Las Vegas, NV –

What happens when you combine nuclear weapons, Las Vegas and a view of history skewed towards propaganda? Besides a whole lot of fun, you get the Atomic Testing Museum located off of the Strip.

As you walk into the stainless steel interior of the decidedly Desert-Modern building (which also houses something called the Desert Research Institute and an office for the U.S. Department of Energy) your first instinct is that the museum might be cool, might have something interesting to offer, and that you might get to see some people melted by nuclear weaponry. Yah!

Alas, no people getting melted. However, the sight of thousands of people getting vaporized might be less horrific than the shear otherworldly terror that underlies every diorama and piece of information in this museum. For this is reality, there is no turning away from it. And what is that reality? It’s Zen, it’s nirvana, it’s the Tao, the world as it truly is: terrifying, unescapable, engulfing, ultimately…beautiful.

Any discussion of spiritual terms automatically causes abstraction, something not real (the biggest catch-22 for any spiritual seeker). Which is why a nuclear weapon is such a beautiful thing: you can’t run away from it.

For the Atomic Testing Museum to take this opportunity to help people by showing them a door to ultimate reality and turn it into a mere exercise in nuclear industry propaganda is not surprising. However, it does unwittingly unlock another door to who ultimately controls our country and ultimately our destinies. The “museum” doesn’t hide it. Everywhere you look are “funded by” plaques with Wackenhut, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin logos. The museum’s pamphlets all proudly tell of how the museum was funded by those three company’s dollars.

Sadly, the “museum” also is proud of the fact that it is endorsed by the Smithsonian Institution, is housed in the same building and is in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, and that 50% of it was funded by us, citizen taxpayers, through a Congressional grant thanks to the “tireless dedication of Senator Harry Reid” (from the ATM’s pamphlet).

And yet at best it’s an attempt to paint a positive picture of an otherwise terrible technology, atomic weaponry (there is little discussion of atomic energy, this is very much a weapons museum) and at worst it’s blatant corporate propaganda coinciding with willing participation from the U.S. government. Of course Lockheed-Martin, Wackenhut and Bechtel want us to keep building nuclear weaponry. Lockheed builds the warhead delivery systems, Wackenhut provides the staffing for nuclear weapon installations and Bechtel builds the plants that make weapons-grade plutonium. They’re simply protecting their investment, that’s logical, but what is the U.S. Government doing letting them?

While Eisenhower’s words from January, 1961 of “beware of the military industrial complex” are still reverberating down through the last fifty years little has been done to heed them. The military and its suppliers operate in a shadow-world away from the eyes of citizens. We are unable to witness what goes on in the thousands of military bases across the country and across the world, including places like the Pentagon. They are off-limits to the people that fund them and that they purport to defend. The conversations and deals that are made on these bases are similarly off-limits to us, we just pay for them.

Still, somehow, the Department of Energy and the Smithsonian Institution, both arms of the U.S. Government and thereby of the people, find time to not only associate with but fund an institution as ridiculously in-bed with privately held corporations that supply the military as the Atomic Testing Museum.

It’s impossible to describe the amount of historical whitewashing that has gone on inside the Atomic Testing “Museum”. From calling modern thermonuclear weaponry “clean and safe” (that is a direct quote from a museum plaque) to saying that Native tribes displaced from Nevada testing sites were “valiantly contributing to their nation’s welfare” every piece of information that could potentially be harmful to the nuclear weapons industry has been slightly altered from an objective viewpoint and replaced with the viewpoint of an industry public relations representative. It’s as if every placard and exhibit were vetted by Wackenhut, Bechtel and Lockheed-Martin. Oops…forgot; they built the museum.

It is difficult to describe the doublespeak that goes on in this altar of propaganda. I encourage you to go see it for yourself. Perhaps the saddest part of all is that most people will leave the ATM thinking to themselves “boy, I’m sure glad that we have those nuclear weapons and that those responsible government folks are looking after them,” and never question who built the museum and why.

Perhaps unwittingly the Atomic Testing Museum does peel back a layer of ultimate reality and sheds light on the underbelly of America: the citizens have abdicated control. It’s one thing to say they never were in control, that’s excusable. But as Eisenhower’s 1961 speech reveals there existed a time in this country that the government feared its people. Perhaps they still do, perhaps all governments still fear their people, which is why they build museums to help pacify them. North Korea, Russia, China, they all do it well. The U.S. is following suit in its own sad way.