In the 1950s, the US Army fell in love with nuclear weapons, and began building them by the hundreds. Each new design feature had to be tested, and to do that, the US selected a patch of desert not very far from Las Vegas (it was not uncommon to see mushroom clouds from the casinos at the Vegas Strip. Today, the National Atomic Testing Museum in Vegas displays some artifacts from the Nevada Test Site.

Here are some photos from a visit.

The museum

Inside the museum

One of the graphite bricks used to make the first nuclear reactor, for the Manhattan Project, in Chicago

A safety glass used during the Trinity atomic bomb test

Civil Defense manuals from the 1950s and 1960s

A comic-book version for the kids

Genie nuclear air-to-air missile

B-53 thermonuclear bomb

B-61 nuclear bomb

My hand to show scale

“Davy Crockett” nuclear rocket-propelled grenade. Yes, seriously.

My hand to show scale

W-48 nuclear artillery shell. It had a yield about the same as the Hiroshima bomb.

Equipment used to observe nuclear explosions, known as KITE.

Another piece of test equipment, known as FOAM.

High-speed camera used to record atomic tests

Fish-eye camera used to record underground nuclear tests

The Krakatau equipment used to test modern weapons without an explosion

Phoebus, an experimental rocket engine powered by a nuclear reactor

Portable equipment carried by NEST (Nuclear Emergency Search Teams). Designed to look for hidden terrorist nukes, it was also used to find crash-landed nuclear-powered satellites.

A collection of geiger counters and dosimeters