The Nevada Test Site sits about sixty-five miles from Las Vegas, and between 1951 and 1992 the United States detonated nearly a thousand nuclear devices there, more than anywhere else on the planet. The film traces why the site was chosen in the years after World War II, when fear of a Soviet nuclear attack pushed the government to find a stretch of desert remote enough to absorb decades of atomic and underground testing. Archival footage shows mock towns built and destroyed to study blast effects, craters left by underground detonations, and the control bunkers where scientists watched shots go off in real time. The narration walks through how testing shifted from open-air explosions, visible for miles and sometimes watched by tourists in Las Vegas, to sealed underground shots after the 1963 test ban treaty. What remains today is a landscape of subsidence craters and radioactive ground, still closed to the public, a physical record of the Cold War's arms race.