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shows us pens where pigs, monkeys, and cows were caged at increasing distances from ground zero. He claims that he once barbecued a survivor. He shows us the remains of bomb shelters, domes of concrete blown open to expose metal reinforcement. We stop at the remains of a railroad trestle, its I beams sheared.
    Trees were stuck into the ground to form artificial forests. Slow-motion photography developed for bomb tests shows the trees steaming as the radiation hit, then igniting. Then the shock wave came, extinguishing the flames like a child blowing out birthday candles, and the tops of the trees bent hard away from the blast, then back toward the blast, back and forth, reverberating with the shock wave.
    We visit the remains of a doomsday town, a mockup of suburban America, where cars were parked and mannequins were stationed doing what suburban Americans did in the 1950s, washing dishes and playing in the yard and carrying briefcases. With unabashed delight, our guide says that one of the workers assigned to the creation of a doomsday town positioned two mannequins, naked, man on top, in a second-story bedroom.
    The mannequins would have seen a flash of light. They would have felt sudden heat. Those far enough removed to survive the heat would have seen dust racing toward them across the desert floor. When the blast struck, it would have felt at first like a strong wind but would have increased suddenly, sweeping entire houses away, killing mannequins by the score. Farther out, cars parked broadside to the blast tumbled sideways, rolling across the desert. Cars parked toward the blast survived the shock wave, but the heat blistered their paint.
    Our guide talks of sitting five miles from a test, where he felt the shock wave and the extreme heat. The shock wave passed, bounced off the mountains behind him, and returned. He crouched in a trench as the shock wave and its hot wind passed overhead. He was sunburned.
    After several hundred nuclear bomb detonations, in 1963 a treaty ended above-ground testing. The government learned how to dig. Dig a shaft, lower a bomb into the shaft, plug the opening, and set off the bomb. Eight hundred and twenty-eight bombs were set off below ground. Each shot was named: the Uncle, the Bandicoot, the Gerbil, the Stones, the Pleasant, the Ticking.
    Now we are sixty-five miles from Las Vegas, in Yucca Flat, the most bomb-blasted and irradiated piece of real estate on earth. We drive past crater after crater, some in groups, others standing alone on the desert floor.
    In Area 10, we stop to look at the Sedan Crater. On July 6, 1962, the government chose to test a thermonuclear bomb—a hydrogen bomb—in a shaft 636 feet deep. Sedan, exploding, generated temperatures around twenty million degrees. In contrast, the surface of the sun, at a mere ten thousand degrees, would seem air-conditioned.
    Sedan lifted a dome of desert earth thirty stories into the air. Beneath the ground, the earth was vaporized, leaving a cavity of heated gases. The gases cooled and contracted, lowering the pressure within the cavity. The ceiling of the cavity collapsed, chimneying, and the desert fell inward. The crater is as unnatural as rock art. At one-fifth of a mile across and more than three hundred feet deep, it is the ultimate graffiti.
    Four years after the explosion, fifteen pounds of Sedan’s radioactive soil were boxed up, shipped to Alaska, and spread on the ground at a place called Ogotoruk Valley, above the Arctic Circle, thirty-two miles from the tiny village of Point Hope, at a location where the federal government once planned to dig a harbor using hydrogen bombs. Upon hearing this, Ogotoruk Valley becomes another place I must visit.
     
    In Hiroshima, half a world away and more than a half century ago, survivors of the world’s first atom bomb attack fell ill. Most survivors who had been within a half mile of ground zero, near the Gokoku Shrine, died within hours or days of the blast. At first doctors