Monday, Oct. 13, 2003 | 8:14 a.m.
While 1950s schoolchildren across the United States learned to "duck and cover" in the event of a nuclear bomb attack, Joan Williams and her Austin classmates helped the U.S. government test humans' reactions to the real thing.
They didn't understand what, exactly, the Atomic Energy Commission was looking for. They just donned a little badge for a week or so whenever the government officials asked.
"They put atomic bomb-testing badges on all the schoolchildren to test the radiation" from possible fallout, Williams said.
She couldn't recall whether it was round or square.
"But it had a little pad on it that turned a color," she said. "We wore them a week or so, and then we turned them in."
Nevada's once-thriving mining town of Austin sits in the exact center of the state, a 330-mile drive north of Las Vegas and 172 miles north as the crow flies from the Nevada Test Site.
While Las Vegas old-timers can recall hiking up to Mount Charleston or other local peaks to watch the tests as family outings, residents of Austin recall being a little more involved in the tests -- whether they wanted to or not.
Joy Brandt, who has lived in Austin most of her life, said local families also were given testing devices to place outside their homes.
"It was a machine, and we'd put it out in the back yard," Brandt said. "It had a test cap in it. It would turn black, then we'd go out, take it out of the machine and ship it back."
A new one was sent to replace it. Brandt shook her head and chuckled at the memory of unknowing residents being so helpful and unquestioning less than 10 years after atomic bombs vaporized two cities in Japan.
Above-ground nuclear testing in Nevada started in 1951. In 1957 the government even released the test dates so spectators could gather and enjoy the show.
Las Vegas Valley dwellers weren't the only ones looking.
"We used to sit in the yard up here and watch the light," Brandt said.
And people think Utah is weird.
Maybe a person has to live here a long, long time (which lets at least 50 percent of the valley's residents off the hook) before the idea of residents gathered around a picnic basket watching a mushroom cloud in the distance ceases to make a jaw drop.
That's likely why the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation's Atomic Testing Museum is expected to draw 800,000 visitors annually when it opens in about a year.
After the blush of blackjack wears off, Las Vegas visitors want to know more -- heaven help them -- about us. And atomic tests are near the top of the list of curiosities.
"We get several thousand (calls) a year, and the majority of them are from out of state," said Jeff Gordon, of the Nuclear Testing Archives and Public Reading Facility in Las Vegas.
The archives include 370,000 declassified or sanitized (with the super-secret spy stuff deleted) documents and about 100 movies, he said. Nevada's blasts reportedly were visible up to 200 miles away, Gordon said.
But he hadn't heard of the badges Williams and her classmates reportedly wore. Williams isn't sure how many of the adults of the time knew about them.
"I can't recall ever getting parental permission," she said. "They just gave them to us at school."
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