It's a Nuclear World


When I was about fourteen or fifteen, they, meaning the military, started testing the atomic bomb at a place called Frenchman Flat. It was about 60 miles north of Las Vegas. At that time, we lived in Boulder City, Nevada. It is a real curiosity to me that they announced when they were going to set the bomb off or drop it from a plane. The official reason was to make sure that people were completely out of the area. I sometimes thought that it might have been to alert the Russian spies that some people thought were in the area so that they didn’t have to stay up all night and would be able to see the power of the bomb and leave the United States alone. I don’t really know; they never asked me for my input or any one else that I know of in Clark County, Nevada.
One morning very early, still dark, my father woke my little brother and me up to go out and see the bomb blast. At the time I wasn’t really all that interested in watching the bomb, but Dad wanted us to see it and so we went. I don’t remember what time of year it was, but it was cool on the desert. We went out past Railroad Pass and were sitting on a little rise near what was then the Star Bar. Well, the sun finally came up and we went home. They had canceled the test for that day. The next week we repeated the adventure. My dad had broken out the bottoms of dark brown beer bottles to look through to see the blast. It was not a good idea to look at the blast with the naked eye. He had broken off all of the bottle but the bottom and had smoothed the side where the broken glass was. Again, we sat there for a very long time. Then at the time they had announced, we sat with the beer glass bottom held up to look through to see the blast.  Even as far away as where we were, the light was still very bright. It was unbelievable, like someone had set off all of the Fourth of July fireworks at one time. It didn’t last long, just a massive flash of light and then nothing.
I was ready to get in the car, warm up and go home. My dad said that we should just stand there and think about the power of the bomb for a few minutes, which we did, and then a few moments later the ground around us shook like an earthquake. It wasn’t a violent shaking but it was shaking, and along with it came a rumbling noise. That was an effect of the bomb that was 60 miles north of Las Vegas and probably 70 miles north of where we were. In Las Vegas it broke some of the windows on the Strip. I think that the government paid to have them replaced. I suspect that there may have been a few windows that were already broken that were reported to have been the result of the bomb.
I was able to see another blast with my dad after that, but it was never as impressive to me as the first one I saw. One time we had been to St George and on the way home all the traffic was stopped. We were sprayed off and told to keep our windows rolled up until we reached Las Vegas. The area where they tested the bombs is still radioactive and will remain so for hundreds of years. They finally quit testing the bomb above ground and started testing them underground which was safer for the population. We weren’t all that important of a state, good for testing the bomb and for dumping and storing all of the country’s nuclear waste. There were 928 bombs tested, one hundred above ground and 828 underground. There would have been a lot less testing if they had chosen Washington D.C. to store the radioactive waste.
I guess I am lucky that I don’t glow in the dark. I wonder if I can blame my weird sense of humor on the exposure to radiation.

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