Where America's Nuclear Age Went to Explain Itself

The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque is the only institution in the United States with a charter from Congress to tell the story of the atomic age. It opened its current location in two thousand nine, on Eubank Boulevard southeast of Kirtland Air Force Base, which is itself one of the largest nuclear weapons storage sites in the world. The museum's outdoor Heritage Park displays the actual hardware: B-twenty-nine bombers, a restored Fat Man bomb casing of the type dropped on Nagasaki, a Titan Two intercontinental ballistic missile, and a full-scale replica of Little Boy.

Inside, exhibits trace the Manhattan Project from its origins in theoretical physics to the Trinity test roughly one hundred miles south of here and on through the Cold War arms race and nuclear medicine. Albuquerque grew up around the bomb. This is where you can look directly at what that means.