Las Vegas, Nevada: Atomic Testing Museum

Freed from secrecy rules, America's bomb-makers have built a museum about what they did in the desert north of Las Vegas.

Our family stopped in for what we thought was going to be a couple of hours at most. After four hours, my wife and kids had to drag me out. I'm a very technical person and this place is just so interesting and well documented. Maybe husbands should go to spend the day alone?

Very interesting. Free parking. Look for a Groupon to save 50%, otherwise $22 an adult.

This is a wonderful museum about a terrible topic. Lots of great ironic pop culture specimens with atomic motifs such as cereal boxes, comic books and Miss Atomic Bomb 1957, and a great collection of Geiger counters. Oddly funny/frightening photos of mushroom clouds going off behind Las Vegas casinos in the late '40s. Educational and worth the visit.

Open since 2005, the Atomic Testing Museum chronicles America's plunge into the nuclear age. Refreshingly devoid of modern-day political correctness, the museum simply presents life as it was between 1951 and 1992, when the Nevada Test Site (located 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas) detonated 928 atomic blasts in and under the desert.

"Sixty-five miles from Vegas? But isn't that, ummm, really, really close to The Strip?" you ask. Uh-huh ... and you'll see just how close when you view the photograph of a mushroom cloud rising behind the Las Vegas skyline. Patrons used to gather in the Sky Room of the Desert Inn to watch the detonations, which would shake the chandeliers seven minutes later.

Indeed, Vegas enthusiastically embraced the nukes, selling Atomic Cocktails, hosting bomb parties and sponsoring Miss Atomic Bomb beauty pageants. It was definitely a different era, and the Atomic Testing Museum does an excellent job -- with films, memorabilia and other vintage material -- of portraying these blasts from the past.