Welcome to the most bombed place on Earth

Alok Jha

Former Science Correspondent

Credit: ITV/On Assignment

There are plenty of extremes about the lonely stretch of mountainous desert north-west of Las Vegas.

The size (more than 5,000 square miles), the heat (40C at midday in August when I visited), the skies (which go on forever).

It also owns another superlative: this is the most bombed place on Earth.

Over four decades, starting in 1951, the US government detonated more than 900 nuclear devices at the Nevada Test Site, a high-security laboratory situated at the southern end of this vast, empty desert.

This patch of land, around the size as Cornwall, witnessed the development of the US nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.

Scientists, engineers and military personnel have gathered here for decades to examine the atom bomb and increase its efficiency.

Ernie Williams worked at the Nevada Test Site since the 1950s. Credit: ITV/On Assignment

I was granted extremely rare access to the site along with Guardian filmmaker Laurence Topham.

We spent a scorched, dusty day at the site with an inexhaustible, charming US Air Force veteran, Ernie Williams.

He is 80 years old, had worked at the test site since the 1950s and seen more than 80 nuclear explosions firsthand.

Through the 1950s and early 1960s, he would watch mushroom clouds from locations set up a few miles from the blasts.

The US government has detonated over 900 nuclear devices at the test site. Credit: ITV/On Assignment

He told me about the blast waves he felt, the bright lights and intense heat.

The first time Ernie saw a mushroom cloud, he told me, he “broke into a dead sweat”.

Years later, as he showed us around, he was still proud of every inch of his strange 'office' and the work that had been done there, all in the name of keeping the US safe during the Cold War.

The world we saw beyond the test site’s high-security gates was an eerie, still place.

A mushroom cloud in the Nevada skies in the 1950s. Credit: ITV On Assignment

We wandered across vast, flat desert plains from which atomic explosions had mushroomed decades earlier.

We peered into the battered remnants of buildings a few miles away that had suffered the brunt of some of those blasts.

We looked down into the inverted grey cone of the world’s biggest human-made crater.

It was gouged out of the Earth in 1962 as part of a programme to work out whether nuclear bombs could be used in place of dynamite to move large amounts of soil when building harbours or tunnels.

The man-made crater in the Nevada desert is the biggest in the world. Credit: ITV/On Assignment

No-one can deny the Nevada Test Site’s place in history.

This place, used to demonstrate the fury of nuclear weapons to the world, was an active battleground of the Cold War.

Proponents argue that, by bombing their own land, the US prevented wider nuclear war.

But those who claim to have been affected by the radioactive fallout from the many above-ground explosions, in nearby towns such as St George for example, disagree.

For them, the human cost of the testing was too great to justify the national security arguments.

The site, like the weapons developed there, will always be controversial.

For more from Guardian filmmaker Laurence Topham click here.