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| Established | March 2005 |
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| Location | Las Vegas, Nevada, United States |
| Coordinates | 36°06′51″N115°08′55″W / 36.11416°N 115.1486°W |
| Type | History museum |
| Website | www |
The National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, documents the history of nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) in the Mojave Desert about 65 miles (105 km) northwest of Las Vegas. The museum operates as an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. [1]
The museum opened in March 2005 as the "Atomic Testing Museum", operated by the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. It is located in Las Vegas, Nevada, at 755 E. Flamingo Rd., just north of Harry Reid International Airport and just east of the Las Vegas Strip. Funding included support from purchasing commemorative Nevada Test Site license plates issued by the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles.
On December 31, 2011, President Barack Obama signed a military spending bill that included designating the museum as a national museum affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. The National Atomic Testing Museum is one of 37 national museums in the U.S. [2]
The museum covers the period from the first test at NTS on January 27, 1951, to the present. Among its exhibits covering American nuclear history is a "Ground Zero Theater", which simulates the experience of observing an atmospheric nuclear test.
Other exhibits include Geiger counters, radio badges and radiation testing devices, Native American artifacts from around the test area, pop culture memorabilia related to the atomic age, and equipment used in testing the devices. Other displays focus on important figures at the facility, videos, and interactive exhibits about radiation. [3] The museum also features a piece of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Wall graffiti art, and two pieces from the World Trade Center. [4]
In 2012 the museum added an exhibit about Area 51, and expanded the exhibit two years later. [5]
The weather station outside of the National Atomic Testing Museum records weather data for downtown Las Vegas. The data include temperature, wind speed, and background gamma radiation in microroentgens per hour. The station is part of the Community Environmental Monitoring Network (CEMP). [6]
The Nevada National Security Site, known as the Nevada Test Site (NTS) until 2010, is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) reservation located in southeastern Nye County, Nevada, about 65 miles (105 km) northwest of the city of Las Vegas. Formerly known as the Nevada Proving Grounds, the site was established in 1951 for the testing of nuclear devices. It covers approximately 1,360 square miles (3,500 km2) of desert and mountainous terrain. Nuclear weapons testing at the site began with a 1-kiloton (4.2 TJ) bomb dropped on Frenchman Flat on January 27, 1951. Over the subsequent four decades, over 1,000 nuclear explosions were detonated at the site. Many of the iconic images of the nuclear era come from the site.
Project Plowshare was the overall United States program for the development of techniques to use nuclear explosives for peaceful construction purposes. The program was organized in June 1957 as part of the worldwide Atoms for Peace efforts. As part of the program, 35 nuclear warheads were detonated in 27 separate tests. A similar program was carried out in the Soviet Union under the name Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy.
Nuclear weapons tests are experiments carried out to determine the performance, yield, and effects of nuclear weapons. Testing nuclear weapons offers practical information about how the weapons function, how detonations are affected by different conditions, and how personnel, structures, and equipment are affected when subjected to nuclear explosions. However, nuclear testing has often been used as an indicator of scientific and military strength. Many tests have been overtly political in their intention; most nuclear weapons states publicly declared their nuclear status through a nuclear test.
Trinitite, also known as atomsite or Alamogordo glass, is the glassy residue left on the desert floor after the plutonium-based Trinity nuclear bomb test on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The glass is primarily composed of arkosic sand composed of quartz grains and feldspar that was melted by the atomic blast. It was first academically described in American Mineralogist in 1948.
Project Chariot was a 1958 United States Atomic Energy Commission proposal to construct an artificial harbor at Cape Thompson on the North Slope of the U.S. state of Alaska by burying and detonating a string of nuclear devices.
Operation Upshot–Knothole was a series of eleven nuclear test shots conducted in 1953 at the Nevada Test Site. It followed Operation Ivy and preceded Operation Castle.
Mercury is a closed village in Nye County, Nevada, United States, 5 miles (8.0 km) north of U.S. Route 95 at a point 65 miles (105 km) northwest of Las Vegas. It is situated within the Nevada National Security Site and was constructed by the Atomic Energy Commission to house and service the staff of the test site. The specific site was known as Jackass Flats and nearby Nevada Test Site 400. Today, the site is governed by the United States Department of Energy. As part of the test site, the village is not accessible to the general public. It was named after the mercury mines which flourished in its general vicinity a century before the village itself was established. The current population is unknown.
Storax Sedan was a shallow underground nuclear test conducted in Area 10 of Yucca Flat at the Nevada National Security Site on July 6, 1962, as part of Operation Plowshare, a program to investigate the use of nuclear weapons for mining, cratering, and other civilian purposes. The radioactive fallout from the test contaminated more US residents than any other nuclear test. The Sedan Crater is the largest human-made crater in the United States and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The American Museum of Science and Energy (AMSE) is a science museum in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, designed to teach children and adults about energy, especially nuclear power, and to document the role Oak Ridge played in the Manhattan Project. The museum opened as the American Museum of Atomic Energy in 1949 in an old World War II cafeteria on Jefferson Circle. It moved to its second facility in 1975 and was renamed AMSE in 1978. As of June 2019, the museum is located in the shopping mall across the street from the old location.
Downwinders were individuals and communities in the intermountain between the Cascade and Rocky Mountain ranges primarily in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah but also in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho who were exposed to radioactive contamination or nuclear fallout from atmospheric or underground nuclear weapons testing, and nuclear accidents.
Atomic tourism or nuclear tourism is a recent form of tourism in which visitors learn about the Atomic Age by traveling to significant sites in atomic history such as nuclear test reactors, museums with nuclear weapon artifacts, delivery vehicles, sites where atomic weapons were detonated, and nuclear power plants.
The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History is a national repository of nuclear science information chartered by the 102nd United States Congress under Public Law 102-190, and located in unincorporated Bernalillo County, New Mexico, with an Albuquerque postal address. It is adjacent to both the Albuquerque city limits and Kirtland Air Force Base.
Pahute Mesa or Paiute Mesa is one of four major nuclear test regions within the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). It occupies 243 square miles (630 km2) in the northwest corner of the NNSS in Nevada. The eastern section is known as Area 19 and the western section as Area 20.
Yucca Flat is a closed desert drainage basin, one of four major nuclear test regions within the Nevada Test Site (NTS), and is divided into nine test sections: Areas 1 through 4 and 6 through 10. Yucca Flat is located at the eastern edge of NTS, about ten miles (16 km) north of Frenchman Flat, and 65 miles (105 km) from Las Vegas, Nevada. Yucca Flat was the site for 739 nuclear tests – nearly four of every five tests carried out at the NTS.
Frenchman Flat is a hydrographic basin in the Nevada National Security Site south of Yucca Flat and north of Mercury, Nevada. The flat was used as an American nuclear test site and has a 5.8 sq mi (15 km2) dry lake bed that was used as a 1950s airstrip before it was chosen after the start of the Korean War for the Nevada Proving Grounds. Nellis Air Force Base land 12 mi × 30 mi was transferred to the Atomic Energy Commission on which Site Mercury was constructed on the flat for supporting American nuclear explosive tests. The 1951 Operation Ranger "Able" test was the first continental US nuclear detonation after the 1945 Trinity test, and Frenchman Flat also had the only detonation of an American artillery-fired nuclear projectile in the 1953 Upshot-Knothole Grable test using the M65 Atomic Cannon.
Smithsonian Affiliations is a division of the Smithsonian Institution that establishes long-term partnerships with non-Smithsonian museums and educational and cultural organizations in order to share collections, exhibitions and educational strategies and conduct joint research. Partner organizations are known as "Smithsonian Affiliates".
Following the success of Operation Grapple in which the United Kingdom became the third nation to acquire thermonuclear weapons after the United States and the Soviet Union, Britain launched negotiations with the US on a treaty under in which both could share information and material to design, test and maintain their nuclear weapons. This effort culminated in the 1958 US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement. One of the results of that treaty was that Britain was allowed to use United States' Nevada Test Site for testing their designs and ideas, and received full support from the personnel there, in exchange for the data "take" from the experiment, a mutual condition. In effect the Nevada Test Site became Britain's test ground, subject only to advance planning and integrating their testing into that of the United States. This resulted in 24 underground tests at the Nevada Test Site from 1958 through the end of nuclear testing in the US in September 1992.
Groom Mine, located in Lincoln County, Nevada, first opened in the 1870s. Most mining in the area, mostly of silver chloride ores, had finished by 1874. Groom Mine continued to operate, finally ceasing operations in 1954. By 1956, official recordings of products of the Groom Mining District, which includes Groom Mine, shows that lead was the bulk of minerals harvested, which also included 145,000 troy ounces (4,500 kg) of silver and about 45 troy ounces (1.4 kg) of gold. During World War II, Groom Mine became surrounded by military activity, which continued into the 21st century. In the 1950s, the mine was exposed to fallout from nuclear testing that was being carried out at the Nevada Test Site. During the late 20th century, military activities, including the destruction of a mill and the restriction of access to the mine, continued to affect work there. The United States Government seized the mine under eminent domain from its previous owners in 2015. Just compensation was set at $1.204 million by the United States District Court, District of Nevada, Judge Miranda Du presiding.
Geneva Smith Douglas was a nuclear physicist and radiation scientist who worked for both the U.S. Public Health Service and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She served as a scientific collaborator for the nuclear industry and the communities local to her work in researching the impacts of nuclear weapon testing programs at the Nevada Test Site. She developed an offsite radiation monitoring program in her time as the Program Operations Manager of the Environmental Monitoring Systems Laboratory and focused much of her time to speaking and advising on nuclear safety and nuclear testing throughout her career and following her retirement. Douglas was an activist for Soroptimist International and was a charter member of Soroptimist International of Greater Las Vegas. Douglas, with her previous employment and her position within Soroptimist International, lobbied Congress on environmental issues, such as environmental preservation.