I the latest Indiana Jones movie, he finds himself in a fake town in the Nevada desert-it has houses, cars, etc., but populated by dummies. it turns out to have been a test town-an atomic bomb was detonated nearby, and the effect on the town was studied. In Weingartner’s “THE GODFATHER RETURS” book, he tells about the a-bomb tests-and alludes to the same thing.
i have seen the fim clip of the house being destroyed by an A-bomb blast-but did the governement actually build a whole town to test this?
Seems wasteful to me.
incidentally, did any hapless hikers get caught in the desert (as a test detonation took place)?
Not in the desert, but a Japanese fishing boat wass irratiated by fallout from one of the bikini atolls killing at least one of the crew. I seem to recall that the cast of the film Cleopatra got similarly exposed from a test while filming in the American Southwest, leading to several fatalities, but I can’t google up a cite, so maybe its an urban legend (or I’m misremembering what the film was).
It was The Conqueror
Wow, John Wayne as Genghis Kahn? Sounds like having an atomic bomb dropped on it wasn’t the worst of that movies problems.
I read The Plutonium Files by Eileen Welsome a couple of years ago and she details what they did for testing the bombs. I don’t recall reading about “fake towns”, but they did contact locals after the tests to see if they had any reactions.
Well, in fact the bomb was not dropped on it, they filmed on irradiated locations.
However, judging by the critical reception i think they should have taken off and nuked the set from orbit, it would have been the only way to be sure.
Yes, they built fake towns. Test footage of the blasts often winds up in low-budget movies. I can’t remember the names of the test sites where this was done, but they’re featured prominantly in the documentary Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie as well as being the site of the climactic fight in Kalifornia.
The towns were constructed so that scientists could get a better understanding of what would happen if a bomb went off in a population center. They wanted to know things like damage levels, radiation levels, temperatures, etc. They also tried out different construction techniques to see what might better withstand the blast.
Wasteful? The government? Never!
I doubt anyone got caught up accidentally in an nuclear test; the area was well cordoned and hiking wasn’t as popular as it is today.
The Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas has multi-media displays that tell the story of all those desert tests. Well worth a visit.
From all of what I’ve seen, they didn’t build whole fake towns—as in with roads on a grid, lawns, main street Doom Town, etc.—but they did certainly build plenty of test buildings of various types and designs. Glasstone’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, a government publication available at a good public library system, details several of them.
I imagine it was easier to test, not to mention cheaper and easier, just building the structures you wanted to blast piecemeal and at fixed ranges rather than building (and rebuilding) an entire model town.
Not nearly as cool, though. 
The bomb programs cost tens of billions of dollars. Any test town or houses built to test their effects cost tens of thousands of dollars. They could have built the houses out of used twenties and it wouldn’t even come to rounding error.
What about teenage kids driving onto the range for a dare?
Take it easy, Daddy-O.
Isn’t that how Bruce Banner became the Hulk?
They also planted pine trees all nice and orderly, so they can test the effects of a nuclear blast on forests. (Starting wildfires, I guess.)
Yeah, they should have just nuked a real town nobody would miss, like Cleveland.
They really did put mannequins and food in the houses, although it was just “representative of a typical suburb”. Although in the test, the “doom town” was only a few kilometers away from ground zero, so I’m not sure who was supposed to be dropping bombs in the suburbs.
Those film clips are fascinating-I understand the movies were shot by special cameras, in lead-lined cases, built by MIT professor Edgarton (later founder of EG@G). I recall seeing a government-supplied leaflet on civil defense-advising you to “lower and shut venetian blinds, to stop flying glass”! Whole lotta good that would do.
Anyway, can you survive a nuke by crawling into a refrigerator (like Indiana Jones did?)
You have to remember that “precision guided” back then meant getting within a few miles of the target. A missile aimed at a military base could easily hit the surrounding community.