Nevada -- Blasts From The Past: Touring A-Bomb Test Site

FRENCHMAN FLAT, Nevada - Peaceful in the desert sunshine, this lake bed in the desert has known fire.

From 1951 to 1959, the government conducted 100 atmospheric tests of nuclear bombs here and in adjoining Yucca Flat.

Bob Freiter never actually saw Frenchman Flat, but he's been there. Now 68 and retired in Anaheim, Calif., Freiter was a 22-year-old gunner on a B-50 bomber that on April 1953 dropped an 11-kiloton atomic bomb on the flat, 60 miles north of Las Vegas.

"We had on black goggles," he recalls. "I couldn't see too well. But the radio man says to me, `Bob, this is historic. Take a look.'

"It was like 800 flashbulbs going off. I was temporarily blinded. The bomber lurched upward when the bomb dropped. The pilot did one circle around the mushroom, and we got the hell out of there."

After the incandescent flash, the blistering heat, the shock wave pulsing across the open desert, a battalion of Marines, sheltered in a bunker 2,000 yards from ground zero, clambered out of their foxholes and began a slow march toward the rising fireball.

Says former Marine Al Sheahan: "All around, the shrubs were burning. Plaster dummies outfitted in Marine uniforms had been charred black. Tanks and jeeps were knocked over and smoking.

"This wasn't an equipment test. This was for the psychological effect on the troops. How we'd behave on the atomic battlefield."

Part of history

Atomic tests like the ones Freiter and Sheahan experienced began here when the Korean War still raged, and Cold War fears were at their height. The country was in a feverish race with the Soviets for nuclear supremacy.

"In those days, the Russians were exploding huge devices, 50 megatons, in the atmosphere," says Department of Energy spokesman Derek Scammell, whose Las Vegas office oversees the test site. "Nuclear testing was a national security issue. No matter what you think about it, this is part of our nation's history."

Now, Scammell says, the Energy Department is considering opening the heavily guarded, once top-secret area to commercial tour operators, who would introduce visitors from all over the world to this surrealistic moonscape cratered from A-bomb blasts, and littered with the relics and artifacts of four decades of atomic experiments.

Visitors would see, for instance, the remains of "Doom Town," a cluster of 19 houses and buildings meant to represent the average American suburb. The streetscape was used in a civil-defense test to gauge how well the average tract house would stand up to nuclear shock and fire.

Mannequins dressed as typical suburban Americans were placed inside the houses in poses representing everyday activities, such as cooking, or watching television. Fresh food was placed on the dining-room table.

In the upstairs bedroom of one house, waggish pranksters on the work crew posed two of the mannequins in a conjugal embrace.

That shot, Apple-2, a 37-kiloton bomb fired from atop a 700-foot tower, knocked houses flat at 3,000 yards. But a wood-frame house at 6,000 yards survived and is still standing, albeit burned and weather-beaten. A two-story brick house at 8,000 yards also remains, a stark silhouette on the flat desert floor.

To see what survived

In the series of above-ground tests, both military and civilian vehicles were sacrificed, as were a diesel locomotive and a string of freight cars. A long chain of motel rooms was built, to see which materials would best stand up to pressure of 450 pounds per square foot.

Stretches of bridges were built, as were a radio station, an electric grid and dozens of experimental bomb shelters.

A bank vault manufacturer volunteered his best product to see if it would preserve currency and documents through doomsday.

Animals were there, too. Dogs and rabbits were penned in the bomb shelters. And wire cages 2,000 yards from ground zero contained Cheshire pigs, whose skin is similar to human epidermis.

To make it even more realistic, the drugged pigs were dressed in swatches of fabrics - cotton, rayon, silk - typically worn by Americans in the '50s.

Now most of these relics are gone, cleared and buried in a pit containing low-level nuclear waste.

Limited tours now

Currently, some 10,000 visitors a year tour the site aboard buses provided by the Energy Department, escorted by former test site employees acting as docents, even though the site, abutting an Air Force bombing range, is tightly controlled. According to the rules, a visitor needs a security clearance, a badge, and an escort.

Prospective visitors must phone the Energy Department's public-affairs office well in advance, and provide Social Security number, date and place of birth, and place of employment. Foreign citizens have to supply additional information. No cameras, binoculars, telescopes, tape recorders or cell phones are allowed.

Once the red tape is out of the way, the tour is free, aboard chartered air-conditioned buses, and lasts from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

"The tour is safe," Scammell says. "The amount of radiation coming off the craters and relics is no greater than normal background radiation a person would get from standing in the sunlight."

The Sedan Crater

The idea that the site has historical significance, comparable to a Civil War battlefield, already has gained some adherents among scholars.

William Gray Johnson, an archaeologist hired by an Energy Department subcontractor to determine the eligibility of test-site structures for the National Register of Historic Sites, thinks Frenchman Flat should be officially recognized "as one of the most important sites in human history."

"We are very lucky that we are not doing this sort of archaeology in cities," Johnson says.

One awesome relic of the atomic tests already has found a spot on the National Register. The Sedan Crater is a gigantic hole 1,000 feet in diameter and 300 feet deep.

It's the product of a test conducted as part of the Plowshare Program, which hoped to find peaceful uses for atomic energy.

Scientists led by H-bomb inventor Edward Teller hoped that atomic bombs could be used to construct harbors, reservoirs and storage tanks, and even dig a new canal across the isthmus of Panama.

The Panamanian scheme fizzled after scientists realized it would take at least 1,000 H-bombs, and that the consequent radioactive fallout on jungle habitat would be biologically unacceptable.

Other contenders for the National Register are the two remaining houses in Doom Town, and the collection of battered relics on Frenchman Flat.

Atmospheric and underground tests

In 1949, President Eisenhower, citing the need for a continental nuclear test site to replace the Pacific atolls of Bikini and Enewetak, picked what was then the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range, because it was a huge area under government control, and had little water to contaminate and few nearby residents.

The United States conducted 100 atmospheric nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site before the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1962, which prohibited testing in the atmosphere.

After atmospheric tests were banned, the government continued to use the test site for underground testing. As of 1993, when all U.S. nuclear testing ended, 925 nuclear devices had been exploded at the site.

During the atmospheric tests, bombs were dropped from planes and balloons and exploded on towers. In one instance a 15-kiloton nuclear shell was fired from a 280mm cannon.

In one of the most controversial of the experiments from the early '50s, thousands of troops from were deployed in maneuvers immediately after the detonations, from trenches 2,500-7,000 yards from ground zero.

During these atmospheric tests, scientists found the tower the most convenient way to control the moment of detonation, since tests had to wait until the wind was blowing away from population centers in California and Las Vegas.

The fallout went somewhere

The radioactive fallout went somewhere. It drifted east, over rural Nevada and Utah. Reacting to health concerns about radioactive dust falling on Utah villages, the Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor of the Energy Department) in 1955 circulated a reassuring but probably disingenuous booklet to rural residents that claimed the tests posed no danger, although, as one chapter heading allowed, "Fallout Can Be Inconvenient."

"Many persons in Nevada, Utah, Arizona and nearby California have Geiger counters these days," says the booklet. "We can expect many reports that `Geiger counters were going crazy here today.' Reports like this may worry people unnecessarily. Don't let them bother you."

According to Carole Gallagher, in her book "American Ground Zero," radiation from fallout during 1953, "the dirtiest year," killed 4,500 of the 14,000 sheep on the Utah range downwind from the test site. Gallagher claims that Atomic Energy Commission memos from the '50s referred to the sheep ranchers living downrange as "a low-use segment of the population."

Says Scammell: "People need to take the test program in context. I believe that without a convincing and reliable nuclear deterrent there would have been another major world war."

Although atomic testing is over for now, the site still is being used for other experiments that need room, particularly those involving the firing of high explosives and the cleanup of toxic chemical spills.

Of the more than 1,300 square miles of the test site (the size of Rhode Island), 100 square miles were used during the tests. Of these, 42 are contaminated with underground radiation that will remain lethal for 250,000 years. ------------------------------------------- If you go:

Until officials decide about commercial tours at the site, to take an Department of Energy tour, call its public-affairs office in Las Vegas, 702-295-0944.