“Absolutely fascinating, even for the non-history buffs, since the issues of excessive secrecy still resonate today, maybe even more than back then.”
– George Knapp
Investigative Reporter, KLAS Channel 8 News
Introduction ~ A Non-violent Weapon
A weapon that makes others look like child’s play was first detonated by the United States at 5:29a.m. on July 16, 1945, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It’s a good thing no human was in range. At ground zero an unfathomable heat melted the dirt into radioactive glass.
A blinding flash lit up the sky. From a safe distance onlookers could see the white plume of fall-out rise in a towering mushroom cloud to neck-craning altitudes. The sound bellowed and the tremble registered on distant continents. Less than a month later, two of these bombs were used to kill more than 120,000 Japanese in an instant.
As if that weren’t testimony enough to its power, in the decades that followed hundreds of these explosions rocked the Nevada Test Site, ninety miles northwest of Las Vegas. This was also a powerful promotional tool for Las Vegas. To draw tourists, the emerging, world-renowned city encouraged word to leak out about when each “secret” explosion would take place.
Crowds of tourists and locals would gather at Mount Charleston to hear the rumble, feel the power and fear course through their bodies, and watch the enormous clouds of deadly dust rise and drift away in silence. Long after the visitors were gone, the radioactive fallout spread into the atmosphere every which way. It would often envelop Mount Charleston like a blanket on the very ground where the unsuspecting audiences had gathered.
Four years after America’s first explosion, Russia began its path of decimation with its first detonation of a nuclear device. The arms race was on. This was beyond the rattling of sabers. The thunderous test explosions filled the sky with mushroom clouds as superpowers pounded their soil like gorillas beating their chests — messages across continents between unofficial enemies.
Americans who lived through it say it was like two men standing in a pool of gasoline, neck-deep, fighting over who had more matches. Igniting just one of the many matches they were feverishly amassing could annihilate them both and alter the world as they knew it. This was their world.