In 1951, the U.S. Department of Energy allowed nuclear devices to be tested at the Nevada Test Site. The detonations took place in the Nevada desert, about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. What attracted both residents and tourists were the mushroom clouds that lit up the sky.
Casinos, such as Binion’s Horseshoe and the Desert Inn, were promoting their best viewing spots to see the the mushroom clouds. Crowds were dancing and drinking while the sky was lit up during the detonation times. Beauty pageants were held at the Las Vegas Sands, where the winner would be crowned “Miss Atomic Energy.” Though fun and games were had, attendees had no idea they were going to later on feel the ill-effects of contaminated particles and radioactive dust, as explained by u/lewistherintelamon.
In an interview with City Lab, Allen Palmer, executive director of the National Atomic Testing Museum, described what would happen when the warheads detonated. Palmer said, “They would light up the sky. It turned night into day.”
“People were fascinated by the clouds, by this idea of unlocking secrets of atom. But there was absolutely an underlying fear—we were so close by,” added Palmer.
U/ragnar_ok mentioned the tragic behind-the-scenes story of director Dick Powell’s The Conqueror. In the 1956 historical drama, Genghis Khan (John Wayne) kidnaps and falls in love with Bortai (Susan Heyward) was seen as Bortai, the daughter of the Tartar leader. The user said, “They filmed it downwind on one of these testing facilities, at twice the distance of these viewing parties, and a lot of the people on set got cancer.”
Though the production crew knew they were filming downwind from the Nevada Test Site, the government assured them that the nuclear tests weren’t hazardous to their health. Of the 220 cast and crew members involved in the making of the film, about 91 of them contracted cancer, including Wayne, Hayward and Powell.
In 1980, Dr. Robert C. Pendleton, director of radiological health at the University of Utah, told People, “The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size, you’d expect only 30-some cancers to develop. With 91, I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up even in a court of law.”
Reddit users shared stories about what their relatives saw during the detonations. 2muchyarn remembered what his uncle, who was involved with the military, had said, “They were told to cover their eyes with their hands, the only protection offered. He saw his bones though the skin, basically his own x-ray. He died from complications many years later.”
U/red5tz also mentioned his uncle had top-secret clearance from the Navy, which allowed him to attend the nuclear bombings at Bikini Atoll. The Reddit user mentioned, “He said that even through wearing the thick goggles, there were more colors in those bombs that are seen in the world. And that even the color footage recordings of those bombs could never do justice as to the richness of the intense colors.”
