Recalling Miss Atomic Blast

Dr. Raman Srinivasan

``A roadway could become a city. A building could become a sign. In no place at all, someplace could be created. That is Las Vegas' genius.'' -- Alan Hess, architecture critic.

Nobody lived in Las Vegas. Each one of us had travelled several hundred miles to meet in Vegas. Intrigued, one of our engineers ran a quick optimisation programme to check if Vegas emerged as a counter-intuitive but nevertheless logical choice. Rationally speaking, Chicago would have been better. Yet we converged from different corners of the world for our user conference, where my brief was to gather notes for marketing. ``The medium is the message,'' Canadian scholar, Marshall McLuhan, wrote. What is the message of Vegas?

How do you get millions to visit this most remote city each year? And then, how does one persuade them to spend billions of dollars in a metropolis built in the middle of nowhere? Well, Vegas is not really in the middle of nowhere. It is actually quite close to the site for the world's largest high-level radioactive waste repository, Yucca Mountain. What kind of marketing geniuses succeed in getting people to party beside the world's largest nuclear weapons test site?

Yucca Mountain is situated within the massive Nevada Test Site that is but a hundred km north-west of Vegas. It all began with Operation Ranger, in 1951, when a ten-kilotonne atomic bomb was dropped from a plane. Between 1951 and 1962, a hundred nuclear weapons were tested above ground, releasing dangerous radiation into the atmosphere. The US military built entire cities, ``doom-towns,'' on the test site to assess the efficacy of their atomic weapons. After 1962, only underground tests were conducted as atmospheric tests were banned. In all, at least 900 nuclear tests were conducted near Vegas.

Atom burgers, anyone?

Vegas welcomed the tests, with enthusiasm. Entrepreneurs responded by throwing parties and conducting beauty pageants. They even crowned attractive young women as Miss Atomic Blast to celebrate the early tests. Here was a new kind of entertainment to be marketed-- watching atom bomb tests. And there was plenty of it too, about one a month for decades. Even the sedate Life magazine bought into this febrile marketing. A cover photograph showed mushroom clouds rising above the city's neon mascot, ``Vegas Vic.''

The inauguration of casinos such as the Desert Inn was timed to coincide with an atomic blast. Local restaurants added atom-burgers to their menus. In any case, all this fun and frolic pays, the crowds keep pouring into Vegas, atomic blasts or not.

Indeed, Vegas possesses all the wile, guise, and agility of a desert animal. The extravagant decoration, the gushing water fountains, and the promise of forbidden pleasures all serve to draw in the crowds, night after night. This is the way to thrive in a harsh landscape littered with abandoned ghost towns.

An uncanny genius for packaging, presenting, re-presenting, and selling even the downside remains a hallmark of Vegas. Flamboyant surrealism is the preferred idiom of marketing, Vegas style. Of course, where else would you find a tradition of promoting the destruction of buildings as paid events?

`Welcome' board to change

Obviously marketing is not the only secret to its success. Vegas displays an incredible capacity to shake loose the burdens of both nature and culture, and is hence extraordinarily quick to change. It is, therefore, not surprising that Vegas is the fastest growing metropolis in North America, a real boomtown.

For a city that is not yet a hundred years old, many of its buildings have been built, demolished, built again, and demolished again, and re-built yet again. No other city in the history of mankind, not even Beijing, has seen such rapid cycles of creation and re-creation, and at such a large scale. Maybe this enthusiastic embrace of an accelerating cycle of creation and destruction does call for celebration.

The Bellagio Resorts, a major landmark on the Strip, stands on the very site of what was once The Dunes Casino. The Strip had begun as a wide-open stretch of the Los Angeles Highway glittering with neon-lit casinos. But all that has changed. Not just the Bellagio, but most other resorts on the Strip have been built on sites previously occupied by other casinos, all famous in their own time. The only exception is the legendary Flamingo, the first modern resort on the Strip.

It cost $2 million to build the Flamingo in 1946. Today it costs as much to demolish a hotel on the Strip. ``When you blow that kind of money,'' said Cory Stuler of Alladin, ``you might as well have a party to go with the bang.''

Why blast a hotel with explosives? It is the most cost-effective way to get rid of a large building. Fundamentally, it is not very different from the underground nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada test site. The aim is to create a contained implosion where all the destructive energy is directed inwards into the building.

Making money all the while

Creating controlled implosions is a fine art that requires mastery not only of explosives but also of structural engineering. Two firms, LVI Group Inc and Controlled Demolition, Inc, dominate this business in America. Both utilise advanced software to model shock waves generated during the implosions and simulate the collapse of buildings. The key to successful demolition is to ensure that the building collapses inwards, and does so quickly. The secondary goal is to break up large pieces of building, even as they fall, into rubble that can be carted away easily. In fact, monumental structures are reduced to rubble in just a few seconds. Implosions are highly efficient and hence popular in Vegas.

Vegas has also made these implosions important social occasions. Midnight of New Year's Eve, 1996, marked the demolition of the 11-storey, 900-room Hacienda Hotel. The event was celebrated with a massive New Year party aptly billed ``Dynamite New Year'' and televised live on the Fox network. Over 60,000 people watched the demolition and the associated festive fireworks from the streets. Today, Mandalay Bay stands on that site.

When the Landmark Hotel was imploded, Hollywood filmed the event for use in the feature film ``Mars Attacks!'' The demolition of the Sands hotel in 1997 made it to the front page of the dignified Harpers Magazine. The list is long and notable. In April 1998, when the old Aladdin Hotel Tower was imploded, the Casino charged spectators $250 each to watch the event from a nearby tent. In a relatively rare display of philanthropy, the proceeds were donated to a charitable foundation dedicated to sick and dying children. It took all of 17 seconds to bring down the 300-ft tower and create over twenty thousand tonnes of debris. One of the national TV networks televised the entire event.

Neither conventional implosions nor nuclear explosions keep Vegas from its business -- making money. On the contrary, this process of ``incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one'' is embraced and marketed for the greater glory of Vegas.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter was remarkably prescient when he wrote; ``This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.'' Our industry is no stranger to Creative Destruction. ERP software enabled the wave of re-engineering that swept through corporations in the early 1990s. The Internet revolution made dis-intermediation on a global scale possible, and is now creating the Virtual Enterprise. We, software professionals, must help our users master this process of Creative Destruction.

To be continued

The author works for Ramco Systems, and can be reached at agility@rsi.ramco.com.

The third part of this article, titled ``A Light in the night'', appeared in eWorld dated May 2.