Bob Sheahan had grown up around Groom Mine, with its cluster of work buildings and adjacent cabins. The mine has been in his family since 1885 and his father, Dan, ran it now. Bob was thirty-one, a former engineering student at the University of Nevada, when one day in early 1951 a polite, well-dressed man from the Atomic Energy Commission came calling. There would be atomic blasts, he warned them, at the new proving ground about thirty miles to the southwest, and some radioactive fallout might drift over the mountains. It would head northeast toward them, crossing the Groom Range at Coyote Gap, near the site of what would become the town of Rachel, with its little monitoring site on the town square. The AEC man gave the Sheahans a Geiger counter and taught them how to use it. He left flat sticky plates to catch fallout for later testing. He set up a radio.
Dan Sheahan had the Atomic Energy Commission boys sign his guest book. “We’re all family,” he said.
The first shot, on February 2, 1951, broke the Sheahans’ front door and cracked several windows. Others quickly followed. With the Korean War turning ugly, research into tactical nuclear weapons was pushing ahead hard.
Soon the Sheahans began to see signs of the fallout. Bits of metal big enough to pick up with a magnet, all that was left of the vaporized steel towers, fell out of the sky. The Geiger counter showed the metal was hot.
Strange white spots about the size of a silver dollar began to appear on the backs of cattle and horses. These, the AEC man would tell them, were called beta burns. One day Sheahan saw an object on the ground, and when he got close he found it was a dead deer, marked with the same white spots as the cattle. He noticed something else strange: There were very few rabbits. Usually, the desert was full of them — you would mount any rise and startle one — but now he hardly saw any.
The first series of shots came in rapid succession. They were part of the series called Upshot Knothole. But the fallout from the series called Operation Buster Jangle was worse. These were run mostly by the Army, which set up a whole tent town at the proving ground called Camp Desert Rock and exposed tanks and troops and all sorts of equipment to the edges of the blast. In one test, the Army tried to determine the effects of an atomic blast on uniforms at varying distances from ground zero. Miniature uniforms complete with zippers, snaps, and toggles were custom sewn to fit each of 111 white Chester hogs. The pig was chosen because, flattering to our species or not, its muscle and fat distribution most nearly resemble those of a human being.
Most of the pigs, each in its specially tailored little pig uniform, ended up barbecued alive, and there must have been a smell of roasting pork that might not have been entirely repulsive. The test was jokingly called “The Charge of the Swine Brigade.” But the troops too were being exposed — far more than many knew — to radiation.
On May 5, 1952, soldiers came to warn the Sheahans of an impending very “dirty shot” and suggested they evacuate. Dan and Bob Sheahan stayed; the rest of the family went to Las Vegas. The next day, a blast went off that broke windows and ripped sheet metal from the buildings.
Worst of them all was the ninth shot in the series, code-named Harry, on March 24, 1953. It irradiated some four thousand sheep being herded through Coyote Gap. Within a few days they would all die.
The fallout from the Harry blast traveled as far as St. George, Utah — to the northeast — with deadly effect. Years later the trail of cancers it left among the “downwinders” became the subject of lawsuits. By the nineties, however, it was clear that most of the American population had been downwinders. A report credited the blasts with causing some seventy thousand cases of thyroid cancer alone.
After “Dirty Harry,” cattle drinking from Papoose Lake died, but the Sheahans still felt the AEC was taking care of them. They once made a trip to the office at the test site. An officer forthrightly explained to them that the shots were set off when the winds blew toward Groom, to avoid sending the fallout toward Las Vegas.
Once, the soldiers came to check the Sheahans’ water hole. They took samples and the sergeant assured them it was fine. Then one of the enlisted men asked if he could have a cup of water. “Can’t you wait until we get back to camp, soldier?” his commander gruffly interrupted. When the men realized the implications of their exchange, both became silent and embarrassed.
During all this time, Dan and Bob Sheahan had to halt operations at the mine, sometimes for two weeks at a time, because of the tests. Nor was the mine safe from conventional weapons. It was still part of the gunnery and bombing range, and in 1954, an overeager trainee strafed the mine buildings, presumably mistaking them for one of the target buildings on the range.
Finally Dan Sheahan discovered that his wife, Martha, had cancer. He would eventually sue the AEC, but the Sheahans held on to their land and mine, passing it to the next generation, Pat and Bob, and worked out an uneasy truce with the Air Force. But Bob never showed off his photographs, and into the nineties he was afraid to talk at all about the mine lest the Air Force make his life difficult.
By the seventies, Martha Sheahan had wondered how the military could say they were defending freedom at the base while trampling on the freedoms of those on its edge. But after the guards showed up at the mine in 1984, the Sheahans fell silent. At least some of the family were given security clearances, and when I talked to them in the mid-nineties other family members were still unwilling to criticize what the government had done. “They take care of us,” one family member said of the Air Force. He refused to talk. He didn’t want to be identified.
The dirty blasts of the early fifties baptized Groom and Papoose lakes in radiation. And the base that would grow up there, like a gigantic sci-fi mutant, would share the ethos of emergency, justifying the pollution of the “unpopulated” areas around it.
In its own irrepressible way, Las Vegas seized on the proximity of the test site in a more festive manner. The bright boomerangs and bubbles of neon on the Strip arrived just about the same time the flying saucers did. In honor of the destruction of Doomtown, the suburban town built in 1955 for the Apple II explosion, one Vegas hotel filled its swimming pool with mushrooms. Parties assembled to watch the blasts from convenient high spots. There were picnics on Mount Charleston, halfway up to Mercury, a future site of Interceptor expeditions. Even weddings were scheduled to coincide with nuclear tests: honeymoon in Las Vegas! Did the earth move for you too, dear? The mushroom cloud became another party theme, like the themes of the Old West, the Middle East, Ancient Rome, invoked as keynotes for decor at the Frontier, the Sands, or Caesars Palace. The Flamingo served an Atomic Cocktail — vodka, brandy, schnapps, and a touch of sherry. Gigi, its top hairdresser, arranged wire to produce an Atomic Hairdo. In May 1957 the Sands held a Miss Atomic Bomb contest in which the competing beauties appeared with the iconic mushroom cloud, modeled in cotton, glued to their silvery swimsuits.
Las Vegas is hardly typical of the United States, but for a time the whole country shared in the eagerness to embrace the atom. The historian Paul Boyer calls it the search for the silver lining to the mushroom cloud. There was an effort to downplay the effects of fallout and blast — it was actually proposed that a good wide-brimmed hat could offer a lot of protection — and civil defense drills became a common activity for schoolchildren. The stylized logo of the atom, with its zippy futuristic orbiting electrons, was soon joined by the three triangles on yellow of the fallout shelter as nuclear age icons. Disney published a children’s book called Our Friend the Atom, and the Boy Scouts added an atomic energy merit badge to their sashes. But beneath the cheery atom culture — so well documented in the 1982 film The Atomic Cafe—was a deeper and frequently denied fear. The atomic bomb shook heartland America to the core.