Putting the Allies in Their Place: Spatial Influences upon Foreign Observation of US Nuclear Testing, 1955–57

The designation of the Nevada Test Site, in 1951, established a permanent nuclear weapons proving ground in the continental United States. Although primarily a cost-saving measure, for the United States’ allies it offered greater ease of observing U.S. nuclear testing than was possible at remote Pacific test sites. Accordingly, during the latter half of the 1950s the United States invited NATO member states to send observers to atmospheric nuclear tests, from which these observers drew consequential lessons about contemporary warfare. The diffusion of nuclear knowledge which this enabled held both symbolic and practical consequence for the foreign observers who witnessed the power of the atom firsthand.

Drawing upon concepts of spatial history, this paper explores how foreign representatives’ observations of U.S. nuclear testing during the 1950s were shaped by ideas of space and place. For example, geographic boundaries which circumscribed observers’ movements directly shaped their inferences as to the survivability of a nuclear exchange and, in certain cases, the feasibility of their own military nuclear programs. Furthermore, the physical security controls encountered by observers reinforced the division between nuclear haves and have-nots. Finally, the test site itself constituted a “representational space” for foreign observers, whose interactions with one another shaped their perceptions of their individual and collective relationships to the United States.

This paper draws chiefly upon declassified U.S. and French archival documents to trace the diffusion of nuclear knowledge to allied representatives in and around the Nevada Test Site. In considering foreign observers’ experience of U.S. testing, it illuminates an under-examined facet of the atmospheric testing era, and by extension its consequences for the modern era.