vice | Sprinkled throughout the back roads of America are the remains of
Armageddon. Or what could have been Armageddon had the Cold War between
the United States and the Soviet Union suddenly gone hot.
The
ghosts of America's atomic arsenal, from development to deployment, are
accessible if you know where to look: in Arizona and South Dakota,
decommissioned nuclear missiles still aim skyward; in Nevada and New
Mexico, the remains of nuclear testing still scar the desert; and in
Tennessee and Washington state, the facilities that developed uranium
and plutonium for America's nuclear bombs gather dust.
In the
coming months, the National Park Service and the Department of Energy
will establish the Manhattan Project National Historical
Park — preserving once-secret sites at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and
Hanford, where scientists raced to develop the world's first atomic
bomb. Public tours at these sites are already ferociously popular,
selling out within days. The Park Service aims to better facilitate
access to these sites to meet increasing public interest.
Yet
elsewhere in the US, the ruins of the Manhattan Project and the arms
race that followed remain overlooked. In North Dakota, a pyramid-like
anti-missile radar that was built to detect an incoming nuclear attack
from the Soviet Union pokes through the prairie grass behind an open
fence. In Arizona, a satellite calibration target that was used during
the Cold War to help American satellites focus their lenses before
spying on the Soviet Union sits covered in weeds near a Motel 6 parking
lot. And in a suburban Chicago park, where visitors jog and bird watch,
nuclear waste from the world's first reactor — developed by Italian
physicist Enrico Fermi for the Manhattan Project in 1942 — sits buried
beneath a sign that reads "Caution — Do Not Dig."
Collectively,
these sites are a visible reminder of America's nuclear history — a time
when the threat of doomsday was as much a part of the landscape as the
national psyche.
