Nevada Test Site not forgotten

Saturday, July 15, 2000 | 8:10 a.m.

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Wearing a souvenir Nevada Test Site baseball cap, Layton O'Neill pointed to a scale model of a building used to disassemble radioactive parts.

"That's the biggest hot cell in the Free World," O'Neill said enthusiastically about the now-vacant Test Site building.

The retired health physicist, who spent years driving through clouds of atomic blasts to detect radiation levels, has hundreds of stories. Depending on which day you visit the Nevada Test Site History Center, you may get an earful.

Wedged into a Energy Department building at 2621 Losee Road in North Las Vegas, the center offers self-guided tours. Former Test Site employees serve as hosts. O'Neill, who schedules the volunteers, occasionally works a shift himself.

"It's a history that needs to be told," said O'Neill, a self-described patriot who says of his career: "I couldn't have done anything better."

From 1951 to 1992, the Nevada Test Site was where 928 above- and below-ground nuclear tests were conducted. Bombs were dropped from planes, detonated on towers, from balloons and in tunnels. The mushroom clouds from atmospheric blasts could be seen from Las Vegas.

In 1998, six years after President George Bush signed a moratorium that stopped all nuclear weapons test, the Nevada Test Site History Foundation was formed to preserve the site's information. Members have been gathering memorabilia since then.

"Things were being thrown away," O'Neill said. "A couple of guys decided we need to preserve this history."

Among photos of fireballs, mushroom clouds and soldiers in trenches watching the early tests are other memorabilia: A model nuclear reactor, a Davy Crockett nuclear projectile and portable ion chambers used to measure levels of radiation. A model train set featuring Area 25, where nuclear reactors were tested, sits in the corner.

A mannequin's head wears a pair of goggles used to protect against the bright explosions. Next to the head is a black-and-white photo of VIPs wearing the goggles to watch the tests.

"With those on and with my back to the first aerial I ever saw, you could have read a newspaper," said host Jack Busick, who worked as a timing and firing engineer and an assistant test director.

A framed letter from President Harry Truman establishing the Test Site, known then as the Nevada Proving Grounds, hangs near a blow-by-blow photo series of a 16-kiloton atmospheric explosion destroying a house in less than three seconds.

A T-shirt featuring the shot can be purchased in the gift shop, along with coffee cups of the foundation's mushroom-cloud logo, postcards of fireballs and declassified videos of the nuclear age.

More controversial are the earrings in the shape of Little Boy and Fat Man -- bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. "We can hardly keep them in stock," Ernie Williams, a foundation charter member, said.

Visitors also receive a complimentary sample of a borosilicate glass marble. The glass was proposed as a way of encasing liquid high-level nuclear waste from defense projects -- a technique that was never adopted.

The controversy surrounding the testing at the site 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas and the devastation after bombs were dropped on Japan are not part of the center's displays.

In recent years, some former workers have complained of illness caused by radiation exposure. Legislation compensating them is working its way through Congress. Downwinders -- those living downwind of above-ground atomic blasts at the Test Site who have contracted various diseases -- already receive compensation.

"There is a plan to include that aspect of the Test Site in the final display," O'Neill said.

A future site, a $10.9 million joint venture involving the foundation, the Energy Department and the Desert Research Institute, will be housed on the DRI campus at Swenson Street and Flamingo Road.

The 59,000-square-foot facility is scheduled to open late next year. It will include 8,000 square feet of permanent exhibit space and a smaller area for temporary exhibits. The foundation's recent affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution allows the exchange of items.

The current center is within walking distance of a public reading room and information center where more than 350,000 documents, newspaper clippings and videos can be accessed. All will be transferred to the new site.

The history center opened in July 1999 as a precursor for the new facility, Loretta Helling, an Energy Department spokeswoman, said. Until recently, it was open only on Wednesdays, but still drew more than 500 visitors, Helling said.

"We're getting a lot of people who picked us up on the website," said Williams, a former Test Site worker who conducts daylong tours through the site. "And when they come to town, they want to see this."

Visitors from different states, the United Kingdom and Japan have signed the guest book. Most visitors are from Southern Nevada and many are former Energy Department employees interested in seeing information previously unavailable to them.

"A lot of the people who worked at the Test Site weren't allowed to go to other places," O'Neill said."It was all on a need-to-know basis."

Despite lack of space, the center does offer telling memorabilia of the era. Among items on display are a 1953 Las Vegas High School yearbook, which features a color photo of a fireball from an atmospheric atomic explosion.

On-site computers contain photos of John F. Kennedy's visit to the Test Site; life in Mercury, the small town at the entrance of the Test Site; mannequins posed in mock fallout shelters; and even a look at the Nevada Test Site employees' 1961 Christmas party.

"People on the tours ask what it felt like when that atmospheric shot went off," he said

First there is a bright light, Williams explained. Then a heat wave, then shock waves.

"By the time the shock wave arrives, you can see the stem of the mushroom, then the cloud," he said. "The heat wave feels like a gust of wind coming at you 60 to 80 miles an hour.

"We moved 6.2 million cubic yards of material in 2 1/2 seconds," Williams said, pointing to a crater formed by 104-kiloton explosive buried underground. The explosion was part of a program to test peacetime uses of explosives. The crater is 320 feet deep and 1,280 feet in diameter.

"I think it's great we stopped the war," O'Neill said. "But it's a terrible weapon."

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