 the Mark 3 'Fat Man' that had been dropped onto the Japanese city of Nagasaki ten years earlier. Its mushroom cloud was visible for 100 miles. Nevada's biggest city watched in awe. Such was the naivety of the era. A generation of Americans, flushed in the afterglow of victory over Germany and Japan in 1945, but war){kind=link}
Seventy years ago, nuclear testing began in the Nevada desert – and tourists flocked to see the rise of the Atomic Age
A few seconds after midday, a cry went up from the crowd at the Desert Inn.
It continued for several moments, a mixture of excitement and admiration which – as it hung in the air – seemed to mimic the very thing that had caused it. Some 65 miles to the north-west, the mushroom cloud billowed up, puffed out its chest and rolled with that boiling grey-white fervour of the radioactive explosion. The main event. The headline act.
Back on the balcony, the onlookers murmured once more and sipped their cocktails – suitably impressed at the rise of the USA’s Atomic Age.
It seems a remarkable and unlikely image now. Improbable. And deeply distasteful. Not least here amid the tensions of 2022, when the spectre of nuclear war has risen from what we all hoped was the geopolitical grave, and Russia is rattling sabres of a type not brandished with menace in the best part of 40 years.