Atom Bomb Tourism: Las Vegas Marketed Its Own Exposure

The Chamber of Commerce printed the test schedule on a calendar. Tourists could plan their visits accordingly.

Beginning in January of nineteen fifty-one, the Nevada Test Site conducted nuclear weapons detonations about sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, and the city decided to treat it as an amenity. Hotels advertised rooftop viewing parties scheduled for pre-dawn hours when the light from a nuclear explosion was most visible against the desert sky. The Las Vegas Review-Journal ran upcoming test dates alongside entertainment listings. Casinos served drinks called Atomic Cocktails. The Miss Atomic Bomb beauty pageant crowned its first winner in nineteen fifty-two, the contestant posing in a costume shaped like a mushroom cloud.

The Atomic Energy Commission and Nevada regulators assured the public that the fallout posed no danger. This was the official position. Casino owners accepted it because accepting it was good for business. Tourists came for the shows, the gambling, and, for a period, the spectacle of a nuclear detonation visible from a hotel rooftop sixty miles away.

Above-ground testing at the Nevada Test Site continued until nineteen sixty-three, when the United States signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. By then, concerns about fallout had become harder to dismiss. The downwind communities of southern Utah had been experiencing elevated cancer rates for years. The viewing parties quietly ended. The calendars stopped being printed.

What the National Atomic Testing Museum preserves, a few miles east of the Strip, are the artifacts of that particular civic performance: the promotional materials, the cocktail menus, the beauty pageant photographs. They document a moment when a city looked at a nuclear weapons program in its backyard and decided the correct response was marketing.