“No car?” chuckled the Albuquerque resident. “You could catch a bus, I
suppose. The National Atomic Museum is out at Kirtland Air Base.”
He seemed shocked that I didn’t have a car, but not as shocked as I was when
the armed guard at Kirtland threw me off the bus. She’d boarded the bus to check
IDs and found that I didn’t have a pass for the base. An hour later, with the
paperwork done, I headed for the giant hangars that house a significant lump of
America’s atomic history.
The military setting is spot on for the weapons that have threatened the
world for fifty years. Here you can unravel the story of the atom, how it was
discovered and how it was split to release energy. You can look at relics of the
Manhattan Project. The stuff parked round the building is monumental in
scale—from the Boeing B-52 bomber that delivered the last airburst H-bomb
to missiles towering above us.
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This part of the American Southwest has nursed many mysteries, some from the
stranger side of history. Our next stop was to be Roswell, site of the supposed
flying saucer crash of 1947, so it seemed fitting that even our Albuquerque taxi
driver had once spotted a UFO.
Roswell is a small town in the middle of nowhere. You can see clear to the
horizon across the desert plains. The International UFO Museum & Research
Center sits opposite the stucco courthouse on Main Street. It’s really just a
huge souvenir stall with a few solemn displays. I scan the model alien and the
old newspaper cuttings. One picture shows the remnants of a weather
balloon—UFOlogists claim this was part of the government cover-up for the
“real” alien craft.
But it’s not just aliens that link Roswell with outer space, as I found in
the Roswell Museum and Art Center. The father of modern rocketry, Robert
Goddard—namesake for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center—set up his
firing range here. His experiments must have placed rockets and space firmly in
the local imagination. Roswell is also birthplace of the only scientist to have
set foot on the Moon. The museum proudly displays the spacesuit worn by
geologist Harrison “Jack” Schmitt during the Apollo 17 mission.
Just outside Tucson, across the state line in Arizona, is the only missile
silo in the world open to the public. It’s an unsettling place to visit, oddly
familiar from films such as Dr Strangelove. We clang down metal steps
into a wire cage. Doors slam behind us.
We head down a tunnel to the command centre. Here are instruction manuals and
the two key points that would have been used to blow up the world. It is mildly
comforting to know that two people would have had to agree on this, but an
unimpressed child suggests that if you smuggled in a false arm both keys could
have been turned by one person. A subdued bunch of visitors climbs back into the
sunlight.
Tucson has another technology graveyard: the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base,
where more than 5000 unwanted planes are parked in long lines, preserved by the
desert air. You can take a tour or just play spy from a bus. Luckily, our bus
driver was an aviation buff; he even has a website devoted to old planes.
Last stop is the nearby Pima Air and Space Museum. Here you’ll find Jack
Kennedy’s Air Force One, a whale of a plane that carried the shuttle around and
a Blackbird SR71. I head for the cafe to mull over why all this military
hardware is so fascinating in spite of its deadly purpose—and plan the
next US visit. Concrete and engineering, I think. Hoover Dams, and the LA river
now flowing down a concrete culvert painted blue to cheer up residents.
