Reserve your free tickets on Eventbrite.īrett’s exhibition “ Opposing Forces: Photographs of Abandoned Nuclear Missile Bases” will be on display at the Diefenbunker from August 2 – September 9, 2018.Įnter your email address to follow our blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.īrowse By Category Browse By Category Tweet! Tweet! Tweet! You’ll also be the first to hear about his intriguing Cold War journey with his photographs from Santa Barbara, California to the Diefenbunker in Ottawa. One: Bye Bye Blackbirds – Cold War Relics in the Californian Desert Opposing Forces Exhibition Launch and Artist Talk | Thursday August 2, 7-9pmĬome meet the artist, Brett Leigh Dicks, and learn about his collection of photographs on display in the Diefenbunker’s Vault.
Prologue: Destination Ottawa (via Tucson and Calexico) For more information visit Follow Brett Leigh Dick’s journey to the Diefenbunker: The Historic Wendover Airfield now operates a museum at the former base as well as conducting tours of the airfield. Three days later, the B-29 Bockscar dropped the Fat Man plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. Today, you can see paper cranes everywhere in Japan - lots of people make them and decorate with them.Īnd when the KSL Olympic crew arrived at the airport, Alex Cabrero said he saw one of the teams from Germany at baggage claim, collecting all their equipment.After undergoing extensive training at Wendover Air Field with prototype bombs, at 8:15 am on August 6, the Enola Gay dropped the Little Boy uranium bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. “People are interested in the story, which is good, because we wanted to, you know, we wanted to be, again, a symbol of peace and reconciliation,” he said. “It really is.”Ī few years ago, her family members donated one of those original cranes to the Wendover museum during a ceremony airfield President James Petersen will never forget. Sasaki died when she was just 12 years old.ĭoctors believe her leukemia was caused by radiation exposure, but her cranes became legendary in Japan. She survived, but needed hospital care a few years later, and started folding a thousand little paper cranes as a sign of peace.
It was folded by Sadako Sasaki, who was only two years old when that bomb fell just a mile from her family’s home in Hiroshima. “That is the very tiniest piece,” said Petersen. In the museum, there are photos, items and even the signatures of the men who flew that mission.Īnd then, there is that little paper crane. “When we have visitors walk through that door, they walk into this room, and a lot of them just stand there and they feel it,” said Petersen. The crew on that mission lived and trained in Wendover. It’s the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II. It’s there because the big airplane hangar just down the road is where the Enola Gay was based. That crane, folded about as delicately as the paper it’s made from, sits in a special case in the museum. “We get quite a few inquiries about the paper crane,” said Petersen. We're doing a story on this for at 10:30pm /6JMJU4yLpP It's a paper crane folded by a girl who lived a mile from where the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The smallest item at the Historic Wendover Airfield just might have the biggest meaning. “We can’t forget the past,” said Petersen.Īt the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum, it’s the smallest thing that gives humanity hope. Walk into any museum and you’ll find all sorts of big things and big moments, marking human history. “We’ve had lots of visitors from all over the world,” said James Petersen, president of the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum. Today, Japan and the United States are close friends, and inside a Wendover museum, there’s an example of how things can change over time. That moment, and another bomb later in Nagasaki, essentially ended W orld War II. WENDOVER, Utah - An airplane based in Wendover, Utah carried and dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.