The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History: Where the Bomb Came to Explain Itself
Near Albuquerque, New Mexico
In nineteen forty-five, the United States Army chose Albuquerque as the central node of its nuclear weapons complex. The decision was logistical: the high desert plateau, the distance from the coasts, the existing Kirtland Field airbase, and the proximity to Los Alamos, where the weapon was being designed, sixty miles to the north. The bomb was born in Los Alamos and assembled and stored in Albuquerque. The city has lived alongside that fact ever since.
The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History was founded in nineteen sixty-nine, originally on Kirtland Air Force Base, as a way of creating a public memory for what had happened here. It moved to its current site on Eubank Boulevard Southeast in two thousand nine, and it is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution.
What the museum holds is remarkable in its specificity. Full-scale replicas of Little Boy and Fat Man, the two weapons dropped on Japan in August of nineteen forty-five, stand in the main gallery. Visitors can walk around them. They are larger than most people expect. The museum also holds a B-Fifty-Two Stratofortress, an F-One Oh Five Thunderchief, and other aircraft configured to deliver nuclear weapons during the Cold War. These are not miniatures. They are the aircraft themselves, parked outside on the heritage park grounds, faded by the Albuquerque sun, accessible on foot.
The interpretive choices the museum makes are deliberate and not uniformly comfortable. The Pacific theater galleries document the destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki with photographs and survivor accounts. The Cold War galleries document the arms race, the shelter-building programs, the civil defense campaigns built around an assumption of survivability that most physicists considered false. The museum does not present the nuclear age as a triumph. It presents it as a fact about the world that requires understanding.
Albuquerque built the weapon, stored the weapon, and then built a museum to explain what it had done. That is an unusual sequence, and the museum takes it seriously.
