Question of the Day - 11 May 2017

[Editor's Note: The results of the previous poll, on blackjack skills, are live and analyzed. You can vote on the new poll, about your favorite Vegas "era," here. It's a good little history lesson to boot.] 

We answered this question in a lot of detail in QoD 5/19/11. It covers the whole question about the model for that image, Lee Merlin, along with other intriguing details and several photos. Now that the archives are open, we encourage everyone with an interest in this to click on the link. 

Here, we'll just augment that answer with a little background on the nuclear tests, which we consider the strangest interlude in a recent history of highly strange interludes in southern Nevada.

Starting in 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission began conducting above-ground nuclear test explosions in the vast uninhabited reaches of the old Las Vegas Aerial Gunnery Range, which now encompassed Nellis Air Force Base and the Nuclear Test Site. For the next 10 years, nearly a bomb a month was detonated atmospherically a mere 70 miles northwest of downtown Las Vegas — so close that they could be easily seen from the rooftops of the hotels.

For most blasts, the AEC erected realistic “Doom Town” sets to measure destruction and thousands of soldiers were posted within a tight radius to be purposefully exposed to the radiation. Some Las Vegans worried about the literal fallout and which way the winds were blowing; they usually blew from the west, so southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona took the brunt of the radiation. But most locals seemed to contract what was called “atomic fever,” with everything from mushroom-cloud burgers and “bomb-watching” parties to postcards showing the Vegas skyline with mushroom clouds in the background.

In addition, Las Vegans reveled in the military and AEC payrolls, a new notoriety approaching cosmic dimensions, and in the neon-fireworks-thermonuclear aspects of the whole extravaganza. You can see a cool video of Vegas in 1953 and one of the bomb tests here.

One of the marketing gimmicks involved cheesecake images of Miss Atomic Bomb, wearing swimsuits with various symbols of the blasts. A different showgirl, most often from the Sands’ Copa Room was chosen every year starting in 1952 to play the part.     

The iconic image that you refer to in the question is the 1957 Miss Atomic Bomb in a photograph taken by the long-time Las Vegas News Bureau photographer Don English.

Nothing new has turned up about Lee Merlin (if that was actually her real name and not a stage name) since the original answer in 2011.