The Nuclear Museum's Honest Reckoning

In nineteen sixty-nine, the Air Force established a museum on the grounds of Sandia Base near Kirtland Field, inside an old anti-aircraft gun repair facility. They called it the National Atomic Museum. Its mandate was to tell the story of American nuclear weapons, and in its first decades it told that story largely in the register of technical achievement: the physics, the engineering, the bomb designs, the delivery systems.

The museum received a congressional charter as a national museum in nineteen ninety-one, and its mission began expanding beyond weapons manufacturing to include the full sweep of nuclear science and history, from nuclear medicine to energy policy to the human costs of the atomic age. After the September two thousand one attacks restricted public access to the Kirtland base, the museum moved to Old Town Albuquerque and then reopened at its current home in southeast Albuquerque in April two thousand nine as the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. It holds a congressional charter as a national museum in its field and is a Smithsonian affiliate.

The current museum holds sixteen permanent indoor exhibit areas, including exhibits on the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb's cultural impact, nuclear medicine, and energy. Its outdoor Heritage Park displays military aircraft, missiles, vehicles, and the sail of the nuclear submarine USS James K. Polk. The museum does not flinch from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from the Bikini Atoll tests, or from the medical consequences of atmospheric testing on downwind communities in Nevada and the Southwest.

Albuquerque is the city that assembled the weapons. The museum is the city's attempt to look at what it assembled. That combination, the production site and the honest account of what it produced, makes it unlike any other museum in the country.