The 1957 atomic bomb test taken from the roof of Fremont Street, Las Vegas. Photo / Las Vegas News Bureau, Don English
The 1957 atomic bomb test taken from the roof of Fremont Street, Las Vegas. Photo / Las Vegas News Bureau, Don English
It started with a bang and went out with a whimper. However, 70 years after the first test, Las Vegas' nuclear tourism is seeing a renaissance.
At 30 seconds to midday on November 9, 1952, tourists on the balcony of the Pioneer Club Hotel donned their sunglasses and looked north.
A moment and a brilliant flash later, they were enjoying the spectacular plumes and the afterglow of ionising radiation. Cocktails in hand, they toasted the miracle of the atomic age.
The hotel would advertise its proximity to the test sites as a good thing. Printing postcards with views from the roof, the Pioneer would mark each test with parties and mementos.
"Atomic detonation shown was 75 miles distant from the "Up and Atom City" of Las Vegas, Nevada," reads one.
Today, the prospect of MAD (mutually assured destruction) and tactical thermonuclear devices have a more contemporary ring - especially for anyone neighbouring the Russian Federation - but back then "the bomb" was a novelty.
The Trinity Test replica at The National Atomic Museum. Photo / Kelly Michals, Flickr, CC
Seventy years ago Las Vegas was basking in the glow of nuclear tourism.
But with the new Cold War rhetoric on televisions, resorts and museums have been benefiting from a new wave of nostalgia.
America's obsession with the bomb is anathema to nuclear-free New Zealand.
Despite the horrors, in Nevada, the more positive memories of the nuclear era appear to have the half life of uranium 235.
They include memories of the Miss Atomic Bomb beauty contest, nuclear merchandising and viewing parties, and driving out to watch the bombs go off in the desert.
Miss Atomic Bomb 1957, Lee Merlin. Photo / Las Vegas News Bureau
In a bizarre pageant of glamour meets Armageddon - Las Vegas ran a semi-annual contest to find an atomic beauty queen between 1952 and 1957.
Lee Merlin was crowned "Miss Atomic Bomb" in 1957.
A photo of her, dressed in a mushroom cloud-like dress in the Nevada Desert, is one of the weirdest and most enduring images of the era. It greets visitors to the National Atomic Testing Museum.
1957 marks the high point of nuclear enthusiasm. There would be no more nuclear pageants after that, only bigger tests further away and dawning realisation maybe the bomb wasn't a good thing to have in your backyard.
By 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the mushroom cloud was out of fashion.
Today there is a resurgence in interest. If only to decipher the terms now being bandied around again after a 30-year hiatus, and to work out if President Putin would be a fan of the "Fat Man" or "Little Boy".
This year The Nevada National Security Site began running free, monthly public tours. Travelling 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas to the test site, they pick up visitors from the Atomic Testing Museum.
The Sedan Crater in the Nevada Desert. Photo / Wikimedia Commons
Atomic Tours of the Nevada Test Site
Frenchman Flat Views of the flat dry lake bed are best appreciated from "News Knob", a raised hill that was used by about 600 observers and media invited to view the early tests.
Sedan Crater One of the largest man-made craters on earth, the pit was dug not by excavators but a 104-kiloton thermonuclear device in 1962.
Apple 2 Houses The Apple houses are eerily famous. Broadcast to Americans in the first nationally televised nuclear test in 1953, the Apple Houses are all that stand near ground zero - in various states of thermonuclear distress.
