Dan Snow's History Hit - Las Vegas & Atomic Tourism

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

In the 1950s, the US government conducted a series of nuclear bomb tests in the Mojave desert, right next door to Las Vegas. Tourists flocked to the luxurious hotels of America's gambling capital to watch mushroom clouds billow over the horizon. These tests sparked an obsession with a chemical element that still inspires fear and fascination to this day - uranium.Dan is joined by Lucy Jane Santos, author of 'The Atomic City: Las Vegas, Nuclear Energy, and the Uranium Era'. Lucy takes us through the highlights of the history of uranium and explains why Las Vegas exemplifies our fascination with this element.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Max Carrey.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In the 1950s, the American government let off a series of nuclear bombs next door to Las Vegas. Parents would wake up their kids and they'd all go and sit on the porch and watch a nuclear test, a mushroom cloud towering above them. And one young person remembers huddling with her family on the front steps, drinking hot chocolate, and watching the pink cloud go over. This is one of the more remarkable insights in a biography of uranium that's been written by the historian Lucy Jane Santos. It's called Chain Reactions,

A Hopeful History of Uranium, and she charts it from a curious metal in the 19th century with some interesting properties. It was used to make candlesticks for Queen Adelaide, the wife of King William IV in the 1830s. It was used as a colouring agent for glass, and it was used to dye false teeth. In the 20th century, uranium went on quite the journey. It was discovered to have certain properties that meant it could be used as the fuel for a chain reaction, unleashing the energy of the stars. And the story of uranium is not yet over. In this podcast, we're going to hear from Lucy all about the past, present, and future of uranium. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity.

Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. So Lucy, I've never thought for one minute about uranium before the 1940s. What was it? What does it mean to people before then? Well, it really depends when we're thinking about it. I mean, one thing I've found with researching this book is it's a very long history. And I can't remember where I start, but I think I start sort of like billions of years ago when the Earth was created, because uranium is part of the earth it's it's everywhere it's in our core the core of the earth it's absolutely everywhere so we've known

uranium for a long time we only started really using it from about the the 19th century really and then it starts being used as a colouring agent for glass and ceramics and we start seeing it being used as medicine as well so So if you ask that question, you know, what does uranium mean to someone in about 18 or 1850, something like that, they may say that it was a treatment for diabetes. That was its most well-known use at the time, at least in terms of medicine. Wow. And sorry to be thick, but uranium, just what form does it take? It's a rock, it's an ore, like what's it sort of look like and how do you handle it? And where's it being found?

Well, it's found in the ground. There are hundreds, I may be over-regulating that, there are lots and lots and lots of different types of uranium minerals that we find in the ground. One of the ones, the most famous one, I guess, is pitchblende, which I talk about a lot in both this book and my previous book as well. Pitchblende is the mineral substance that Marie Curie used to isolate radium, for instance. So it has a really important part in radioactive history. But it's also in

turbanite, carnitite as well. Lots of tites and knights and things like that um but we find it's it's it's it's an abundant mineral um and we tend to use it um we can you can make it into it's a toxic metal so it's a metallic substance but we can also mix it with various this is this is the bit where my site my lack of science comes in there's lots of different ways of making it into different things so we can mix it with salts and make chlorides, for instance. And again, that's how it's usually used in medicine. Did people use it to make their teeth all colourful and weird? There is a little bit of evidence. There's an article in Scientific American, I think it's

about 1854, 1857. And they say that false teeth, teeth made from quartz has been coloured with a uranium substance to make it a sort of yellowy colour. But they're also talking about making teeth a blue colour as well. I think this is really a time when false teeth were not very good in the first instance. So looking completely natural wasn't necessarily the end game. There's times when people have got silver teeth, very proud of their silver and gold teeth. So having a little bit of colouring in your teeth is quite an attractive thing at this point. Now, I'm no scientist. What does sticking a load of uranium-coated false teeth into your mouth do for your health?

your mouth do for your health? Probably very little. The big problem with uranium in most of its uses in terms of like teeth and medicine would be its toxicity. So it's a heavy metal and we know we shouldn't be swallowing or imbibing heavy metals. We know lead is poisonous, for instance. Uranium is the same sort of poisonous substance. So probably having a little bit of a false teeth with a little bit of uranium isn't going to make much difference to your health. We see lots of tableware at this time, 19th century and 20th century being made with uranium as well. So people are eating food off uranium plates. There was a very famous brand in the US, Fiestaware, which is this beautiful red colouring, very, very popular in the 1930s and into the 40s and 50s. Again, you're probably not going to do

too much damage if you eat your tea off some uranium plates. But just for the record, you're not recommending it? No. One of the things I should perhaps say is you do have to be very careful. If you had anything with like a vinegar substance, it could leach out the uranium from those ceramics. So it's a glaze. Normally it's fine, but they do say don't eat anything vinegary or anything that's going to leach out, anything acidic that's going to leach out that uranium into your food.

But on the whole, it's absolutely fine. And Fiesta Ware is very collectible as well. Fiesta Ware. i love that now tell me about the iranian wine before we move on because that really is a treat so again this is a this is a health product it's using the substance the known toxicity of of uranium this knowledge has been around for centuries this idea that a little bit of what's bad for you is going to do you some good so you have a little bit of toxicity get it into your system somehow whether it's a tablet or some uranium wine and it's going to stimulate your metabolism so it's going to make everything

within your body just perk up a little bit we see that in all sorts of products and arsenic there's arsenic tablets in the 19th century as well. Again, same thing, it's going to stimulate your metabolism and do various things to your body. And yes, there was a uranium wine that was produced, again, for diabetes. Diabetes is absolutely crucial in the history of uranium. And this is the idea that it's going to mimic a little bit of what diabetes, uncontrolled diabetes, because this was a time when insulin hadn't been synthesized. There was nothing to treat diabetics at the time. It was a death sentence. So a little bit of that toxicity that diabetes causes to your body

is sort of mimicked by the uranium. So the idea that you could put a little bit of that toxicity into your body and it would actually help overall. Again, this is a desperate time when there are absolutely no treatments, so people are trying anything that looks like it could actually help. And there were lots of studies that were showing that a little bit of uranium acetate, in a sense, were actually helping those diabetic patients. When do scientists, physicists start sort of homing in on uranium? Well, in connection with atomic theory and perhaps even creating chain reactions and unlimited energy? I mean, it's quite a long history really, because this is all related to the 1890s where Henri Becquerel discovers that there is these invisible rays that becomes known as radioactivity.

He's experimenting with uranium, so it's known right from the beginning. So as soon as the concept of radioactivity is discovered, they know that uranium is a radioactive element. There's also thorium as well that has the similar properties. Over the next 20, 30 years, we start finding more radioactive elements. So Marie Curie discovers radium. She discovers polonium as well. There's lots of experiments.

But it's not until about the 1930s, really, when there's a huge culmination of investigations into the atom. People are really curious what an atom is and what it does and all of those things. So from about the 1930s, we start seeing this culmination of all of these theories, and we see these atomic properties really gaining a lot of prominence. And then we start seeing people saying, well, if there's a lot of energy to be found in these radioactive elements, especially uranium, if they are changing,

disintegrating and putting out those rays while they're doing those alpha, beta and gamma rays, what could we do with that energy? And then we start people talking about a uranium bomb, which obviously leads to the atomic bomb. It must have been a very exciting time. So you just basically take a rock that everyone else had been using as a colourant and to preserve photographs and drink wine, and you suddenly measure it in a different way and realise it's like emitting all these rays. It must have been sort of magical. Yes, there's a huge amount of excitement about what these radioactive elements, in particular in the 1900s, 10s and 20s, it's radium that really captures people's imagination. 1900s, 10s and 20s, it's radium that really captures people's imagination. Uranium isn't quite as an attractive proposition. So radium, we see a similar story. We see it being used in

medicine. We see it being used in entertainment. We see its glow-in-the-dark properties being really, there's an absolute craze for radium in the 20s especially. So we see all of those things happening, but it's not until uranium really starts coming into its own again when its real destructive properties are being talked about that idea that it could be turned into the ultimate at the time the ultimate bomb now you're not a scientist so um feel free not to answer this but can you just try and explain so why why uranium when it comes to blowing things up on a monumental scale it's the property of being able to cause a chain reaction using uranium i have a very simple description of chain reaction in my book which of course is not in my brain right now

it's definitely in the book but i've seen it described as like a of mousetraps essentially so you have one mousetrap that moves to another have one mouse trap that moves to another mouse trap that moves to another mouse trap. And by the end of it, all the mouse traps are exploding at the same time, to mix my metaphors. Or the idea that you can pot balls, a snooker table is also being used to describe chain reactions as well. It's basically the idea that you can start with one thing and you can end with a multitude of explosions and which is really really powerful well it's certainly powerful and i've done many episodes of the podcast on the manhattan project and oppenheimer all that kind of stuff so people can go and check those out but i want to i want to take you forward through the invention of the

atomic bomb to the unexpected story of las Vegas and uranium. This is now, we're into the nuclear age. Why is Vegas suddenly the heart of things? So we have the atomic bomb. So we have Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. By 1946, it's the end of the war, but it's not the end of the history of atomic bombs. The US is now the most powerful country in the world. They have atomic bombs and they want to protect the fact that they are powerful. However, whilst they've built a few and obviously blown up a few, they still don't really know much about them, I would say. So the idea here is that they have to carry on testing them and getting them ever bigger and better. So we have a period after 1947 where the US are testing their bombs in the Bikini Atoll

in the Pacific Ocean. By the late 40s, early 50s, there's this idea that it's too far away. It's not a secure site for these testings. So they're going to start testing atomic bombs in continental United States. So they're looking, this is a project called Project Nutmeg, and they're looking for the ideal place to explode a lot of bombs. And the search sort of gets smaller and smaller until they come up with this former airbase in the Nevada desert.

It's around about 65 miles east of Las Vegas. And so it's in the desert. It's around about 65 miles east of Las Vegas. And so is the desert. It's fairly isolated. Their main criteria here, however, is to keep away from major city centres. So it's 65 miles away from Vegas, 300 miles away from Los Angeles. So that fulfils their criteria of a fairly unpopulated place. However, it should be noted it was isolated, but it wasn't uninhabited. So there was about 100,000 people living in and around that area. But the government

at the time, the fact that it was 300 miles away from LA was just about right. The testing starts moving to this area because it is within the US. It's fairly isolated. So they start building a massive testing facility in the Nevada desert. And does that encourage the growth of Vegas? Because suddenly you've got lots of government personnel and soldiers all swinging by on their way to and from testing. Absolutely. So Vegas in the early 50s, it's a fairly bustling town. But it's not like Vegas in the late 50s, it's a fairly bustling town, but it's not like Vegas in the late 50s.

It's not Frank Sinatra's Vegas. It's not Rat Pack Vegas, really. And it's certainly not the Vegas that we would know today, that massive, sprawling city. It's fairly small. So we've got all the things that we know and we love about Vegas. So we've got some casinos, we've got strip hotels, we've got all of those things. But it's not huge. And the population isn't massive either. I think it's around about 20,000 people who live around that area at the time.

And we have tourists, but nothing like it comes. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about uranium. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. I learned from your book that Operation Ranger, the nuclear tests, begin on the 27th of January 1951. And, you know, people in Vegas knew about it. I mean, it's unimaginable, this stuff. It's not secret. The first bombs that have been exploded, so we have the test bomb Trinity and we have the ones at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these were secret. But obviously, the secret becomes moot after that point. People know that that's what the US are doing. And they

do give the residents warnings. There's lots of discussions prior to the first test about what having atomic bombs so close, of course there is, so close to your home is actually going to mean for you as a resident, but also for tourism as well. I mean, as I said, it's not a huge, huge, huge tourist industry there, but it is a tourist industry. And people were very, very scared at first that it was going to scare people away. scared at first that it was going to scare people away. So we start seeing lots of things in the press about people just really being very worried about these atomic bombs going off in their backyard, essentially. But also they're not just worried about it, they were being thrown out of bed. Yes. So there's some great, I have to choose my words here, but some great stories around these atomic bombs going off. People were aware,

but I don't think they weren't exactly prepared for what was going to happen. And people were thrown out of their beds. There were cracks in buildings and all sorts of things. We see this throughout the testing series that it does have a physical impact on the town. Water sloshing from swimming pools, there's cracks in buildings, windows cracking as well. That seems to be quite a big one. And families would, it became a tradition, you'd gather, like if we watch the rockets take off from Canaveral, people would watch the bombs go off. Yeah, there's lots of stories and uh lots of oral history of people remembering this quite fondly actually a sort of a family bonding scenario where you get woken up very early in the morning by your parents because these tests would go off like 4 a.m 5 a.m in the morning

this is the time not for secrecy or anything but this was the time when the wind was judged to be the most sort of controllable or flat, because people were worried that there would be a fallout, you know, flying all over Nevada. So early in the morning, kids are being woken up, they're going in their cars, they're going to viewing points throughout the city to see these mushroom clouds, to see these bombs going off. And the thing we all find so bizarre about Vegas is the licentiousness of the gambling and things, but the fact that it's set in this kind of totally hostile,

Mars-like environment. And then on top of that, to add to its sort of Hunter S. Thompson otherworldliness, you've got people detonating atomic bombs next door to it. I mean, it must have just... So the reputation, the kind of the lore of the city is really forged in this period.'s already at this period um obviously had that association with gangsters so in vegas really sort of comes into its own as a city by 1931 because it's one of the only places

in in the us where you can gamble so we start seeing this this link with gambling we see the link with with mobsters of course as well i i've just come back from vegas actually i went uh last month to vegas and it is even today this sort of strange place you don't really know what time it is or what you're doing or it's it's it has a strange otherworldliness even today. But back then in a smaller city with those bombs going off and people running all over town trying to find them or to find the best place to view them, it must have been very strange. And some of the iconography of Vegas, the logos and the casinos and stuff, they are actually derived from imagery of mushroom clouds and nuclear blasts.

Yes, there's a couple of casinos, the Flamingo and the Stardust. And if you look at their early signs, which are now, the Stardust for certain is in the Neon Museum in Vegas. It's on display so you can go and see it. But when it was up, it does very much look like a mushroom cloud with little bits of, I guess, atomic fallout sort of scattering down. Now it's in, as I said, in the Neon Museum. It's in bits, so you don't quite get the same effect of it, but it must have looked incredibly, I mean, it was huge. It must have looked incredibly powerful.

So atomic weapons, good old uranium, goes from being something that's very, to be feared, to something that's actually very modern and cool and fun. Yes, but always with that element of fear. There's a little line that was being walked here between dangerous and sexy, isn't there? And its link with Vegas was really part of turning atomic bombs from just being about destruction into something that was a bit more glamorous.

And that was the association with Vegas. We see it in all sorts of things in Vegas. There was Atomic Beauty Queen competitions as well. And that's really sort of the, I guess, the pinnacle of that link between sexy and danger of those atomic bombs. Yes, the Atomic Beauty competition's strange. It says in your book that she was described as radiating loveliness instead of deadly atomic particles. The language they use around these Atomic Beauty Queens. So these aren't Beauty Queen competitions in the sense that there's a whole parade of women in their swimsuits and the winner is chosen. These are sort of things that are given to one particular woman this is it's all publicity the the vegas publicity machine really cranked up a gear in terms of utilizing this this link with atomic bombs i mean going from being quite nervous about the link to really embracing it you know sort of you can't

beat it join it type thing so by the time we get to the mid-50s we've had atomic bombs being blown up in in vegas for a few years now they start doing all of these atomic beauty queens so someone is crowned an atomic beauty queen so you can be miss atomic blast for instance that's 1952 and we have 1953 i think is miss atomic bomb and all of these women are photographed in bathing suits, but we can see people with mushroom clouds made from cotton wool. Sometimes they're carrying Geiger counters. Sometimes they're carrying these sort of strange sort of homemade looking fallout, I don't know what they are, sort of balls made out of paper just to sort of simulate fallout particles. It is very strange but also

you can see what they're trying to do you can see that they're trying to link vegas and glamour and these atomic bombs and elvis presley is described as the first atomic powered singer yes i mean this was one of the things that i was really excited to to find out during the research that Elvis, Mr. Vegas, we know that he had residencies in Vegas late in his career. His first Vegas residency, he was known as the Atomic Bomb singer. He was linked to the Atomic Bomb. He was performing, basically. I mean, so many of these casinos were having Atomic Bomb-themed entertainers. They were having atomic parties, and they would have them in the evenings. And sometimes they would last until 4 a.m. in the morning when the atomic bombs were due to go off. So people would stay up all night drinking, often drinking atomic cocktails as well.

There was themed cocktails. And then the sort of culmination of the evening would be watching that mushroom cloud in the light of the early dawn 60 miles away. And when does this era come to an end? Presumably as hydrogen bombs take over from uranium bombs, they become too powerful to blow up next to Vegas. Well, as the bombs in any sense become bigger, they become more dangerous. The risk of fallout becomes greater. So we start seeing the American population in general, but also the Vegas industry around the atomic bombs starting to become a little bit more hesitant. It stops being, to excuse an expression, fun and games and starts becoming serious.

to excuse an expression, fun and games, and starts becoming serious. I mean, this is all happening within a very short space of time, but we start seeing people being much more concerned about the radioactive fallout from the bombs. So we see lots more concern, and people don't want anymore these bombs to be going off so close to them, and with such devastating consequences. And the Atomic Energy Commission does hide some of the effects from the local population. They definitely dismiss some of people's concerns and really ramp up the idea that this is all fun, this is all

great. But as the bombs become more powerful, they just can't hide it anymore. And some of those tests, there are some really, really awful stories. I mean, they're all awful stories when you really get down to it. But some awful stories of huge bombs being blown up in that Nevada desert and people's livestock dying, people getting ill, people getting covered with unknown ash, things like that. And obviously that starts raising real alarm bells. Speaking of alarm bells, let's finish up. Just in conclusion, in short, should we fear uranium or is it a wonder material? Should we be excited by its future prospects? I mean, that is a big question. And like any substance, it depends how it's being used. I mean, the last more than quarter of my book moves away from this tale of uranium being used

as medicine, uranium being used as bombs, and talks about its use as nuclear energy. So, its use for electricity, its use for power in general so we start talking about that and again it's a it's a long and complicated history of a new technology is always going to have some issues of course it is but on the whole i do conclude that uranium and nuclear energy on the whole is is is really important for our future and it isn't something that should be feared it's something that we need to learn how to well we need to make sure that we're controlling but also is something we can embrace for the future sounds to me like we want we want explosions next to vegas again i mean that's um i i can see that i can see you're in

the market for it it would be more exciting than some of the things I saw in Vegas when I was there recently. Hey, what happens if Vegas stays in Vegas, Lucy Jane Santos? Okay, so thank you for coming on the podcast. What is your book called? So my book is called Chain Reactions, A Hopeful History of Uranium, and it's out on the 4th of July. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much.