Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2005 | 8:18 a.m.
Along the walkway lined with aluminum handrails a timeline unfolds through the nuclear age, depicting international history in photos, videos and letters.
Much of that history came through Nevada, the nation's nuclear proving ground.
Six years after the Trinity test, the United States government developed the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, where a total of 928 nuclear experiments were detonated out of a total of 1,054 since the nuclear age began.
Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy all played roles in developing the test site. Truman approved the Nevada Proving Ground on Dec. 18, 1950, carving out a continental testing range that would be the site of nuclear-weapons experiments until September 1992.
The story of the nuclear age is captured in sound, flashing lights, film clips, interactive displays and documents inside the three-story, 66,000-square-foot Frank H. Rogers Science & Technology Building.
The museum, on the campus of the Desert Research Institute, opens to the public Feb. 20. The Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institute, designed the museum to show the full story of atomic testing and its impact on society.
For Linda M. Smith, second in command under Nick Aquilina, U.S. Department of Energy's Nevada Operations Office manager from 1987 to 1994, the story of the making of the atomic bomb is told objectively.
"It's not a glorification," Smith said. "This is something in cultural context." The museum features displays of items from the test site, along with other cultural items that detail the times. There are also simulations and displays, showing what testing was like.
But the real story is told by the thousands of people who worked at the test site from 1951 until 1992.
When Peggy Bostian traveled to the test site every day to work for major contractor Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company and then for Herb Grier of Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier -- EG & G the chief monitoring contractor -- it was a perilous drive.
"When I was out there, it was a two-lane highway," Bostian said as she guided visitors through the museum recently during a private tour.
U.S. 95 leading to the test site was known as "the widow-maker" because so many fatal crashes occurred along its 65-mile stretch.
Bostian is marketing and development officer for the Atomic Testing Museum. She is helping to solve some of the mysteries of those days when test site activities were top secret.
Researchers have been working to put various pieces and people together to explain what happened at the test site.
Supporters believe the museum is an important effort to keep the historical significance of the Test Site's activities in the public eye.
For Troy Wade, who managed the Test Site in the 1970s and 1980s, the powerful above- and below-ground blasts reminded the world of peace through strength.
"All of a sudden the sky lights up and everything lights up and then the shock wave comes," Wade said in a video clip. "Once you saw it, you understood why it must never be used."
Wade believes the nuclear weapons experiments at the Test Site prevented World War III.
"I consider myself a soldier in the Cold War," Wade said. "We made the country safer."
Photographer Al O'Donnell said he was proud of the work accomplished by the thousands of those who worked at the Test Site. He could never understand the anti-nuclear demonstrators.
"We protected their freedom of speech," O'Donnell said.
For those who never experienced the piercing white light of an atomic blast, there's a theater with wooden benches, like those at Newsman's Nob, where the media went in the 1950s to witness atomic blasts.
The sight of the mushroom cloud rising and the shock wave quaking the earth and raising the desert's dust are all re-created in the theater.
The museum follows the rise of the atomic age in part by noting the equipment and products that came about during that time.
In addition to the glass cases filled with radiation monitors, scaled-back bombs and radiation badges worn by each worker, a pop culture case contains a box of Kix cereal advertising a "Kix atomic bomb ring," Atomic FireBall candies and a large metal box full of Civil Defense all-purpose survival crackers made by the Kroger Company.
The museum tour begins with its ticket booth -- a replica of the Test Site's security center.
The museum presents a history of the area before atomic testing, which includes petroglyphs. The site was crossed by "49ers" headed to California, saw miners in a short-lived boom in the 1800s and was visited by ranchers.
The museum presents atmospheric testing, as the Nevada Test Site saw 100 atmospheric tests from January 1951 to July 1962.
In 1963 President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev signed a treaty to require that both superpowers' nuclear experiments be held underground.
The museum marks that transition in testing as well.
Visitors can walk through a 10-foot-wide decoupler pipe, part of the pipeline between an underground bomb and trailers loaded with instruments to record the blast in less than a millionth of a second. The decou- plers allowed the instruments to capture the test's results without releasing radioactivity.
The museum also looks at environmental management at the site and future and alternative uses.
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