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Fake nuke reported stolen
ROGER SNODGRASS
Los Alamos Monitor
Ed Grothus, a Los Alamos peace activist, said a mock nuclear weapon weighing 500 pounds was stolen from his salvage store on Monday.
The owner of the Black Hole said he purchased a number of "practice bombs" in Oklahoma about three years ago. He had joined several of them together in a hub to create a sunflower.
The missing fake weapon was lying near the others to give an idea of how the sunflower was constructed.
Grothus said it weighed about 500 pounds. He said he generally sold the "bombs" for about $300 each.
He last saw the replica when he started work on Monday, the Martin Luther King holiday.
"I didn't miss it until I went home at night at 5:30 p.m.," he said.
He recalled that most of the visitors on Monday were from foreign countries, like Canada and England.
"But it would have had to have been a local person," he concluded.
The Black Hole is one of Los Alamos County's most eccentric and popular tourist destinations and is visited by people from all over the country and the world because of its unique collection of vintage high-tech components and salvage from Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Grothus was honored last month at the "World Uranium Summit and Nuclear Free Future Awards" in Window Rock, Ariz. He was given an international "lifetime achievement" award, "for his unique brand of gadfly peace activism in the community of Los Alamos, the birthplace of the bomb."
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