear field exercise conducted on land; troops shown are a mere 6 miles from the blast.

Atomic tourists taking in the sites.

Camera men filming the atomic blast of Wasp Prime Test, during Operation Teapot. Nevada, February 18, 1955.

Man sitting near a Nevada Test Site sign, Nevada, United States, 1955 From 1951–1962, Mercury was a town in the Nevada atomic testing site where hundreds of test explosions were conducted.

Watching poolside.

Soldiers at the test site.

Fashion of the atomic age.

The first flash of light generated by an atomic bomb.

Birds-eye view of dozens of craters dotting the Yucca Flats.

A nuclear crater left behind.

Model posing in front of a nuclear cloud.

Miss Atomic Bomb of Sin City.

Photograph of Yucca Flat, covered with craters created by atomic bombs, in the Nevada Test Site.

(Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons / Las Vegas News Bureau / US Army Archives / Atomic Tourism in Las Vegas by Kiana Pancino).

Updated on: September 29, 2022

Any factual error or typo?  Let us know.

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National Geographic Magazine Publishes “The Nuclear Tourist”

September 24, 2014

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE PUBLISHES “THE NUCLEAR TOURIST” SEPTEMBER // 2014

After the publication of his 20-year retrospective “The Long Shadow of Chernobyl” Gerd Ludwig continues to explore the aftermath of the world’s worst nuclear disaster to date. In a story titled “THE NUCLEAR TOURIST,” the October issue of National Geographic Magazine USA and several of the foreign language editions of NG published Gerd’s images of tourism in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (text by George Johnson). For more information and to see the images: Click here

In addition, the German language edition of National Geographic ran a 2-page interview with Gerd about the power of photography and what makes working for National Geographic special. To read the interview: Click here

To order a signed copy of the book: Click here

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September 16, 2014

World Travel

The Nuclear Tourist

Visiting the site of the Chernobyl meltdown.

George Johnson National Geographic Oct 2014 10 min Permalink

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Step inside Cold War nuclear sites

Contemplating cataclysmic destruction isn't exactly relaxing. So why do hundreds of thousands of tourists visit these decommissioned missile sites?

Grey, cushioned, comfortable, the chair doesn’t seem meant for a combat position on the front line of nuclear war. Yvonne Morris sat there on alert in the early eighties. Now, when she leads tours, she steers visitors through simulations of the steps she never had to take: Authenticate the controller's flat, dire command; retrieve the launch codes from the war safe; turn the keys in unison with the deputy crew commander to send a seven-story-tall Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile and its massive nuclear payload hurtling off into the world.

That’s when Morris—a former missile combat crew commander and current director of the Titan Missile Museum —tells the tourist they’ve failed. If the mission to maintain peace through deterrence had been successful, the bomb would never have launched.

In 2018, it’s an effective simulation. But at several points in the last seven decades, most people wouldn’t have needed any help imagining the start of a nuclear war. There were some years where nobody forgot that absolute, omnipresent threat. And though it's gone largely unnoticed for years, current events—and increasing nuclear tourism—are bringing it back into the spotlight.

Anxiety and inattention form a repeated pattern when it comes to nukes, suggests Paul Boyer in his book By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age .

A game of Battleship waits in the day room at MMNHS. Missile crew members had mandated breaks during their 24-hour alerts, and a guaranteed rest day following.

In the years immediately following World War II, the United States had an “obsessive post-Hiroshima awareness of the horror of the atomic bomb,” Boyer writes. By 1950, it had faded. But in the mid-fifties, fallout from American and Russian atmospheric bomb tests—miles of ash, dead fishermen, radioactive rain, radioactive milk—renewed public terror. [ See photos taken on illegal visits to Chernobyl’s dead zone. ]

The national preoccupation with nuclear war nearly disappeared again after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, thanks to a test-ban treaty and the growing impenetrability of nuclear technology and strategy. And though fears of nuclear war resurged during the global proxy conflicts of the eighties, another wave of disinterest followed after the Cold War’s end in 1991: The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) saw the U.S. and the U.S.S.R agree to reduce their deployed nukes, and people were eager to think the threat had passed.

All the while, thousands of warheads remained buried on high alert beneath ranches, homes, and highways.

Underground on the front lines

At ground level, the missiles were nearly invisible, their presence marked by antennae, barbed wire fences, and the launch duct door like a small basketball court.

“From a distance, it looks like something unremarkable,” says Eric Leonard, superintendent at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site (MMNHS) in South Dakota . Then you get close enough to read the signs: Use of deadly force authorized. “The distance between mundane and extraordinary is pretty fast.”

Antennae cluster on the surface of the Titan Missile Museum's silo. When the Titan IIs were phased out in 1982, the site went through an elaborate deactivation process, crippling the missile to ensure it could never fire—and making sure those safeguards were visible to Soviet satellites.

In the 1960s, the Air Force planted 1,000 Minuteman missiles across the Great Plains, each with a payload of a little over one megaton. Only 54 Titans were deployed, mostly in the Southwest—but each of these carried a payload of 9 megatons, enough to decimate an area larger than Maui. [ Learn how shockwaves from WWII bombing raids rippled the edges of space .]

“What it’s designed to do is erase a city from Earth,” says Leonard. “That’s what it does. But the other perverse part of nuclear weapons is, when you’re building weapons that powerful … the very fact that you have them and they’re ready to go is intended to serve as a deterrent against America’s enemies so that they don’t attack.”

That strategy of mutually assured destruction has been the prevailing rhetoric of the nuclearized world. “[It] enabled us to stand toe to toe, to look each other straight in the eye, and not go to war with each other,” says Morris, who pulled alerts at all 18 Titan silos around Tucson , Arizona , from 1980 to 1984.

To ensure a missile was always ready to launch within minutes of receiving an order, crews pulled alerts—24-hour shifts that were a dissonant balance of ritualized routine, constant adrenaline, and eerie domesticity.

Keys inserted in this console would have initiated missile launch at MMNHS. That control center was like "the hub of a wagon wheel," says Leonard, controlling a flight of 10 missiles out of South Dakota's 150 total Minuteman IIs.

A comminucations antenna rises from the underground Titan II silo. From 1963 to 1987, 54 Titan IIs were deployed across the U.S.; Tucson hosted a single unit, or wing, of 18 missiles.

After a top-secret security briefing on the day’s threats, officers had to prove and re-prove their identity before even getting into the bunker, where they secured the launch codes in the war safe with their own personal padlocks. Crews filled the hours with gruelingly thorough, top-to-bottom inspections of the missile’s every gauge, light, pump, fan, and belt, Morris says.

At both Titan and Minuteman sites, it was absolutely impermissible for a single person to be in the launch room alone. The weapons’ sheer destructive power was too great a risk and too heavy a responsibility to entrust to only one officer; the crew commander and their deputy always acted together. [ You and almost everyone you know owe your life to this Russian nuclear officer. ]

Yet the presence of immense violence lived alongside the trappings of daily human life. More advanced versions of the weapons that once killed 120,000 people in seconds formed part of the same sites that housed beds, kitchenettes, kitschy morale art, and comfortable chairs.

Visitors can walk around the bottom of the Titan II missile, seven stories below the surface. The two-stage booster can lift over 2 tons into low orbit, and Titans were even used for Gemini manned space missions .

The accidental doomsday tourist

Today, Leonard and Morris oversee the world’s only two intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) preserved for the benefit of the public.

“The American nuclear arsenal hasn’t grown, but it hasn’t particularly gone anywhere,” says Leonard. “And if national parks are a place for dialogue about what America is and how America works, this is a pretty important subject.”

Recognition of a public need to preserve Cold War missile sites came swiftly: The Titan Missile Museum actually opened before the Cold War ended, and MMNHS is one of the only national historic sites to be listed while less than 50 years old. Visitation to the latter has more than doubled since 2011, and last year, 144,000 park visitors brought about $10 million to the local economy. Though plenty plan ahead—summer tours book months in advance—many visitors are accidental, stopping by on their way from Badlands National Park less than 10 minutes away.

“The most asked question is some variation of ‘Hey, we still have nuclear missiles?’” says Leonard of people’s disbelief. ( We do still have a lot : Of the U.S.’s roughly 6,800-missile stockpile, roughly 1,800 are deployed, roughly 400 of those are ICBMs, and almost all of those can fire within five minutes of the president’s order, though nobody agrees on those numbers.)

Missile crew portraits hang on display at MMNHS. Many missile officers, retired from Air Force bases in Rapid City, South Dakota, and Tucson, Arizona, are deeply involved volunteers at the sites where they once worked.

Not all visitors are nuclear neophytes. Former Cold War missile crews come to show their families the missiles they used to work on, and current missile officers use the retro sites as analogs to the top-secret job they can’t take their families to see today. Both Titan and Minuteman have strong volunteer programs filled with retired Air Force. [ See photos of dark tourism sites around the world. ]

Interest isn’t limited to America’s Cold War survivors, either: International visitation is growing.

“If you’re not from the United States, your Cold War experience is often much more personal,” Leonard says. “Soviet nuclear weapons wouldn’t take you out in 30 minutes, they’d take you out in four.”

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And the barbed nuclear rhetoric between the U.S. and Korea may be renewing both foreign and domestic interest in these unique sites. [ Powerful photos show what nuclear "fire and fury" really looks like. ]

Documentary photographer Adam Reynolds , who spent two years taking these photos, links that interest to a Cold War nostalgia. “Now, with nuclear proliferation becoming more and more of an issue, we’re looking back almost like, ‘Wow. It was a lot simpler. There were just two sides.’”

The facility manager's combined room and office at MMNHS showcases the strange domesticity of the launch control centers. Reynolds' photographs explore the bunkers' sense of claustrophobia and antiquation, "almost like the set of an old science fiction B movie."

Reynolds acknowledges the missile sites’ importance, but also the “strange feeling” they elicit: “What are we actually celebrating? Are we celebrating how strong we are, that we can destroy the world? Or is it sort of a morality lesson or a cautionary tale that we’re trying to preserve?”

For Morris, the goal is a little clearer.

“[We want] people to leave here understanding, at least vaguely, what a nuclear weapon is, what its capability is, how expensive it is to maintain and operate , and what’s required,” she says. “And to help [people] make a decision about what they want the future of nuclear weapons in the United States to be.”

“You can read about nuclear weapons all day long,” she adds, “but it is unlikely to have the same impact on you as standing ten feet away from an intercontinental ballistic missile.”

Light throws every rivet into sharp relief at Level 5 of the Titan II missile. "It’s super evocative to see children react to that," Leonard says of similar spectacles at the Minuteman site. "If you’re a child in the world, what can you do about nuclear weapons?"

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• NUCLEAR WEAPONS
• MODERN HISTORY
• POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

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The UN’s nuclear watchdog chief will visit Iran next week as concerns rise about uranium enrichment

FILE - International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi waits to meet Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida shakes hands at the prime minister’s office in Tokyo Thursday, March 14, 2024. The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog will travel to Iran next week as Tehran’s nuclear program enriches uranium a step away from weapons-grade levels and international oversight of the program remains limited, officials said Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, Pool, File)

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JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog will travel to Iran next week as Tehran’s nuclear program enriches uranium a step away from weapons-grade levels and international oversight remains limited, officials said Wednesday.

Rafael Mariano Grossi’s visit will coincide with a nuclear energy conference Iran will hold in the central city of Isfahan, which hosts sensitive enrichment sites and was targeted in an apparent Israeli attack on April 19 . It also coincides with wider regional tensions in the Mideast inflamed by the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, including attacks on shipping by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen .

The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency will visit Iran on May 6 and 7, the Vienna-based agency said. It did not elaborate on his schedule or his meetings.

Iranian state television has described the conference in Isfahan as an “international conference on nuclear sciences and techniques.” The broadcaster quoted Mohammed Eslami, the head of Iran’s civilian nuclear program, as saying on Wednesday that Grossi will attend the conference and meet with him and other officials.

“I am sure that the ambiguities will be resolved and we can strengthen our relations with the agency within the framework of safeguards and” the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty , Eslami said.

Tensions have only grown between Iran and the IAEA since then-President Donald Trump in 2018 unilaterally withdraw America from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers. Since then, Iran has abandoned all limits the deal put on its program and now has enough enriched uranium for “several” nuclear bombs if it chose to build them, Grossi has warned .

IAEA surveillance cameras have been disrupted, while Iran has barred some of the agency’s most experienced inspectors . Iranian officials have increasingly threatened they could pursue atomic weapons, particularly after launching an unprecedented drone-and-missile attack on Israel last month.

Iran has always denied seeking nuclear weapons, saying its atomic program is for purely civilian purposes. However, U.S. intelligence agencies and the IAEA say Iran had an organized military nuclear program up until 2003.

The latest American intelligence community assessment says Iran “is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.”

Associated Press writer Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.