the hundreds of atomic devices exploded at the Nevada Test Site from 1951 until 1992, the ones that stand out are those featuring Doom Town, a row of houses, businesses, and utility poles. It makes sense: the flash, the wall of dust, and the burning yuccas are impressive on their own, but without something familiar in the frame, the explosion can seem abstract. Doom Town—also called Survival City, or Terror Town—makes the bomb anything but theoretical. These are the images I can’t forget.
Click. Here’s Doom Town’s iconic two-story house, a classic Colonial with shuttered windows balancing a front door. Neat and tidy, with white-painted siding and a sturdy red-brick chimney: if this were your house, you’d probably feel pretty good about yourself. But something’s wrong. The vehicle parked in the drive isn’t a Dodge or a Packard but an Army jeep; on the chimney’s edge, a bloom of spray paint shows the siding was painted in a hurry. This is a house nobody will ever live in. Its only inhabitants are mannequins with eyes like apple seeds.
All part of the plan, and the planning took far longer than the event itself. A crew unloaded telephone poles, jockeyed them upright, and drilled them into the alluvium. Down in Vegas, men bargained for cars and stood in line for sets of keys. Imagine the hitch and roar of a ’46 Ford, ’51 Hudson, ’48 Buick, and ’47 Olds as they pull onto the highway, headed for the proving grounds. Click. Here’s one of the cars now, a pale-blue ’49 Cadillac with 46 painted on its trunk in numbers two feet tall, marked like an entrant in a demolition derby.
You could say the whole country pitches in. Fenders pressed from Bethlehem steel, lumber skidded out of south Georgia piney woods, glass insulators molded in West Virginia, slacks loomed and pieced and serged in Carolina mills. And mannequins made in Long Island, crated and stacked and loaded onto railcars.
Click. In an upstairs bedroom, a soldier tucks a mannequin woman into a narrow bed, the mattress’s navy ticking visible beneath the white sheet. Outside the open window, the white blare of the desert at noon. Downstairs, another soldier arranges a family, seating adults around a table and positioning children on the floor, checking the dog tags around each of their necks.
What’s a plan but a story, set not in the past but the future? Someone in the Civil Defense Administration already decided how many mannequins this house will hold, what they’ll wear, whether they’ll sit or stand. But surely this soldier can allow himself the freedom to choose, say, which game the children on the floor will play. For Brother and Little Sister, how about jacks? A good indoor game. And Big Sister, let’s set her off from the rest, next to her portable record player, its cord lying on the floor like a limp snake. Father leans toward the television, one hand on his knee and the other on the pipe resting in the hole drilled in his lip. The blank television reflects his face; he could be watching the news.
The tremendous monetary and other outlays involved (in testing far away) have at times been publicly justified by stressing radiological hazards. I submit that this pattern has already become too firmly fixed in the public mind and its continuation can contribute to an unhealthy, dangerous, and unjustified fear of atomic detonations. . . . It is high time to lay the ghost of an all-pervading lethal radioactive cloud (to rest). . . . While there may be short-term public relations difficulties caused by testing atomic bombs within the continental limits, these are more than offset by the fundamental gain from increased realism in the attitude of the public.
—Rear Admiral William S. “Deak” Parsons, 1948
In 1945, Manhattan Project physicists exploded the first atomic device, Trinity, in the desert outside Alamogordo; a little more than two weeks later, the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima, and three days after that, Bockscar dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki. Scientists predicted that the United States’ monopoly on atomic weapons would hold for at least twenty years, but in 1949, the Soviets proved them wrong, exploding a bomb named First Lightning. In response, Harry Truman authorized the building of Mike, the first hydrogen bomb, tested in the South Pacific. The logistics of testing so far away made the process costly, so a public relations campaign was conducted in order to convince Americans that testing closer to home—at the Nevada Test Site, an hour or so north of Las Vegas—was desirable and safe. By and large, the public got on board with this campaign, and although much of the evidence generated by the tests was kept classified for decades, the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission made it a priority to publicize some of the information. Broadcasts of the tests were shown on television, newspaper reporters and photographers documented them, and civilians were encouraged to witness the explosions.
In the summer of 1957, an article in the New York Times explained how to plan one’s summer vacation around the “non-ancient but none the less honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching.” Reporter Gladwin Hill wrote that “for the first time, the Atomic Energy Commission’s Nevada test program will extend through the summer tourist season, into November. It will be the most extensive test series ever held, with upward of fifteen detonations. And for the first time, the A.E.C. has released a partial schedule, so that tourists interested in seeing a nuclear explosion can adjust itineraries accordingly.”
Hill’s article suggests routes, vantage points, and film speeds, so that the atomic tourist can capture the spectacle. But is there anything to fear from watching an atomic explosion? Rest assured, he says, that “there is virtually no danger from radioactive fall-out.” A car crash is the bigger threat, possibly caused by the bomb’s blinding flash or by “the excitement of the moment, [when] people get careless in their driving.”
In the article’s last paragraph, Hill writes, “A perennial question from people who do not like pre-dawn expeditions is whether the explosions can be seen from Las Vegas, sixty-five miles away. The answer is that sometimes enough of a flash is visible to permit a person to say he has ‘seen an atomic bomb.’ But it is not the same as viewing one from relatively close range, which generally is a breath-taking experience.”
That summer, after winning the title of Miss Atomic Bomb, a local woman poses for photos with a cauliflower-shaped cloud basted to the front of her bathing suit. Thanks to trick photography, she seems to tower over the salt flats on endless legs, power lines brushing her ankles. With her arms held high above her head, the very shape of her body echoes the mushroom cloud, and her smile looks even wider because of the dark lipstick outlining her mouth, a ragged circle like a blast radius. Not only do Americans want to see the bomb, we want to become it, shaping our bodies to fit its form.
A studious-looking young man who totes his electric guitar like a sawn-off shot-gun.
—Review of a Buddy Holly performance in Birmingham, England; March 11, 1958
There’s a lot going on during that atomic summer. Buddy Holly, for instance. His career’s taken off by 1957, thanks to hits like “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” and “Everyday,” songs that combine country inflections with rock’s insistent rhythm. He looks ordinary, like someone you went to high school with; in fact, you were born knowing him, the bird-chested guy, sexless and safe. But look more closely: at the story of how he gets into a “scuffle” with his buddy Joe B., the bass player, before a show, and Joe B. accidentally knocks off Buddy’s two front caps. Buddy solves the problem by smearing a wad of chewing gum across the space, sticking the caps back on, and playing the gig. Or at the story of how he met dark-haired Maria Elena in a music publishing office and that same day asked her to marry him—and she said yes. Or look at this, a clip from a TV show he played in December of ’57.
“Now if you haven’t heard of these young men,” the hostess says, “then you must be the wrong age, because they’re rock and roll specialists.” The camera’s trained on Buddy, and he doesn’t waste time: If you knew Peggy Sue, then you’d know why I feel blue, giving it everything he’s got, and
