Monday, Feb. 21, 2005 | 10:52 a.m.
As hundreds of people stood for hours at the opening of the Atomic Testing Museum on Sunday, the museum's director invited anti-nuclear demonstrators inside to take a look for themselves at 50 years of Cold War memorabilia.
While some anti-nuclear activists took him up on the offer, residents downwind of the Nevada Test Site where the United States experimented with nuclear weapons above and below ground from 1951 until 1992 called the museum "revisionist history."
Zachary Moon, program and development director for the Nevada Desert Experience, a faith-based group of demonstrators that has kept prayer vigils at the gates of the Test Site for decades, said the T-shirts and the protest signs displayed by 36 people near the museum's entrance had a purpose.
"We really wanted to give voice to some of the missing pieces at the museum," Moon said. "At the very least, history is much more complicated than what is shown."
After several years of work, the museum opened this weekend at the Desert Research Institute with exhibits detailing the history of nuclear testing in the United States and the Nevada Test Site.
Quakers, Catholics, Lutherans and Episcopalians from 14 to 88 years old from Nevada and California gathered at the museum's entrance on Flamingo Road, or a meditation garden west of the building, to hand out a simple sheet of paper explaining why they were there.
Moon said that the funds put into atomic testing take monies away from the poor, the homeless, and help to create a culture of violence.
"The nuclear testing program at the Nevada Test Site tested human beings on radiation effects without their knowledge or consent," the Nevada Desert Experience said under the heading, "Human Costs."
The museum is intended to give an overview of atomic testing, but despite the display cases of photos, souvenirs, pop culture icons and equipment, human stories are ignored as a visitor walks a timeline that presents only the facts and the figures, Moon said.
"The way they (the events) are described, in matter-of-fact language, dehumanizes them," he said.
A nationwide consortium of people living downwind of the Test Site went even further, calling the museum "a monument to propaganda."
The Downwinders Opposed to Nuclear Testing said that while the museum sees itself as a research center and records repository, it has excluded those who suffered health effects from nuclear testing, creating a "revisionist history" that was half paid by congressional appropriations, the rest by museum donors.
"Removing the downwinders from history is revisionism at its worst," Thomas said. Thomas compared it to visiting a museum that historically documents the Holocaust but leaves out the stories of the victims.
"This is the biggest propaganda con-job on those downwind since the Atomic Energy Commission published their little green books on the atomic tests in Nevada after they got caught in public with the lethal fallout," said Preston Truman, a downwinder from Malad, Idaho.
The booklets explained that there was no danger from the radioactive fallout.
Truman referred to an above-ground atomic bomb named "Harry," detonated by the government in 1953, that spread enough radiation to kill hundreds if not thousands of sheep grazing downwind from the Test Site. The 32-kiloton blast, packing a nuclear punch of 32,000 tons of TNT, was more than twice the size of the weapon dropped on Hiroshima.
The Test Site was a symbol of the Cold War that came to an end in 1992 when the United States stopped underground nuclear weapons experiments, museum director Bill Johnson, an archaeologist, said.
"Now we are able to celebrate its end," Johnson said.
Johnson went onto the sidewalk where demonstrators carried cardboard signs saying "No Nukes Is Good Nukes" and another with "140,000 died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki," a reference to atomic bombs that were dropped 60 years ago this Aug. 6 and 9, respectively.
Johnson told the demonstrators that their signs would become part of the exhibit after opening day.
"We need to get the peace protests represented," said Linda Smith, a former Test Site worker and a museum board trustee, who said the exhibit is expected to be expanded in the next three to five years.
The Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, ranked second behind mining as Nevada's leading economy during the 1970s with more than 10,000 workers employed annually.
Troy Wade, a former Test Site manager, said it took 10 years and support from the Smithsonian Institute to open the museum.
The museum should become a place where all kinds of issues can be discussed, beyond the photos of bomb blasts, cereal boxes with mushroom clouds printed on them and short films -- including a simulated bomb blast -- shown inside a small theater, said Anne Street, a trustee from Washington, D.C.
"I'm so glad they invited the demonstrators inside," Street said. "I hope that that's the spirit this museum continues to have."
For 72-year-old Fred Powell and his wife, Gloria, of Coer d'Alene, Idaho, the tour brought back memories of a series of 11 above-ground nuclear weapons blasts in 1953 that the government called "Upshot-Knothole."
Powell was one of 20 members of a military police unit stationed at the Test Site during the 1953 atomic experiments and he slept in a tent at Camp Desert Rock.
"We can hardly find anyone still alive anymore," said Powell, who faces aortic surgery on Friday. He said he decided to come to the museum's opening before his operation.
Marine Sgt. Brandon Bormann, who came with his grandfather, former Marine Sgt. Robert Bormann, said he was fascinated by the "little gadgets" used to measure radiation after nuclear tests.
"I enjoyed it," said Bormann, who returned to Camp Pendleton, Calif., in September after serving seven months in Iraq. His grandfather, a Marine on board ships during the Pacific Islands nuclear tests, urged him to come.
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