Boyd Matson | Wild Chronicles

nukes over nevada

Nuking Nevada.  If you’re worried about someone setting off a nuclear weapon in the United States, it’s a little too late.  We’ve already had hundreds of nuclear explosions within our own borders, the atomic fury unleashed by our own government.  A little patch of desert in Nevada has been the target of more than nine hundred of those explosions as we developed and tested ever bigger and more destructive weapons.

For a while we even had a program called Operation Plowshare where we attempted to follow the Biblical admonition and beat our swords into plowshares by developing nukes for peace.  Clearly that program to build stuff by blowing up stuff didn’t work.

I was reminded of my visits to the Nevada test site this week on my radio show, National Geographic Weekend when interviewing Lucy Craft who wrote the story about Japan’s Nuclear Refugees in this month’s National Geographic Magazine.  Some of the towns around the compromised Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant are still to this day empty ghost towns.

On the show we discuss Japan and what’s happened after the Fukushima fallout and I also talk about my Nevada visits.  Afterwards, I remembered a visit I once made to the National Atomic Museum, a museum where we pay tribute to our unique ability to blowup stuff.

This video has highlights of my atomic museum and Nevada Test Site visits.  It’s a blast