Out in the street, a moving truck is loaded with cardboard boxes, though their owners will never move in or move out. A woman sits on a swing, perfectly still, and a family at a diner-style table tucks into a meal of artificial fruit. There, even now, a game of bowls is ongoing. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (opens in new tab) reimagined the map as a sci-fi simulation, and its most recent version was located in a mini-Moscow.īut that first Nevada doom town in 2010’s Black Ops remains the spookiest and most evocative. Iteration has taken Nuketown away from its primary inspiration, displacing the suburbs to suit the setting of each successive Treyarch game. Filmmakers keep returning to these twisted movie sets, populated by mannequins, built for some of the most enormous and irresponsible pyrotechnics ever seen. Radioactive, the new film about the life of nuclear pioneer Marie Curie, features a detour to the Nevada test site, echoing Indiana Jones. Perhaps that story contributes to the ongoing fascination of Hollywood - and by extension, the Santa Monica-based Treyarch - with doom towns. "The first Nevada doom town in 2010’s Black Ops remains the spookiest and most evocative." Officials said the Utah desert was perfectly safe, but in the years that followed, 91 of the 220 cast and crew on The Conqueror developed cancer, Wayne among them. In one bizarre case, a notoriously crummy epic (opens in new tab) starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan was shot just outside St. While the US government was building fake communities to test the effects of radiation, its bombs were impacting real ones. The city reported increases in a host of different cancers over that period, and in 1990 Congress passed an act to grant compensation for ‘downwinders’. Yet for two and a half decades, fallout was regularly carried west by the wind, where it would pass through St. The AEC, which picked the Nevada site after the Korean War made South Pacific testing unviable, told locals that their “best action not to be worried about fallout.” If the idea of above-ground nuclear testing in your national backyard sounds insane to you, then you’re not wrong. One 32 kiloton nuke was dubbed Harry, but later nicknamed ‘Dirty Harry’ by the press, since miscalculation and wind change produced unusually high amounts of radioactive fallout. The Atomic Energy Commission detonated over 100 bombs between 19, giving each one a cute name like Badger, Eddie, or Annie. Closer buildings were pulled to pieces, heat visibly rolling up their walls before they exploded. The temperature alone blistered the paint on a house 6,000 feet from ground zero, before the blast ripped the gutters from its roof. As with so much horror, it makes the familiar unnatural.įootage captured for a frankly terrifying short film distributed by the US government in 1955 showed the impact of that year’s Apple-2 test on the fake homes. The mannequins' clothes had a practical purpose (officials wanted to observe how materials like wool, cotton and nylon would act under the extreme conditions of a nuclear blast), but they also served to make the scenes more disturbing, and certainly contributed to Nuketown’s uncanny atmosphere. Workers posed families of mannequins inside, as if captured during the last moment of normality before annihilation - the very moment so many Americans feared in the early Cold War, after childhood drills taught them to cower under their school desks. Call of Duty: Warzone's ridiculously OTT in-game lobbies are the best part of its battle royale (opens in new tab)
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