鈥淣o car?鈥� chuckled the Albuquerque resident. 鈥淵ou could catch a bus, I
suppose. The National Atomic Museum is out at Kirtland Air Base.鈥�
He seemed shocked that I didn鈥檛 have a car, but not as shocked as I was when
the armed guard at Kirtland threw me off the bus. She鈥檇 boarded the bus to check
IDs and found that I didn鈥檛 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鈥檚 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鈥攆rom 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鈥檚 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鈥擴FOlogists claim this was part of the government cover-up for the
鈥渞eal鈥� alien craft.
But it鈥檚 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鈥攏amesake for NASA鈥檚 Goddard Space Flight Center鈥攕et 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 鈥淛ack鈥� 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鈥檚 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鈥檒l find Jack
Kennedy鈥檚 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鈥攁nd 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.