The National Atomic Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico: Where “Weapon Shapes” Are Not Enough (1989)

THE NATIONAL ATOMIC MUSEUM, ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO: WHERE “WEAPON SHAPES” ARE NOT ENOUGH KENNETH ARNOLD Adobe buildings, Native American artifacts, and flat, dry land­ scapes punctuated by stubborn mesas—these are among the ele­ ments that determine one’s initial impression of northern New Mexico, and it is from them that the country gains something of its timeless quality. But our own century has had an impact here, too; after all, Los Alamos, the birthplace of atomic weaponry, is one of the larger towns in the area. And not far away is a museum devoted to these weapons, the National Atomic Museum. The National Atomic Museum is located within the confines of Kirtland Air Force Base, southeast of downtown Albuquerque. To get to it, one has to enter the base through a checkpoint cut into an imposing fence. That done, there is little danger of missing the museum, marked as it is by an outdoor display of missiles, heavy artillery, and a gigantic B-52 bomber. These details of the museum’s immediate context are not irrelevant; rather, they help in understand­ ing the tone of the exhibits inside and the virtual absence of anything beyond a strictly military context. The museum was opened in 1969 under the aegis of the Defense Nuclear Agency, then was transferred to the Department of Energy in 1976. This may explain the presence of newer exhibits treating nuclear energy in more general terms. But the museum’s core remains a display dating from the opening twenty years ago, a display of “unclassified nuclear weapon shapes.” This odd phrase, which appears in a museum flier, is striking in its aggressive neutrality. As it turns out, however, the words appear to have been chosen carefully. The exhibit’s backdrop includes photographs and brief labels, mounted on walls into which are set a number of television monitors displaying newsreels from the 1930s and 1940s. In front are the weapon shapes themselves: Little Boy, Fat Man, Lulu, Davy Crockett, Mr. Arnold, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, is writing a dissertation entitled “Cabinets for the Curious: Science in English Museums, 1600—1759.”©1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3003-0003$01.00 640 The National Atomic Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico 641 Honest John, and some twenty-five more empty casings lie scattered about a cavernous space like minimalist sculptures. The exhibit is explicitly structured around an enumeration of unadorned facts: “Free, Factual, Fascinating,” reads the flier. Walking around the exhibit, one is bombarded with details of “system versatility,” of “physical parameters,” of “delivery methods,” of “subcritical masses,” while the weapon shapes themselves are arranged in a strict chronol­ ogy: Mark 6 follows Mark 5 and is itself followed by Mark 7. But a collection of nuclear bomb casings inevitably produces an impression larger than a simple marshaling of chronology, technical specifications, and discrete “facts.” Even if one only pays attention to the straightforward mode of succession, another tale unfolds, one with which we are already familiar from displays in natural history museums. The story is quite simply one of evolution, with each successive shape the natural descendant of the one before. To be sure, the display embodies a more nuanced tale than that: There is an opening unit on German efforts to build the bomb; there are panels on the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge, and Hanford; there are descriptions of the shift from atmospheric to underground testing and of numerous “New Advances in Technology.” Yet this is all subsidiary to the real focus of interest, the weapon shapes themselves, especially Little Boy and Fat Man. The real fact is that these are neither sculptures nor natural history specimens. Rather, they are what instantaneously caused approximately 115,000 deaths with their combined 36 kilotons, virtually wiping out the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the two most deadly events of human history. However, this information is presented simply as another part of the factual picture. What is not mentioned is the psychological shadow that such weapons have cast ever since 1945, the way they forever altered the concept of warfare, and what they meant in real human terms. And...