Original subtitles

Las Vegas in the 1950's.

This small desert town of 50,000

is just starting to gain attention

for its mafia-run gambling casinos

and glittering nightlife.

But for many, the real attraction

is a very different kind of light show.

For nearly a decade,

Cold War scientists set off a series of nuclear bombs

just 65 miles from Vegas,

in a quest for bigger and more destructive weapons.

It is a place where you can have a nuclear bomb go off,

and you can have the media crush

that turns it into kind of a circus atmosphere.

It was big entertainment.

If everything goes according to plan,

we'll soon see the largest explosion

ever set off on the face of the earth.

It was the nation's grand atomic experiment.

You are here to participate in an atomic maneuver.

Complete with its own subculture

that spawned beauty queens

and radioactive superheroes.

You adapt to it,

you make it familiar, you make it funny,

and then it's not so scary.

Along with mind-blowing images

of doom towns being annihilated by nuclear fire storms.

Welcome to Nevada.

The atomic weapon of which Churchill

spoke is tested...

A hazard unique to nuclear warfare

is radioactive fallout...

Unseen, unheard, and odorless,

this substance can only be...

We bring you a report

on the atomic explosion being tested.

We take you now to the Yucca Flats of Nevada

for operation doorstep.

This is Walter Cronkite

on the Yucca Flats,

some 75 miles north of Las Vegas, Nevada.

For the first time, we will be able to report such an explosion

seven miles due north of us here,

on the Yucca Flats.

And, incidentally, too, this time,

perhaps not so incidentally for the men concerned,

some thousand troops will be in trenches,

closer than man has ever been before, intentionally,

to the explosion of an atomic device.

March 17, 1953.

It's been eight years

since two atomic bombs devastated Japan

and put an end to world war ii.

Now the explosive power of nuclear destruction

is about to be beamed live from the Nevada desert

to television audiences across the United States.

In the trenches,

about two miles from the blast site,

is a group of soldiers, technicians, and even reporters,

positioned much closer than anyone else that day.

Ernie Williams, an administrator at the test site,

is a veteran of more than 50 atomic tests

and knows well the experience of being inside these trenches.

I knew that the gamma rays, the x-rays,

and neutrons were gonna come through.

I knew that the shock wave was gonna be probably pretty rough.

I guess I have to say I was a gutsy guy.

I, I wanted to know what it was to be like.

Out there,

some seven miles north of us here,

on a tower 300 feet high,

an atomic device of some 15,000 tons dynamite equivalent

will be exploded at 5:20 our time.

That's 2 minutes and 20 seconds from now.

Besides the national television and radio audience,

hundreds of people were at the site that day

to watch the 16-kiloton bomb detonate.

The Cold War with the Soviet Union

is in full swing.

The race is on to build bigger and better bombs.

Let's face it,

the threat of nuclear bomb warfare

is the greatest danger our nation has ever known.

Enemy jet bombers carrying nuclear weapons

can sweep over a variety of routes

and drop bombs on any important target

in the United States.

It is essential that no country

gain ascendancy over the United States

in the development, manufacture,

and tactical use of atomic weapons.

In this desolate desert,

miles from anything,

the atomic energy commission, the A.E.C.,

gives the press a ringside seat.

It wants to show the world exactly what it can do.

There is a place out at the site well known

called news nob,

which was just a series of bleachers

that had a very good view

of both Frenchman Flat and Yucca Flats,

where most of the experiments were done.

And you would have a lot of the big names...

From ABC, NBC, and CBS.

This was part of that PR effort by the A.E.C.

They wanted to let people know that they could be safe,

that we had this weapon,

we could win this Cold War.

You are here to participate in an atomic maneuver.

Atomic weapons are truly powerful,

but they don't mean the end of all life,

as so many people think.

You can live through an atomic attack.

And by taking common-sense precautions,

live to fight another day.

H minus 10 seconds.

Then you hear the countdown.

You hear the 9, 8, 7, 6...

5, 4, 3...

2, 1...

Zero!

And at the time of zero, an extreme bright light comes,

and I mean extremely bright light.

Probably 10 times brighter than what the sun is.

Just lights up everything.

At 4:30 in the morning

you can see the mountains eight miles away,

and they're just as bright as, as the daylight.

Seconds after detonation,

those closest to the blast

must steel themselves for what comes next:

A shock wave in the air

that can travel faster

than even the most destructive winds of a hurricane.

Shock wave travels, on the average,

a mile every five to seven seconds.

So when you're in a trench at a mile and a quarter,

you've got roughly between eight and ten seconds.

After that, it's too late.

You better be ready.

So I just buckled my knees

and got my head down below the surface of the ground,

because I knew if I didn't, I was gonna eat a lot of dirt.

The shock wave went over the top of us.

My guess is it's probably in excess of 500 miles an hour.

And that's, that's pretty rough.

But how did this patch of land

65 miles from Las Vegas

become America's atomic ground zero?

Even though the war was over,

the American military wanted to maintain dominance

with atomic weapons.

To create an effective arsenal,

the United States needed to build and test more weapons.

The nation's nuclear program

had been developed

in Los Alamos, New Mexico,

but after the war,

the government wanted to test bigger bombs

in a more remote location.

So testing was moved to the Bikini Atoll

nearly 5,000 miles

from the west coast of the United States.

During the war,

the world had seen

what an atomic bomb could do to a city.

Now the government wanted to know

how our military infrastructure

would withstand a possible nuclear blast.

One test involved dozens of decommissioned warships.

We are seeking primarily to learn

what types of ships, tactical formations,

and strategic dispositions of our own naval forces

will best survive attack by atomic weapons

should we ever have to face them.

On July 26, 1946,

a nuclear bomb was anchored

90 feet below the surface of the water.

If everything goes according to plan,

we'll soon see the largest explosion

ever set off on the face of the earth.

While this device was just a little bigger

than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki,

because it was placed beneath the surface of the waves,

the result was nothing like anyone had ever seen.

But the Bikini Atoll was far from home,

and the distance made logistics difficult.

This led the government to begin secretly searching for a site

to detonate smaller bombs in the continental U.S.

The secrecy about the program itself is

that we didn't want our adversaries to know

what we were doing.

The more we could keep them in the dark,

the better off we were

to try and have an edge on the competition.

The government launched project nutmeg

to determine if nuclear weapons could be safely tested

in the United States.

Its conclusions:

If the weather was right and the site was properly monitored,

atomic blasts in the atmosphere

would not cause damage to property or population.

The only problem was,

no one knew just how big the bombs tested would be,

or how much radiation they would spread.

They looked at various places,

including up in Alaska and northern Utah.

They looked at the outer banks of the carolinas,

mainly because of the wind conditions out there.

They felt any radioactivity would be blown out to the sea.

But then they realized

the population centers were just too much

to even consider that area.

In 1949,

without a clear consensus on where to go,

the atomic energy commission

shelved all plans for the testing of nuclear weapons

in the United States.

The only exception would be if there was a national emergency.

A few weeks later,

the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb...

Setting the world on a path...

Towards an atomic showdown.

In September 1949,

the United States believed the Soviet Union

was at least five years away

from duplicating the most destructive force on earth...

The atomic bomb.

The United States was wrong.

The Soviet detonation

was followed by the communist government of Mao Zedong

taking over China in the fall of 1949.

Six months later,

north Korean troops stormed the 38th parallel,

starting the Korean War.

Fear of all-out war between the superpowers was rife,

and the United States wanted to be sure it had the upper hand.

It was what was called "Mutually Assured Destruction,"

and that was the policy

that both countries lived by

to prevent the world

from erupting into a nuclear catastrophe.

And the reason was,

if we had all these bombs that could wipe out civilization,

nobody would have any incentive to try and really set one off.

The race was on to build bigger atomic bombs.

The question was where to test them...

some place even farther away from civilization

than Los Alamos, New Mexico,

where the bomb was developed during the war.

So, our need is pressing for a nearby test site,

a place where nuclear tests can be made frequently, quickly,

and more economically.

And, thus, the Nevada test site was set up

for the first in a series of continental tests

that are part of our continuing atomic program.

The Nevada site was 1,300 square miles...

larger than the state of Rhode Island.

The Southern section had good logistics.

It was 25 miles

from the Indian Springs air force base.

Las Vegas, then a small town of 50,000,

was 65 miles away,

meaning access to a growing labor force.

A major state highway was only seven miles away.

And other than Las Vegas,

there was not much else around.

Las Vegas was a small town.

It was less than 50,000 at that point.

And we didn't have the tourism and the gambling

that we have today.

So, when the federal government came to town

and established a permanent payroll,

a lot of people employed with good jobs,

people welcomed it.

And so we just found ways to adapt it into our local culture.

It is historical fact

that military weakness is an invitation to aggression.

By being prepared,

our army hopes to avoid a future war.

But should war come,

it may also become historical fact

that the war was won in advance.

On January 27, 1951,

flying 3 1/2 miles above the desert floor,

the crew of an air force plane

released the first nuclear weapon in Nevada.

4, 3, 2, 1,

turn.

A 1,000 pound bomb named Able.

It sent out a blinding white flash

followed by a red-orange glow and a shock wave.

A mushroom cloud rose 14,000 feet,

and a thunderous burst

reverberated across the Mojave Desert.

The following morning,

a second, more powerful atomic blast,

code-named Baker,

lit up the pre-dawn sky.

100 miles away,

a truck driver told the local paper

he could see the glare from the blast.

It almost blinded him

to the point where he was wondering, what about driving?

Was it safe to do this?

In just ten days,

five nuclear weapons

were detonated over the Nevada test site,

ranging from 1 kiloton...

Up to 23 kilotons.

Most were smaller than the 15 & 20 kiloton bombs

dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.

The fifth test,

which was a 23-kiloton shot,

actually was felt and seen as far as Los Angeles,

and they actually saw the bright light from the test

and felt some of the ground motion.

Anyone at the test site

to witness an explosion

had to wear a pair of cobalt goggles.

Put on your goggles.

Observers without goggles must face away from the blast.

The reason they had to have these

is that those nuclear tests that they were doing back there

had the intensity of suns, plural.

So, if they didn't wear these, it would burn their retinas.

I mean, if you look through these now

and just look out into the normal area,

you can't see anything,

but you can look and stare at the sun

by just wearing these goggles.

For those guys,

those brave men,

and there were some women, too, at the test site,

for them to actually see a nuclear blast go off,

looking through cobalt glasses...

This was "Star Wars" of its era.

They published A Little Green Book

that advised people on what to do

when the bomb was going off.

We wear sunglasses when you look at the fireball,

you don't stand next to plate glass windows...

Things that seem pretty silly now,

but at the time, people felt like they would keep them safe.

Bruce church grew up in rural Utah,

near the Nevada border,

working on his family's dairy farm.

He would later work as a radiation physicist

at the test site.

He has vivid childhood memories

of seeing nuclear explosions light up the pre-dawn sky.

My dad would drag me out of bed

about 5 o'clock in the morning.

We would be working away,

and the whole western sky would light up

like a huge light bulb went off.

It was awesome.

It's a little bit like an instant sunrise.

It was that bright.

And it happened so many times that dad would say,

"Well, looks like they detonated another one in Nevada."

You know, and we'd go about our business, milking cows.

Building an arsenal of nuclear weapons

required thousands of people to work at the Nevada site.

The government creates a city to house employees.

They call the town "Mercury."

The scientists that were in charge

of establishing the government town of Mercury

had sent someone to the post office

to give the town an address.

The guy shows up, and the postmaster asks him,

"Well, what is the name of this place?"

So they thought, "Well, we saw these little cans of Mercury

on the side of the road

that the gold miners used to use to amalgamate the ore

to make sure it was gold that they were looking for,

so let's call it Mercury."

Peggy Hallerberg was a secretary at the site.

She says there was an air of professionalism in Mercury,

despite its remote location.

There's a very close-knit group

that was like working downtown at any other job,

except it was at this remote area,

very secretive.

It's a big fraternity,

this order of the mushroom,

and it's growing all the time

as more and more of us from all the services

have an opportunity to be a part of this big effort

to collect the knowhow for atomic warfare.

In an effort to make life in Mercury more tenable,

the government brought in all the comforts of home.

The government town of Mercury

had a reputation for having a very good steakhouse,

set up a bowling alley.

There was movies.

When people got off work

it wasn't just all, you know, bombs and tests.

With the infrastructure in place

to continue large-scale testing of nuclear weapons,

scientists in the early 1950's

wanted to know how bombs would behave

when detonated at different altitudes.

They learn during their experiments

that bombs dropped from higher altitudes

spread their destructive force over a much wider area...

sometimes more than a mile.

Bombs dropped closer to the ground...

Nearly liquefied anything beneath them,

but the devastation covers a much smaller patch of ground.

To make their experiments more precise,

scientists began detonating bombs secured in towers.

This way they knew the exact height at which a bomb goes off,

compared to those dropped from planes.

Setting off nuclear weapons was always serious business.

Officials from government laboratories,

either Los Alamos or Lawrence livermore,

controlled the tests.

The test controller

knew exactly where every person was

upwind from the Nevada test site.

We knew exactly how many people were on the test site,

where our radiological emergency people were located.

It was a business-like kind of an operation

and taken very seriously.

By the mid-1950's,

scientists knew that the bombs released radiation,

but believed that the resulting fallout

would not be dangerous enough to affect human health.

Little did they know

that radioactive debris from larger blasts

from the Pacific and the Soviet Union

were circling the globe

and already starting to enter the world's food chain.

...wind sweeping across

the desert...

American homes

will be exposed to atomic blasts.

In area one of the Nevada test site...

Direct bearing

on the welfare of every American family.

...sits a vacant house,

battered by decades of abuse from an unforgiving desert.

Yucca flat,

a barren area of desert,

Sagebrush and Joshua Trees...

And blasts from nuclear bombs.

Today, thousands of tourists visit this house.

But a spot just two miles away, where atomic bombs were set off,

is still off-limits because of the high levels of radiation.

At the 5,500-foot line

is a re-designed house...

This house was pummeled

by a nuclear test in 1955 called "Apple 2."

Designers were looking for ways to make homes strong enough

to withstand a blast from an atom bomb.

This new design provides additional

strength at a cost increase of approximately 10%.

Scientists wanted Americans to be prepared

for the unthinkable yet possible,

to see how homes would withstand blast waves

from an atomic weapon launched at an American community.

This house was 6,000 feet from ground zero.

Other homes that were closer were incinerated.

Everybody has seen

that very famous footage

of the houses just imploding

and then exploding out.

What happens first is that it gets hit by the heat,

and so it blistered almost all of the paint.

When you look on the backside of the house,

you can still see some remnants of the paint.

It ripped all the gutters off of the house.

The chimney here was shifted about six inches.

The blinds that were on the windows

were all blown out.

But otherwise this house withstood the blast pressures

and the heat from the nuclear test.

The apple-2 bomb

was placed in a tower 1,500 feet above the ground

so the resulting fireball

wouldn't destroy monitoring equipment.

Technicians built small towns within the blast zone...

shops, gas stations,

dozens of homes made of brick and wood.

They called the small cities "Doom Towns."

Here, just before dawn,

for the first time in our history,

American homes will be exposed to atomic blasts.

Today, main street of every American city and town.

We had all kinds of houses built,

grocery stores...

We had the electrical systems.

Single-story homes, two-story homes,

wooden, brick, block, and so on,

different distances from the ground zero,

to see what the effects would be from the blast and the heat.

Inside the buildings,

workers positioned entire families of mannequins,

who silently waited for the explosions to come.

Let's see what would happen

to a normal, average family.

We had mannequins

with all different types of clothing on...

wool, you know, cotton, rayon, nylon.

The mannequins had a house roughly 5,000 feet away.

They had them sitting at the kitchen table.

We had a lean-to in the basement.

The mannequins became

some of the most famous participants of the tests.

The mannequins were furnished by J.C. Penney's.

Those mannequins that had radiation,

they never got them back.

But the rest of them that didn't,

they took them back.

What they did with them, I don't know.

Ha ha ha!

Seems typical of the American family at home.

First-floor living room,

children at play, unaware of approaching disaster.

Mannequins thrown about,

clothing cut,

plaster bodies pockmarked by flying glass.

Remember this dining room group?

Again, effects of an atomic blast

in the house farthest from ground zero.

Builders of bank vaults

came out to see what's the best way,

how much concrete do they need,

how much steel do they need?

There were underground parking facilities.

What would happen to Bridges

at what distances from the actual event?

For example,

something as simple as changing 2x4 pieces of wood to 2x6s

increased structural integrity of a building by 12%,

upping the odds of a home withstanding a blast.

Las Vegas

as the caravan sets out

for the site of A.E.C.'s Nevada proving grounds,

a variety of passenger cars, old and new,

loaned by the dealers and manufacturers of America.

Operation hot rod

had vehicles placed a half-mile to two miles from ground zero

to determine if they could be used as shelters.

Often, if they were a mile away,

they might have broken windows,

but they would be operable,

where if they got within a quarter mile or half mile,

they often were no longer operable.

Having gone through some of the remnants

of the testing at Frenchman Flat

and seeing the twisted metal

and seeing what got burned and what didn't get burned,

what got tipped over, what didn't get tipped over,

it gives you a new perspective

on how powerful these explosions really were.

Right in close to ground zero,

everything gets vaporized from that immense heat.

The big thing for the scientists

was to be able to get that footage of what happened,

what was going on.

The best way to record the effects of a bomb

was with a high-speed camera.

A camera slows down

the split-second burst of a nuclear blast

so that we can apply a tape measure to it.

The only way that they could protect that film

from the x-rays and the radiation

that were being emanated

was a lead wall.

And in that lead wall there would be a pinhole,

and that camera's looking through the pinhole

directly at ground zero.

Seconds before a blast,

a signal was sent to the cameras to start rolling.

The cameras would run through the explosion

and stop only when they ran out of film.

Fears of nuclear annihilation by the Soviets

force the scientists to push the limits even further.

They needed to know just how much exposure to an atomic blast

could be absorbed by living things.

Hundreds of sheep, pigs, and small barnyard animals

are put in the path of the bomb's wrath.

Some are placed in enclosures at ground level

while others are placed in below-ground positions.

Some of the more similar things

to the human body,

as far as reaction to things like radiation,

is pig skin.

So they would actually put pigs

at different distances from the shot,

and then go in and see what the effects were.

A large part of the experiments

was to determine their biological effects

on living things,

and the effects on some of the animals

were pretty gruesome.

Most of the animals used in tests

were incinerated...

Their carcasses studied for effects from the blasts.

All this was done to collect as much data as possible

to determine how to build bombs for maximum effect.

The atomic energy commission,

in collaboration with the united states army and air force,

will conduct the atomic test known as exercise desert rock,

the first in which troops will participate

as part of an atomic experiment.

U.S. military wanted to push the limits

and see how soldiers would hold up to the stresses

of being close to a nuclear detonation.

As early as the first year of testing in Nevada,

marines, and later other military units,

were stationed in trenches within two miles of ground zero.

What could our military troops endure?

What did they need to protect themselves

against the bright flashes,

the shock wave, the radiation

that they would have to be sent in to ground zero

and clean up?

Could we fight a nuclear war and win it,

or were there going to be no winners?

We didn't know.

But, Burt, don't you think that the atomic weapon

would be a mighty powerful thing

for our soldiers to avoid on the battlefield?

Well, al, there's no, no question about it.

It is a powerful weapon.

But we have had proven to us in these tests

that a soldier can fight and survive on an atomic battlefield

if he protects himself adequately.

Well Burt, you were out there.

How's about some comments

on this radiation I hear so much about?

Well, there is radiation.

There's no question about that.

But, well, for example,

the other day I was out there at 2,500 yards from ground zero,

and I received one milliroentgen of radiation during that time,

and it takes approximately 450 roentgens

to place one in the critical category.

So, as you can see, I'm, I'm still here.

Once the bomb is ignited

and the mushroom cloud soars above their heads,

they wait for the initial shock wave to pass.

Dick mingus crouched in a trench

during one of these tests.

H minus 10 seconds.

Now the countdown is going.

8...

I crouched a little bit,

not knowing how severe it's gonna be.

6...

5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

And then you see that terrible flash.

And then it's dead silence for a period of time.

All of a sudden it hits,

like somebody pushing you.

The wind hits you,

and the noise hits at the same time.

It's just immense.

You think about it a little bit,

it will run a cold chill up your back.

It was also kind of a measurement

of how does a person react to such a magnificent detonation?

This is not a conventional bomb we're talking about.

This is something that's pretty scary.

And would our soldiers be scared, too?

Troops would then get out of their protective trenches

and march toward the detonation site.

Today, these soldiers are called nuclear veterans,

and many have suffered health problems

from literally walking into clouds of radiation.

I remember seeing footage

of soldiers being brushed off with brooms,

just to get the contaminated soil off of their clothes.

And later on, some of these soldiers

were coming down with diseases related to the fallout.

This became a huge problem.

I think, had our government known

what the health effects would be down the road,

they probably would have done these tests differently.

The federal government

eventually compensated soldiers and "Downwinders,"

people living in the fallout zones

of Nevada, Utah, and northern Arizona.

Laws passed in the 1990's

allowed for a one-time payment of $75,000

to atomic veterans who had contracted

one of 21 different types of cancer

attributed to fallout.

People who lived downwind were awarded $50,000.

$800 million has been paid out since the program began.

Seeing nuclear explosions up close was terrifying,

and as these experiments become more dangerous,

the life around them gets more absurd.

From a rooftop in downtown Las Vegas,

it's easy to look a few miles north

of the sheep mountain range,

toward the Nevada test site.

Between 1950 and 1960,

the city's population grew by 161%

to a quarter of a million.

Many people were drawn

by the explosion in the casino industry,

and tourists flocked to the city for another type of explosion:

The nuclear kind.

Back in the day,

when the Nevada test site

was conducting nuclear weapons tests,

you could look in this direction...

And you could actually see the remnants of a nuclear cloud,

a mushroom cloud,

orange glow in the sky.

During the 1950's,

the detonation at the Nevada test site

gave Las Vegas a new way to make money:

Atomic tourism.

People came from all over the country

to witness the detonations,

which always went off at dawn.

Hotel casinos would host atomic parties

on their rooftops.

Guests would drink until dawn

and finish their evening with a nuclear blast.

Welcome to Nevada.

It is a place where you can have a nuclear bomb go off,

and you can have the media crush

that turns it into kind of a circus atmosphere.

The impact on popular culture

and how pervasive that was.

It was kind of like whistling in the dark.

You adapt to it,

you make it familiar, you make it funny,

you make it sexy,

and then it's not so scary.

"Atomic" just was in everybody's jargon.

And of course atomic liquors is still here,

and I don't think it'll ever change that name.

The word "Atomic" was just an adjective used

in many, many, many ways.

And you saw it reproduced in song, in movies,

in television, in logos.

The mushroom cloud was on the cover of the yearbook

of Las Vegas high school.

Some people even think the Las Vegas sign

is a reflection of that mushroom cloud.

The mushroom cloud was pretty much glorified.

It became an iconic symbol.

It was hot, hot, hot.

Even beauty pageants

found a way to add "Atomic" to their name

as casinos crowned miss atomic bomb.

You had gigi, the hairdresser at the flamingo

who would fix you a hairdo that looked like a mushroom cloud.

But, you know, the bottom line was

there were signs on the dice table and the roulette table

that said if the ball clicked or the dice flipped

because of some trembling,

house rules prevailed.

You could hear the people say,

"Oh, I got up at 4 o'clock in the morning

so I could see that flash in the sky."

It was big entertainment.

The curious would travel for miles

up into the Sheep Mountains north of the city

to get a better view.

I am so glad that I actually saw a mushroom cloud.

And you definitely felt the earth shake,

the sound wave that would come across the desert,

and you would feel the vibration.

Neither I nor any of my friends

had any concerns at all,

but very aware that something really important was going on

65 miles away.

Congressional hearings in 1957

put the spotlight on atmospheric testing,

and the atomic energy commission

had to defend the importance of the tests

against public fears.

All employees and anyone within 20 miles of ground zero

were given film badges to wear.

The badges measured the intensity

of radiation exposure.

Film badges and dosimeters issued to you

enable the radiological safety monitor in your unit

to read the amount of your exposure.

Every month, employees would turn in the film badges

to be checked for radioactive material.

I used to put film badges with clips

on anybody I could find that would wear them out there

around the test site,

including highway department, police, sheriffs,

fire department, and so on.

And with film badges,

if you have radiation, it darkens the film.

It was basically the same thing

as the dentist used to put in their patient's mouth

to have an X-ray.

It was a type of film that,

when exposed to gamma ray radiation,

which is like an X-ray,

it would be exposed,

and the density of the film was such

that you could measure the intensity of the exposure.

If there was a test

in which there was a release of radioactivity,

we would go around, pick up the film badge

and replace it with a fresh one,

take the initial one back to the lab for analysis.

It was part of their uniform.

All of the monitors

carried plastic bags to collect vegetation

and collect milk samples and water samples.

We pretty much tested everything we could think of.

In all my years out there,

we never exceeded the permissible levels.

But reassurances from inspectors in Nevada

couldn't sway public opinion.

With the Soviet Union testing even larger bombs,

sometimes in more populated areas,

the atomic age was casting a dark cloud of doom

over a testing program

originally intended to protect the world.

After seven years of atomic tests in Nevada,

fears over radioactive fallout peaked in 1958,

and the United States imposed a moratorium

on nuclear weapons testing.

The blasts at the Nevada testing grounds stopped.

It had been a long time coming.

There had been 152 atmospheric atomic detonations

done by the United States in Nevada...

And the pacific

between 1946 and 1958.

82 of them at the Nevada test site.

As scientists were learning more and more

about the effects of nuclear weapons,

it became clear that maybe we should not be

detonating nuclear weapons in the atmosphere

because the fallout was circulating the globe,

it was causing unrest in people that were downwind.

And the Soviet Union was conducting some really big ones

that were showing up on our soil, too.

Newsmen enter a 1,900-foot tunnel

into a Nevada rock mesa,

where an atomic bomb blast last summer makes news now.

One purpose of the original test

was to see whether an underground atom blast

could be detected by sensitive instruments

at remote points.

After the test, the atomic energy commission announced

the limit of detection was 250 miles,

an error just corrected.

The blast was picked up in Alaska,

over 2,000 miles away.

And so new fuel is added to the debate

on a temporary worldwide ban on nuclear explosions.

The blast itself collapsed only some 500 feet of the tunnel

and was scarcely felt outside,

in odd contrast to the political reverberations

now being felt months afterwards.

By 1958, the entire world had become concerned

as radioactive isotopes had been found in nature,

like iodine 131 and strontium 90,

both of which turned up in cows' milk.

Worse, there were reports of similar radioactive material

found in the breast milk of new mothers.

Legendary newsman Walter cronkite

had originally been thunderstruck by the blasts,

like at this one in 1953.

You will hear the blast

and, of course, see the fireball from this bomb.

But now, in 1961, eight years later,

he feared the worst.

Strontium 90 is just one

of a couple of hundred kinds of radioactive garbage

left by atomic bombs,

thrown into the air as a powder,

carried downwind,

drifting back to earth

over the course of days, weeks, years.

Three years to the day that the ban went into effect,

the Soviets broke the moratorium and began testing again.

The move by the Soviets

gave the United States the green light

to continue its own new testing

despite safety concerns from the public.

Many of the tests were moved underground

in an effort to stop radioactive fallout

from skyrocketing into the atmosphere.

The decision was made by our government

to restrict the places

where we can conduct nuclear weapons tests.

There was a train of thought

that we should see

what peaceful uses we could make

of testing nuclear weapons.

What could we use nuclear weapons for besides war?

Excavations of new harbors, big dams, canals,

passes through rugged mountainous terrain.

These and other

massive, imaginative earth-moving projects

may soon be ours.

There was a plan to dig a massive waterway

in Nicaragua,

nicknamed the Pan Atomic Canal.

It was one of the first attempts

to look at using a bomb for peaceful purposes.

This is when they thought they might dig a new Panama Canal

using the bomb.

We could use nuclear bombs

for something besides war,

and we could do this in an instant.

We could move all this earth suddenly,

and it would make a nice perfect little divot in the earth.

For more than a year,

test site secretary Peggy Hallerberg

and her colleagues

had asked the scientist for whom they worked

to take them to see an underground detonation.

We climbed into this gray government trailer.

There probably were ten people in the trailer,

we were waiting for the shot to go off.

Called the Sedan Shot,

it was the largest of the Nevada site's underground tests,

a 100-kiloton device placed 636 feet below the ground

in a shaft drilled into the desert floor.

You see tons of dirt flying into the air,

you feel the vibration and the shock wave,

and everybody is looking at each other like,

"Oh, my god. Look what just happened."

The blast lifted a dome of earth

more than 300 feet in the air.

After three seconds, the dome vented.

It collapsed in on itself.

The secondary shock wave

sent 12 million cubic tons of soil

into the Nevada sky.

It was an astounding thing to observe.

Blew sky high.

Shook the ground.

It's something I'll never, ever, ever forget.

Today, what remains of the Sedan nuclear test

stands as a looming silent witness

to the power unleashed here in 1962.

One of the things

that's really hard for people to understand

unless you're actually standing here

is to grasp the size of this crater...

how big it is, how far across it is,

how deep it is.

With a big 1,800 feet deep, 335 feet deep,

it's just almost impossible to imagine

unless you're actually standing here

to get some sort of scale.

Some radioactivity still lingers,

but not enough to make this place dangerous for tourists.

You will see this huge crater

that's unbelievable in size

and look down at the bottom of it,

and you'll see tires that look about the size of lifesavers.

Despite the continuing arms race with the Soviets,

in 1963,

president John F. Kennedy cited unprecedented health risks

from nuclear fallout

and urged passage of the nuclear test ban treaty.

The loss of even one human life

or the malformation of even one baby,

who may be born long after all of us have gone,

should be of concern to us all.

The Soviets agreed.

From that point forward,

above-ground nuclear tests by the superpowers stopped.

The mushroom clouds above the Nevada desert

disappeared.

Between 1951 and 1992,

there were 1,021 detonations at the Nevada test site.

100 of them above ground

during the 1950's and early 1960's.

An arms treaty with the former Soviet Union

ended the detonations for good in 1992.

Now called the Nevada National Security Site,

the area remains busy

with underground super computer testing labs

simulating detonations.

Hopefully we'll never have to detonate

a nuclear weapon,

but if we do, we want to make sure they work,

and how do you do that

if you don't have full-scale nuclear testing?

I wouldn't take anything for the experiences.

It was a job that needed to be done,

and I'm very, very proud to be there

to take part in it.

Those that know the story

of the atomic age in this desert

know if nuclear tests ever need to resume,

the Nevada test site is always ready.