This renewed talk of building nuclear weapons here in the US reminded me of an old report of photos of the sky glow from nuclear tests done in Nevada seen over Los Angeles. This one includes the following description:

Atomic explosion, the largest yet set off on the Nevada test range, was clearly visible in Los Angeles. Staff photographer Perry Folwer was ready with his camera on a tripod on the roof of the Herald-Express building when the blast occurred at 5:49 a.m. Reporter Jack Smith, points towards the great white flash that clearly silhouetted mountains to the east. The brilliant spectacle was seen by many early-rising residents of Los Angeles. Photo dated: February 2, 1951.

More: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

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The first license plate to remember Nevada’s history as the host of the US’s nuclear testing grounds drew criticism for featuring a mushroom cloud (see the plate on the right, above). Now it appears folks are at it again, this time with a plate that depicts the site’s area and includes the classic illustration of an atom’s electron cloud.

All of this generated enough interest to bring the local media out to the Atomic Testing Museum to gawk at the proposed plate, including an actual-sized rendition being shown off on a Lincoln Navigator.

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I convinced Sandee to join me at Atomic Liquors on Fremont Street, just beyond the Western Hotel Casino in what the Las Vegas Sun calls the “gritty underbelly of Las Vegas.”

Owner Joe Sobchick and his wife Stella started business in 1945 with a cafe called Virginia’s. They converted it into a bar in 1953, and changed the name to recognize their proximity to the nuclear tests just 60 miles away.

Now nearly 90, Joe believes he’s been in business longer than any other single bar owner in town, and it’s been a good run. You’ll see his sign in TV, magazines, and movies, most famously perhaps in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) with Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone.

The decline of the neighborhood challenged the Sobchiks, but they fought back. And amazingly — for a city that is constantly reinventing itself — the community seems to have stood behind them.

I guess not everybody in Nevada loves the Test Site as much as this postcard might suggest, but hey, what do tourists know? The image comes from _roberta’s Flickr photostream, and she doesn’t seem too critical.

About 850 miles southeast today, the Trinity Site — where the world’s first atomic weapon was detonated in a test on July 16, 1945 at 5:29:45 a.m. — is open to the public.

It’s said that visitors have already scavenged all the atomic glass from the desert floor under ground zero. Though it’s not the sort of thing you really wanna have in your pocket anyway.

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While looking for a picture for my memorial to the bomb, I found a number of related links. This blog is sometimes nothing more than an annotated bookmark list, and this is why….

The Bomb Project describes itself as:

a comprehensive on-line compendium of nuclear-related links, imagery and documentation. It is intended specifically as a resource for artists, and encourages those working in all media, from net.art, film and video, eco-intervention and site-specific installation to more traditional forms of agitprop, to use this site to search for raw material.

Google, however, pointed me to their old index. It’s there that I found links to Bruce Conner’s Bombhead and Robert Longo’s Nagasaki, part of his Sickness of Reason gallery.

Gregory Walker at Virgina Polytechnic’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture maintains pages of information on the effects of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. It’s here that you’ll find three videos of nuclear tests, including a house blown away, planes destroyed, and trees snapped like matchsticks. These things are scary, even rotten.com has a page on atomic bombs.

Carey Sublette’s The Nuclear Weapon Archive is included in this list mainly because it quotes H.G. Wells:

…And these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them.

Finally, Animation World Network has an interesting story on Walt Disney’s nuclear propaganda. More amusing than that, however, may be this 1957 atomic revolution comic book, from which the image above is taken.

Extra: don’t forget Blondie’s Atomic.

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In what was to be the final act of World War II in the Pacific, the United States made the first and only use of nuclear power as a weapon in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th (US dates), 1945.

George Weller of the Chicago Daily News snuck in to Nagasaki in early September 1945 and became the first American journalist to see the destruction. His stories were censored, and official sources maintained control of news about the bombings and the aftermath for many years.

Mainichi Daily News has a pair of photo galleries of Hiroshima bomb damage and how the city remembers the bomb today.

Nuclear-related stories at MaisonBisson.

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