“The first one they set off January 27 (1951). “I didn’t know life without the bombs,” she says. Nuclear tests were just another part of ranch life for Sharp Howerton and her family. “You can also get a lot of mileage out of pretend friends,” she jokes. She invented games to play with her four sisters and invented pretend friends to keep her company. She memorized poems and songs to pass the time. She liked to ride horses and listen to birds. We had no TV, no running water … But I absolutely loved the ranch.” Sharp Howerton, 75, has fond memories of her childhood on the ranch. Kent adds that “most workers at the Nevada Test Site didn’t want any of them to have to be used.” He says the nuclear testing also served as a deterrent to all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union and was a way to keep up in the nuclear arms race that extended through most of the Cold War. Joseph Kent, director of education at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, explains that the goal of these tests was to “improve the safety and reliability of the United States’ stockpile of nuclear weapons.” The site is about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Between 19, the government conducted 100 atmospheric and 828 underground atomic tests at the site, now known as the Nevada National Security Site. The family lived on the Blue Eagle Ranch in Nye County, about 100 miles north of what was then known as the Nevada Test Site. In the presentation, she chronicled her family’s history in Railroad Valley and what it was like to witness nuclear testing growing up. On June 25, she presented her visual memoir, “In the Dawn’s Early Light,” at the National Atomic Testing Museum. Sharp Howerton and her family are “downwinders,” people exposed to radiation from nuclear testing conducted by the federal government.
Then they could go about their day again - but “of course,” she adds, “the bomb had dropped radiation on everything.” Sharp Howerton and her sisters would run inside until the dust passed. And the other times it would come toward us.” “About half the time it would go over to Utah.
Soon afterward, she’d see the mushroom cloud. Ten minutes later, the shockwaves would travel the 100 miles to rattle her family’s cattle ranch. All the birds - everything was really, really quiet.” “There was just this huge flash and then it was really quiet. (Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal) Sharp Howerton clearly remembers the nuclear tests.Īll she had to do was step out on her front porch, where she’d have a direct line of sight to the detonation. Howerton grew up on a cattle ranch in Nye County in the 50s and lived downwind of nuclear test sites in Nye County. A photograph taken in 1950 showing Jeanne Sharp Howerton, right, her sisters Carole, left, and Helene is copied at the National Atomic Testing Museum, on Thursday, June 23, 2022, in Las Vegas.
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