Atomic Las Vegas (06.06.23)

I was flummoxed by Las Vegas last year, on my first visit there. Feathered showgirls on the street for photo opps, along with Midnight Cowboys, Rhinestone Cowboys and the occasional dominatrix brandishing a plastic whip. Also The Neon Museum, the shuttle driver “Eva Las Vegas” who makes a stop at a liquor store, and the Italian American Club, where everyone looked like an extra from The Sopranos. The wedding chapels. The Garage Mahal. The Liberace Mansion. Flummoxed might not be the right word. Bemused, confounded, a bit overwhelmed? And a touch of charmed.  

The city caught and surprised me repeatedly. Once it was a woman insistently calling me on the street to enter a spa to have my feet nibbled by goldfish. Again by a private home cryogenic chamber with a rack of promotional material. One Cryonics magazine in a display case had a headline story called “Culture Shock: Thinking about Re-integration after Preservation.” First sentence: “A common concern expressed by individuals contemplating  cryopreservation is the possible difficulty in psychological adjustment to an unknowable future.” Well, yes, now that I think of it, I suppose that would take some pondering. 

Travel is so broadening.

The image still on my mind from Vegas, though, is a sculpture in the lobby of the National Atomic Testing Museum. The statue is called Miss Atomic Bomb.

In the 1950s, as international rivalries and the cold war drove expansion of our country’s atomic capability, the federal government poured money and programs into the desert outside Las Vegas. A bare sixty-five miles from the city, bombs were exploded at the Nevada Testing Site. The formerly sleepy city grew 161% in ten years, and, along with gambling and The Strip, it sprouted an atomic tourism industry. Blast watch parties were held on the roofs of hotels. In early 1952, live television coverage began and atomic fever swept the country. Popular designs of everything went atomic: atomic cocktails, dish patterns, cereal boxes, and toys including a home laboratory which included an actual piece of uranium to make the little Geiger counter click. The box said U-238. Hope no children ingested it.

And later that spring, something arrived that seemed truly Las Vegas, a kind of unholy marriage between tourism and showgirl-ism and the cold war. Small town newspapers carried a photo of an atomic pin-up girl; “Miss Atomic Blast”, a showgirl and dancer named Candyce King, was anointed after a watch picnic held at the Last Frontier Hotel. The caption said that she “radiated loveliness instead of deadly atomic particles” and “dazzled US Marines who participated in recent atomic maneuvers.” They found her “as awe-inspiring in another way, as was the ‘Big Bang’”.

Ms. King was succeeded by three other atomic pin-ups in the following years, girls who won beauty contests and rode in parades. The photos were widely distributed as part of the culture and allure of Las Vegas.

The statue of Miss Atomic Bomb which stopped me in my tracks in the Museum lobby has a horrifying look, or perhaps a horrifying resonance. Her arms are flung up, her chin lifted, her knees cocked in a showgirl post, her body clad in a mushroom cloud; is she smiling or screaming? The nuclear test ban treaty, I read, was signed in 1963 after eight years of negotiations; work must have begun on the ban as the Atomic pin-up girls were being distributed and touted.

The treaty, and fear, held the threat of nuclear warfare in some abeyance, but in January of this year, 2023, the metaphorical Doomsday Clock was moved very close to midnight. Headlines were dire. CNBC: Putin’s Nuclear Threats Move Doomsday Clock Closest Ever to Armageddon, Atomic Scientists Say.  And on April 3, un.org published this article: Many Speakers Voice Concern Over Increase in Dangerous Nuclear Weapons Rhetoric Amidst Ongoing War Against Ukraine. 

And in May of 2023, survivors of the atomic bomb blast in Japan were speaking, or trying to speak, to leaders of the G-7, an informal bloc of industrialized nations which includes the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Their summit was taking place in Hiroshima, which was the first city in the world to suffer a nuclear attack; around 140,000 people were killed. According to an NPR story via Apple News, the survivors, called “hibakusha”, did not know if their message would be heard. The former leader of the museum at the Hiroshima Peace Park said the exhibits could not possibly tell the whole story, since they can reproduce sights and sounds but not smells. “The smell that 140,000 citizens emit when their bodies rot and are thrown under the blazing sun cannot be forgotten, even almost eighty years later,” said Hiroshi Harada, who was six years old, and a mile away from the blast center in 1945. He survived because he happened to be standing in the shadow of the train station. His family was trying to leave the city. 

The G-7 leaders wrote messages in the guestbooks at the museum during their visit. I suppose there were photo opps. Harada described the messages as “superficial.”

Perhaps the Atomic Testing Museum is less dusty, and more relevant, than it first appears. Perhaps bemused is the wrong response to Miss Atomic Bomb.

The Vegas museum is Smithsonian-related now, and tour guides are drawn from former workers at the test sites. Ours, retired testing engineer Michael H., still wore his identification badge from 1984, his younger face fresh and his older face sagging but smiling. When he worked the underground tests, he said, it was twelve hundred feet down to his workplace. When our group stepped into the faux bunker, the Ground Zero Theatre, to experience the simulated explosion, it shook and rumbled as he told us not to worry about the flash. We’d be fine, he said.

We would definitely not be fine. No one would be fine. Take a close look at “Miss Atomic Bomb.” The Doomsday Clock is now set at ninety seconds to midnight.

(I traveled to Vegas with a small group on an off-the-Strip tour; see www.mayertravel.com Beyond The Neon.)