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Cold War Tourism: The remains of Armageddon: Revisiting the sites of America’s atomic arsenal
Last edited Mon Jun 22, 2015, 02:18 PM - Edit history (1)
The remains of Armageddon: Revisiting the sites of America’s atomic arsenalWriter Nicole Crowder June 18
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.
In the coming months, the National Park Service and the U.S. Department of Energy will establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park — preserving once-secret sites in Los Alamos, N.M., Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Hanford, Wash., where scientists raced to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. Public tours at these sites are already intensely popular, selling out within days. The Park Service is trying to improve access to these sites to meet the increasing public interest. Veteran photojournalist Jim Lo Scalzo of European Press Agency has been documenting many of these site–hidden in plain site–for the past year in a project titled “Next Exit: Armageddon”.
Yet elsewhere in the United States, the ruins of the Manhattan Project, and the arms race that followed, remain overlooked. In North Dakota, pyramid-like anti-missile radar, 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 used during the Cold War to help U.S. satellites focus their lenses before spying on the Soviet Union sits covered in weeds near a Motel 6 parking lot. In South Dakota, decommissioned nuclear missiles still aim skyward; in Nevada and New Mexico, the remains of nuclear testing still scar the desert. 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.”
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.
In the coming months, the National Park Service and the U.S. Department of Energy will establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park — preserving once-secret sites in Los Alamos, N.M., Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Hanford, Wash., where scientists raced to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. Public tours at these sites are already intensely popular, selling out within days. The Park Service is trying to improve access to these sites to meet the increasing public interest. Veteran photojournalist Jim Lo Scalzo of European Press Agency has been documenting many of these site–hidden in plain site–for the past year in a project titled “Next Exit: Armageddon”.
Yet elsewhere in the United States, the ruins of the Manhattan Project, and the arms race that followed, remain overlooked. In North Dakota, pyramid-like anti-missile radar, 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 used during the Cold War to help U.S. satellites focus their lenses before spying on the Soviet Union sits covered in weeds near a Motel 6 parking lot. In South Dakota, decommissioned nuclear missiles still aim skyward; in Nevada and New Mexico, the remains of nuclear testing still scar the desert. 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.”
Atomic Heritage Foundation
Next Exit, Armageddon: Photos of America's Nuclear Weapons Legacy
By Jim Lo Scalzo
June 16, 2015 | 3:05 pm
All photos by Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency
Tourists walk through a blast door at the Delta 01-Launch Control Facility just outside Wall, South Dakota.
The remains of a pyramid-like anti-missile radar, part of the the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, which was built during the Cold War to detect an incoming nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, is seen just outside Nekoma, North Dakota. The complex was completed in 1975 and was operational for less than a year before the Defense Department ended the Safeguard Program.
The world's first full-scale nuclear reactor, the historic B Reactor, is seen from the window of a bus tour of the Hanford Site. The B Reactor, which was built in secret in 1943-1944 and produced the plutonium used in the Fat Man bomb dropped over Nagasaki, Japan, will become part of the soon-to-be-established Manhattan Project National Historical Park.
June 16, 2015 | 3:05 pm
All photos by Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency
Tourists walk through a blast door at the Delta 01-Launch Control Facility just outside Wall, South Dakota.
The remains of a pyramid-like anti-missile radar, part of the the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, which was built during the Cold War to detect an incoming nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, is seen just outside Nekoma, North Dakota. The complex was completed in 1975 and was operational for less than a year before the Defense Department ended the Safeguard Program.
The world's first full-scale nuclear reactor, the historic B Reactor, is seen from the window of a bus tour of the Hanford Site. The B Reactor, which was built in secret in 1943-1944 and produced the plutonium used in the Fat Man bomb dropped over Nagasaki, Japan, will become part of the soon-to-be-established Manhattan Project National Historical Park.