A sparkling new Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, is already dusting off a powdery coating of fallout from critics who say it doesn't tell the whole atomic testing story. The museum, the first to focus on the area's legacy of nuclear weapons experiments, opened on February 20 to much fanfare.

"Downwinders," residents of the West who suffered health effects from the government's forty years of Nevada bomb tests, protest that the museum is a bunch of pro-nuke propaganda celebrating the blast.

The $4.5 million museum is the result of a partnership by Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation, Dept. of Energy, and the Desert Research Institute, in affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution. It's half-funded by US taxpayers, and half by donations and gifts from corporations and test site workers.

The museum offers an impressive arrangement of artifacts, interpretive displays, and sensory assaults. It's staffed by former workers from the nation's primary nuclear weapons testing facility, which tinkered with bomb-delivered chain reactions from 1951-1992. And those workers want their story told -- such as how the testing was vital to winning the Cold War. It's the same drumbeat we heard in the early 1990s at the Titan Missile Museum, staffed by retired Cold Warriors.

The Atomic Testing Museum sounds equally ready to evangelize, though more heavily bankrolled, to capitalize on the tourist (and public opinon) traffic of Las Vegas. Parts of the floorplan simulate a walk through underground tunnels. There are glass cabinets filled with Geiger counters, radiation detection badges, and other tools of the time. "Atom Bomb and Pop Culture" displays some of the perky memorabilia from the Atomic Cafe era, when mushroom cloud-watching was the height of desert chic. In the sensory overload department, the Ground Zero Theater presents an audiovisual experience where visitors are buffeted by blasts from air cannons as the bomb goes off on screen.

According to the official press release, the museum also displays pieces of the Berlin Wall and the World Trade Centers.

[03/01/2005]