E-mail a link to this story to a friend

Sandia Labs gets Atomic Museum

Published: 08-23-95
By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
The Department of Energy's National Atomic Museum -- the only museum in Albuquerque with a B-52 in its front yard -- was taken over by Sandia National Laboratories on Oct. 1, 1995, officials say.
The museum, originally opened in 1969 to preserve the history of the nuclear age, also will become a forum for showcasing Sandia technologies, officials say.
It was managed by the Energy Department's Albuquerque Operations Office.
Trying to head off criticism the museum could end up a Sandia public relations tool, officials say their primary goal is to preserve its role as the congressionally chartered "official atomic museum of the United States."
"The charter has to be maintained," said museum director Joni Hezlep.
Hezlep believes Sandia, managed by Lockheed Martin Corp., will provide resources to improve the museum, which has always struggled for funding.
Located on Wyoming SE inside Kirtland Air Force Base, the museum is the nation's largest nonsecret repository of nuclear weapons artifacts.
Its main display hall is filled with exhibits that include nuclear weapons minus their radioactive explosives.
It draws 200,000 visitors a year and is well-known among researchers who study the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its history.
They really have it, from A to Z," said Robert S. Norris, a Washington, D.C.-based nuclear weapons expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council and author of many books on nuclear weapons.
The museum is invaluable, Norris said, because there are so few places for a member of the public to have direct contact with nuclear weapons.
Outside, the museum's yard is filled with missiles and planes, including an imposing B-52 nuclear bomber that greets visitors as they drive up.
While the museum is largely filled with dispassionate displays of nuclear artifacts, it doesn't avoid some of the bad news that has afflicted the nuclear age.
One display, for example, tells the story of a nuclear accident over Palomares, Spain, in 1966 in which a B-52 bomber carrying nuclear weapons crashed with an aerial tanker while refueling.
The bombs fell away, with two scattering dangerous plutonium dust over several hundred acres of Spanish farmland.
A smashed-up casing from one of the Palomares bombs (one that did not leak plutonium) is on display.
It also has a small piece of burned tile from Hiroshima on exhibit -- more, Norris pointed out, than the Smithsonian was willing to exhibit after a controversy erupted over its plans for a display of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Deborah Payne, the Sandia executive who will oversee museum operations, said the museum will give Sandia a vehicle "to communicate its scientific accomplishments to museum visitors."
But Payne said it will remain, first and foremost, a national institution devoted to preserving and displaying the nation's national nuclear heritage.
While Sandia takes over the museum, the museum's public documents reading room will remain under DOE control.
The department is considering moving the reading room's documents collection off of Kirtland to a more public place, possibly one of the Albuquerque Technical-Vocational Institute's libraries, said DOE spokesman Al Stotts.