Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

Chapter Eighteen: Meltdown

The idea behind a facility like Area 51 is that dangerous top secret tests can be conducted there without much scrutiny or oversight. To this end, there is no shortage of death woven into the uncensored history of Area 51. One of the most dangerous tests ever performed there was Project 57, the dirty bomb test that took place five miles northwest of Groom Lake, in a subparcel called Area 13. And yet what might have been the one defensible, positive outcome in this otherwise shockingly outrageous test — namely, lessons gleaned from its cleanup — was ignored until it was too late.

Unlike the spy plane projects at Groom Lake, where operations tend to have clear-cut beginnings and ceremonious endings, Project 57 was abandoned midstream. If the point of setting off a dirty bomb in secret was to see what would happen if an airplane carrying a nuclear bomb crashed into the earth near where people lived, it follows that serious efforts would then be undertaken by the Atomic Energy Commission to learn how to clean up such a nightmare scenario after the catastrophe occurs. No such efforts were initially made.

Instead, about a year after setting off the dirty bomb, the Atomic Energy Commission put a barbed-wire fence around the Area 51 subparcel, marked it with HAZARD/DO NOT ENTER/NUCLEAR MATERIAL signs, and moved on to the next weapons test. The bustling CIA facility five miles downwind would be relatively safe, the nuclear scientists and the weapons planners surmised. Alpha particles are heavy and would rest on the topsoil after the original dust cloud settled down. Furthermore, almost no one knew about the supersecret project, certainly not the public, so who would protest? The closest inhabitants were the rank and file at the CIA’s Groom Lake facility next door, and they also knew nothing of Project 57. The men there followed strict need-to-know protocols, and as far as the commission was concerned, all anyone at Area 51 needed to know was to not venture near the barbed-wire fence marking off Area 13.

And yet the information gleaned from a cleanup effort would have been terribly useful, as was revealed eight years and eight months after Project 57 unfurled. On the morning of January 17, 1966, a reallife dirty bomb crisis occurred over Palomares, Spain. A Strategic Air Command bomber flying with four armed hydrogen bombs — with yields between 70 kilotons and 1.45 megatons — collided midair with a refueling tanker over the Spanish countryside.

On the morning of the accident, an Air Force pilot and his six-man crew were participating in an exercise that was part of Operation Chrome Dome, something that had begun in the late 1950s as part of Strategic Air Command. In a show of force inherent to the military doctrine of the day — something called mutual assured destruction, or MAD — airplanes regularly circled Earth carrying thermonuclear bombs. The idea behind MAD was that if the Soviet Union were to make a sneak attack on America, SAC bombers would already be airborne to strike back at Moscow with nuclear weapons of their own, thereby assuring the mutual destruction of both sides.

That morning, the bomber lined up with the tanker and had just begun refueling when, in the words of pilot Larry Messinger, “all of a sudden, all hell seemed to break loose” and the two aircraft collided. There was a massive explosion and the men in the fuel tanker were instantly incinerated. Somehow Messinger, his copilot, the instructor pilot, and the navigator managed to eject from the airplane carrying the bombs. Their parachutes deployed, and the men floated down, landing in the sea. The four nuclear bombs — individually powerful enough to destroy Manhattan — also had parachutes, two of which did not deploy. One parachuted bomb landed gently in a dry riverbed and was later recovered relatively intact. But when the two bombs without parachutes hit the earth, their explosive charges detonated, breaking open the nuclear cores. Nuclear material was released at Palomares in the form of aerosolized plutonium, which then spread out across 650 acres of Spanish farmland — consistent with dispersal patterns from the Project 57 dirty bomb test. The fourth bomb landed in the sea and became lost. Palomares was then a small fishing village and farming community located on the Mediterranean Sea. As fortune would have it, January 17 was the Festival of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of Palomares, which meant most people in the village were at church that day and not out working in the fields.

Five thousand miles away, in Washington, DC, President Johnson learned of the disaster over breakfast. He’d been sitting in his bedroom sipping tea and eating melon and chipped beef when a staffer from the White House Situation Room knocked, entered, and set down a copy of his daily security briefing. On the first page, the president read about the war in Vietnam. On the second page he learned about the Palomares incident. The daily brief said nothing about widespread plutonium dispersal or about the lost thermonuclear bomb. Only that the “16th Nuclear Disaster Team had been dispatched to the area.” The “16th Nuclear Disaster Team” sounded official enough, but if fifteen nuclear disaster teams had preceded this one or existed concurrently, no record of any of them exists in the searchable Department of Energy archives. In reality, the group was ad hoc, meaning it was put together for the specific purpose of dealing with the Palomares incident. An official nuclear disaster response team did not exist in 1966 and would not be created for another nine years, until 1975, when retired Brigadier General Mahlon E. Gates, then the manager of the Nevada Test Site, put together the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST.

In 1966, the conditions in Palomares, Spain, were strikingly similar to the conditions at the Nevada Test Site in terms of geology. Both were dry, hilly landscapes with soil, sand, and wind shear as significant factors to deal with. But considering, with inconceivable lack of foresight, the Atomic Energy Commission had never attempted to clean up the dirty bomb that it had set off at Area 13 nine years before, the 16th Nuclear Disaster Team was, essentially, working in the dark.

Eight hundred individuals with no hands-on expertise were sent to Palomares to assist in the cleanup efforts there. The teams improvised. One group secured the contaminated area and prepared the land to remove contaminated soil. A second group worked to locate the lost thermonuclear bomb, called a broken arrow in Defense Department terms. The group cleaning up the dispersed plutonium included “specialists and scientists” from the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Sandia Laboratories, Raytheon, and EG&G. It was terribly ironic. The very same companies who had engineered the nuclear weapons and whose employees had wired, armed, and fired them were now the companies being paid to clean up the deadly mess. This was the military-industrial complex in full swing.

For the next three months, workers labored around the clock to decontaminate the site of deadly plutonium. By the time the cleanup was over, more than fourteen hundred tons of radioactive soil and plant life were excavated and shipped to the Savannah River plant in South Carolina for disposal. The majority of the plutonium dispersed on the ground was accounted for, but the Defense Nuclear Agency eventually conceded that the extent of the plutonium particles scattered by wind, carried as dust, and ingested by earthworms and excreted somewhere else “will never be known.” As for the missing hydrogen bomb, for fortyfour days the Pentagon refused to admit it was lost despite the fact that it was widely reported as being missing. “I don’t know of any missing bomb,” one Pentagon official told the Associated Press. Only after the bomb was recovered from the ocean floor did the Pentagon admit that it had in fact been lost.

The nuclear accidents did not stop there. Two years and four days later there was another airplane crash involving a Strategic Air Command bomber and four nuclear bombs. On January 21, 1968, an uncontrollable fire started on board a B-52G bomber during a secret mission over Greenland. Six of the seven crew members bailed out of the burning airplane, which crested over the rooftops of the American air base at Thule and slammed into the frozen surface of North Star Bay. The impact detonated the high explosives in at least three of the four thermonuclear bombs — similar to exploding multiple dirty bombs — spreading radioactive plutonium, uranium, and tritium over a large swath of ice. A second fire started at the crash site, consuming bomb debris, wreckage from the airplane, and fuel. After the inferno burned for twenty minutes the ice began to melt. One of the bombs fell into the bay and disappeared beneath the frozen sea. In November of 2008, a BBC News investigation found that the Pentagon ultimately abandoned that fourth nuclear weapon after it became lost.

Once again, an ad hoc emergency group was put together; there was still no permanent disaster cleanup group. This time five hundred people were involved. The conditions were almost as dangerous as the nuclear material. Temperatures fell to −70 degrees Fahrenheit, and winds blew at ninety miles per hour. Equipment froze. In a secret SAC document, made public by a Freedom of Information Act request in 1989, the Air Force declared their efforts would be nominal, “a cleanup undertaken as good housekeeping measures,” with officials anticipating the removal of radioactive debris “to equal not less than 50 %” of the total of what was there. For eight months, a crew calling themselves the Dr. Freezelove Team worked around the clock. When they were done, 10,500 tons of radioactive ice, snow, and crash debris was airlifted out of Greenland and flown to South Carolina for disposal.

Back at the Nevada Test Site, a new industry had been born in nuclear accident cleanup. But before anything can get cleaned up, an assessment must be made regarding how much lethal radiation is present, where exactly, and in what form. All across the desert floor, new proof-of-concept, or prototypes, of radiation-detection instruments appeared. Before the nuclear bomb accidents in Spain and Greenland, individual radiation-detection machines were limited to handheld devices like Geiger counters, used to examine workers’ hands and feet and to search for radiation in limited local areas. Finally, gadgets and gizmos flooded the Nevada Test Site for fieldtesting in a post-nuclear accident world. After the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, testing had moved underground, but often these underground tests “vented,” releasing huge plumes of radiation from fissures in the earth. The test site was the perfect place to test equipment because there was an abundance of plutonium, americium, cesium, cobalt, europium, strontium, and tritium in the topsoil, and no shortage of radiation in the air.

First came new handheld devices, like a briefcase called the Neutron Detector Suitcase, a prototype designed by EG&G, which was followed by more advanced means of detecting radiation, including ground vehicles. The Sky Scanner, developed by the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, roamed down the test site’s dirt roads measuring radioactivity escaping from atomic vents. The Sky Scanner looked like a news van with a satellite dish, but inside it was full of equipment that could determine how much fallout was in the air. Next came fixed-wing aircraft that could patrol the air over an accident site. Used to detect fallout since Operation Crossroads, they were now equipped with state-of-the-art, stillclassified radiation-detection devices. This marked the birth of a burgeoning new military technology that would become one of the most important and most secret businesses of the twenty-first century. Called remote sensing, it is the ability to recognize levels of radioactivity from a distance using ultraviolet radiation, infrared, and other means of detection.

Within a decade of the disastrous nuclear accidents at Palomares and Thule, EG&G would so dominate the radiation-detection market that the laboratory built at the Nevada Test Site for this purpose was initially called the EG&G Remote Sensing Laboratory. After 9/11, the sister laboratory, at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, was called the Remote Sensing Laboratory and included sensing-detection mechanisms for all types of WMD. This facility would become absolutely critical to national security, so much so that by 2011, T. D. Barnes says that “only two people at Nellis are cleared with a need-toknow regarding classified briefings about the Remote Sensing Lab.” Barnes is a member of the Nellis/Creech Air Force Base support team and its civilian military council. But in the 1960s, three nuclear facilities — Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia — and one private corporation — EG&G — were the organizations uniquely positioned to see the writing on the wall. If nuclear accidents were going to continue to happen, then these four entities were going to secure the government contracts to clean things up.

EG&G had been taking radiation measurements and tracking radioactive clouds for the Atomic Energy Commission since 1946. For decades, EG&G Energy Measurements has maintained control of the vast majority of radiation measurements records going back to the first postwar test at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Because much of this information was originally created under the strict Atomic Energy classification Secret/Restricted Data — i.e., it was “born classified”—it has largely remained classified ever since. It cannot be transferred to another steward. For decades, this meant there was no one to compete with EG&G for the remote sensing job. How involved EG&G is in remote sensing today, their corporate headquarters won’t say.

So secret are the record groups in EG&G’s archives, even the president of the United States can be denied access to them, as President Clinton was in 1994. One year earlier, a reporter named Eileen Welsome had written a forty-five-page newspaper story for the Albuquerque Tribune revealing that the Atomic Energy Commission had secretly injected human test subjects with plutonium starting in the 1940s without those individuals’ knowledge or consent. When President Clinton learned about this, he created an advisory committee on human radiation experiments to look into secrets kept by the Atomic Energy Commission and to make them public. In several areas, the president’s committee succeeded in revealing disturbing truths, but in other areas it failed. In at least one case, regarding a secret project at Area 51, the committee was denied access to records kept by EG&G and the Atomic Energy Commission on the grounds that the president did not have a need-to-know about them. In another case, regarding the nuclear rocket program at Area 25 in Jackass Flats, the president’s committee also failed to inform the public of the truth. Whether this is because the record group in EG&G’s archive was kept from the committee or because the committee had access to it but chose not to report the facts in earnest remains unknown. Instead, what happened at Jackass Flats, well after atmospheric testing had been outlawed around the world, gets a oneline reference in the Advisory Committee’s 937-page Final Report, grouped in with dozens of other tests involving “intentional releases” near human populations. “At AEC sites in Nevada and Idaho, radioactive materials were released in tests of the safety of bombs, nuclear reactors, and proposed nuclear rockets and airplanes,” the report innocuously reads.

If Area 51 had a doppelgдnger next door at the test site, it would certainly be Area 25, which encompasses 223 square miles. The flat, sandy desert expanse got its name during the gold rush when miners used to tie their donkeys to trees in the flat area while searching the surrounding mountains for gold. Like Area 51, Jackass Flats is surrounded by mountain ranges on three of its four sides, making them both hidden sites within federally restricted land. Unlike Area 51, which technically does not exist, Jackass Flats in the 1950s and 1960s maintained a polished public face. When President Kennedy visited the Nevada Test Site in 1962, he went to Jackass Flats to promote the space travel programs that were going on there. Richard Mingus was one of the security guards assigned to assist the president’s Secret Service detail that day. Photographs that appeared in the newspapers showed the handsome president, wearing his signature sunglasses and dark suit, flanked by aides while admiring strange-looking contraptions rising up from the desert floor; Mingus stands at attention nearby. Next to the president is Glenn Seaborg, then head of the Atomic Energy Commission and the man who co-discovered plutonium. But as with most nuclear projects of the day, the public was only told a fraction of the story. There was a lot more going on at Jackass Flats behind the scenes — and in underground facilities there — about which the public had no idea.

Area 25 began as the perfect place for America to launch a nuclear-powered spaceship that would get man to Mars and back in the astonishingly short time of 124 days. The spaceship was going to be enormous, sixteen stories tall and piloted by one hundred and fifty men. Project Orion seemed like a space vehicle from a science fiction novel, except it was real. It was the brainchild of a former Los Alamos weapons designer named Theodore Taylor, a man who saw space as the last “new frontier.”

For years, beginning in the early 1950s, Taylor designed nuclear bombs for the Pentagon until he began to doubt the motives of the Defense Department. He left government service, at least officially, and joined General Atomics in San Diego, the nuclear division of defense contractor General Electric. There, he began designing nuclear-powered spaceships. But to build a spaceship that could get to Mars required federal funding, and in 1958 General Atomics presented the idea to President Eisenhower’s new science and technology research group, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. The agency had been created as a result of the Sputnik crisis, its purpose being to never let the Russians one-up American scientists again. Today, the agency is known as DARPA. The D stands for defense.

At the time, developing cutting-edge space-flight technology meant hiring scientists like Wernher Von Braun to design chemical-based rockets that could conceivably get man to the moon in a capsule the size of a car. Along came Ted Taylor with a proposal to build a Marsbound spaceship the size of an office building, thanks to nuclear energy. For ARPA chief Roy Johnson, Ted Taylor’s conception was love at first sight. “Everyone seems to be making plans to pile fuel on fuel on fuel to put a pea into orbit, but you seem to mean business,” the ARPA chief told Taylor in 1958.

General Atomics was given a one-million-dollar advance, a classified project with a code name of Orion, and a maximum-security test facility in Area 25 of the Nevada Test Site at Jackass Flats. The reason Taylor’s spaceship needed an ultrasecret hiding place and could not be launched from Cape Canaveral, as other rockets and spaceships in the works could be, was that the Orion spacecraft would be powered by two thousand “small-sized” nuclear bombs. Taylor’s original idea was to dispense these bombs from the rear of the spaceship, the same as a Coke machine dispenses sodas. The bombs would fall out behind the spaceship, literally exploding and pushing the spaceship along. The Coca-Cola Company was even hired to do a classified early design.

At Area 25, far away from public view, Taylor’s giant spaceship would launch from eight 250-foot-tall towers. Blastoff would mean Orion would rise out of a column of nuclear energy released by exploding atomic bombs. “It would have been the most sensational thing anyone ever saw,” Taylor told his biographer John McPhee. But when the Air Force took over the project, they had an entirely different vision in mind. ARPA and the Air Force reconfigured Orion into a space-based battleship. From high above Earth, a USS Orion could be used to launch attacks against enemy targets using nuclear missiles. Thanks to Orion’s nuclear-propulsion technology, the spaceship could make extremely fast defensive maneuvers, avoiding any Russian nuclear missiles that might come its way. It would be able to withstand the blast from a one-megaton bomb from only five hundred feet away.

For a period of time in the early 1960s the Air Force believed Orion was going to be invincible. “Whoever builds Orion will control the Earth!” declared General Thomas S. Power of the Strategic Air Command. But no one built Orion. After atmospheric nuclear tests were banned in 1963, the project was indefinitely suspended. Still wanting to get men to Mars, NASA and the Air Force turned their attention to nuclear-powered rockets. From now on, there would be no nuclear explosions in the atmosphere at Jackass Flats — at least not officially. Instead, the nuclear energy required for the Mars spaceship would be contained in a flying reactor, with fuel rods producing nuclear energy behind barriers that were lightweight enough for space travel but not so thin as to cook the astronauts inside. The project was now called NERVA, which stood for Nuclear Engine Rocket Vehicle Application. The facility had a public name, even though no one from the public could go there. It was called the Nuclear Rocket Test Facility at Jackass Flats. A joint NASA/Atomic Energy Commission office was created to manage the program, called the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, or SNPO.

For T. D. Barnes, working on the NERVA nuclear reactor was a bit of a stretch — his area of expertise was missile and radar technologies. But when things got slow over at Area 51 in the late 1960s, Barnes, a member of EG&G Special Projects team, would be dispatched over to Area 25 to work on the NERVA program. Even though NERVA had been sold to Congress as a public program, all its data was classified, as were the day-to-day goings-on in Area 25. Barnes’s workstation could not have been more hidden from the public. It was underground, built into the side of a mountain that rose up from the flat desert landscape. Each morning Barnes and his fellow Q-cleared coworkers who lived in and around Las Vegas parked in employee parking lots down at the entrance to the Nevada Test Site, at Camp Mercury, and were then shuttled out to Jackass Flats in Atomic Energy Commission motor pool vans. “Some of the people working on NERVA lived in Beatty and Amargosa Valley and drove to the tunnel themselves,” Barnes adds.

All NERVA employees entered work through a small portal in the side of the mountain, “shaped like the entrance to an old mining shaft, but spiffed up a bit,” Barnes recalls, remembering “large steel doors and huge air pipes curving down from the mesas and entering the tunnel.” Inside, the concrete tunnel was long and straight and ran into the earth “as far as the eye could see.” Atomic Energy Commission records indicate the underground tunnel was 1,150 feet long. Barnes remembered it being brightly lit and sparkling clean. “There were exposed air duct pipes running the length of the tunnel as well as several layers of metal cable trays, which were used to transport heavy items into and out of the tunnel,” he says. “The ceiling was about eight feet tall, and men walked through it no more than two abreast.” There was also a tarantula problem at Jackass Flats, which meant every now and then, Barnes and his colleagues would spot a large hairy spider running down the tunnel floors or scampering along its walls.

Deep in the tunnel Barnes would come up against a last set of closed doors. When they opened, they revealed a succession of brightly lit rooms filled with desks. Barnes explains, “Moving closer to ground zero where the tunnel ended, we entered a large subterranean room stacked floor to ceiling with rows of electronic amplifiers, discriminator circuits, and multiplexing components and banks of hightech equipment lining the walls.” Standing in front of the row of electronics was an engineer “usually with a cart full of electronic test equipment calibrating and repairing electronic circuits,” Barnes explains. These workers were all preparing for what was actually going on aboveground, and that was full-power, full-scale nuclear reactor engine tests. In order for NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission to be able to verify that NERVA could actually propel a spaceship filled with astronauts the 34 million to 249 million miles to Mars (the distance depends on the positions of the two planets in their orbits), those federal agencies had to witness NERVA running full power for long periods of time here on Earth first. To test that kind of thrust without having the engine launch itself into space, it was caged inside a test stand and positioned upside down.

For each engine test, a remote-controlled locomotive would bring the nuclear reactor over to the test stand from where it was housed three miles away in its own cement-block-and-lead-lined bunker, called E-MAD. “We used to joke that the locomotive at Jackass Flats was the slowest in the world,” Barnes explains. “The only thing keeping the reactor from melting down as it traveled down the railroad back and forth between E-MAD and the test stand was the liquid hydrogen [LH2] bath it sat in.” The train never moved at speeds more than five miles per hour. “One spark and the whole thing could blow,” Barnes explains. At −320 degrees Fahrenheit, liquid hydrogen is one of the most combustible and dangerous explosives in the world. James A. Dewar, author of To the End of the Solar System: The Story of the Nuclear Rocket, gets even more specific. “One hundredth of what one might receive from shuffling along a rug and then touching a wall can ignite hydrogen,” Dewar wrote in 2004. To help visualize what the facilities aboveground at Jackass Flats looked like, Barnes likens them to Cape Kennedy. “Imagine a one-hundred-twenty-foot-tall aluminum tower rising up from a plateau of cement surrounded by a deep, concrete aqueduct. Add some huge, spherical thermos-like dewars sitting around, each containing something like two hundred and sixty thousand gallons of liquid hydrogen, and you can visualize the spacelaunch appearance of things,” Barnes explains. In Atomic Energy photographs from the 1960s, a single set of train tracks can be seen running along the bottom of the cement aqueduct and disappearing into an opening underneath the tall metal tower. “The railroad car carried the nuclear reactor up to the test stand and lifted it into place using remotely controlled hydraulic hands,” Barnes explains. “Meanwhile, we were all underground looking at the reactor through special leaded-glass windows, taking measurements and recording data as the engine ran.” The reason the facility was buried inside the mountain was not only to hide it from the Soviet satellites spying on the U.S. nuclear rocket program from overhead, but to shield Barnes and his fellow workers from radiation poisoning from the NERVA reactor. “Six feet of earth shields a man from radiation poisoning pretty good,” says Barnes.

When running at full power, the nuclear engine operated at a temperature of 2,300 Kelvin, or 3,680.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which meant it also had to be kept cooled down by the liquid hydrogen on a permanent basis. “While the engine was running the canyon was like an inferno as the hot hydrogen simultaneously ignited upon contact with the air,” says Barnes. These nuclear rocket engine tests remained secret until the early 1990s, when a reporter named Lee Davidson, the Washington bureau chief for Utah’s Deseret News, provided the public with the first descriptive details. “The Pentagon released information after I filed a Freedom of Information Act,” Davidson says. In turn, Davidson provided the public with previously unknown facts: “bolted down, the engine roared… sending skyward a plume of invisible hydrogen exhaust that had just been thrust through a superheated uranium fission reactor,” Davidson revealed. Researching the story, he also learned that back in the 1960s, after locals in Caliente, Nevada, complained that iodine 131—a major radioactive hazard found in nuclear fission products — had been discovered in their town’s water supply, Atomic Energy officials denied any nuclear testing had been going on at the time. Instead, officials blamed the Chinese, stating, “Fresh fission products probably came from an open-air nuclear bomb test in China.” In fact, a NERVA engine test had gone on at Area 25 just three days before the town conducted its water supply test.

Had the public known about the NERVA tests when they were going on, the tests would have been perceived as a nuclear catastrophe in the making. Which is exactly what did happen. “Los Alamos wanted a run-away reactor,” wrote Dewar, who in addition to being an author is a longtime Atomic Energy Commission employee, “a power surge until [the reactor] exploded.” Dewar explained why. “If Los Alamos had data on the most devastating accident possible, it could calculate other accident scenarios with confidence and take preventative measures accordingly.” And so, on January 12, 1965, the nuclear rocket engine code-named Kiwi was allowed to overheat. High-speed cameras recorded the event. The temperature rose to “over 4000 °C until it burst, sending fuel hurtling skyward and glowing every color of the rainbow,” Dewar wrote. Deadly radioactive fuel chunks as large as 148 pounds shot up into the sky. One ninety-eight-pound piece of radioactive fuel landed more than a quarter of a mile away.

Once the explosion subsided, a radioactive cloud rose up from the desert floor and “stabilized at 2,600 feet” where it was met by an EG&G aircraft “equipped with samplers mounted on its wings.” The cloud hung in the sky and began to drift east then west. “It blew over Los Angeles and out to sea,” Dewar explained. The full data on the EG&G radiation measurements remains classified.

The test, made public as a “safety test,” caused an international incident. The Soviet Union said it violated the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which of course it did. But the Atomic Energy Commission had what it wanted, “accurate data from which to base calculations,” Dewar explained, adding that “the test ended many concerns about a catastrophic incident.” In particular, the Atomic Energy Commission and NASA both now knew that “in the event of such a launch pad accident [the explosion] proved death would come quickly to anyone standing 100 feet from ground zero, serious sickness and possible death at 400 feet, and an unhealthy dose at 1000 feet.”

Because it is difficult to believe that the agencies involved did not already know this, the question remains: What data was Atomic Energy Commission really after? The man in charge of the project during this time, Space Nuclear Propulsion Office director Harold B. Finger, was reached for comment in 2010. “I don’t recall that exact test,” Finger says. “It was a long time ago.”

Five months later, in June of 1965, disaster struck, this time officially unplanned. That is when another incarnation of the nuclear rocket engine, code-named Phoebus, had been running at full power for ten minutes when “suddenly it ran out of LH2 [liquid hydrogen and] overheated in the blink of an eye,” wrote Dewar. As with the planned “explosion” five months earlier, the nuclear rocket reactor first ejected large chunks of its radioactive fuel out into the open air. Then “the remainder fused together, as if hit by a giant welder,” Dewar explained. Laymen would call this a meltdown. The cause of the accident was a faulty gauge on one of the liquid hydrogen tanks. One gauge read a quarter full when in reality there was nothing left inside the tank.

So radiated was the land at Jackass Flats after the Phoebus accident, even HAZMAT cleanup crews in full protective gear could not enter the area for six weeks. No information is available on how the underground employees got out. Originally, Los Alamos tried to send robots into Jackass Flats to conduct the decontamination, but according to Dewar the robots were “slow and inefficient.” Eventually humans were sent in, driving truck-mounted vacuum cleaners to suck up deadly contaminants. Declassified Atomic Energy Commission photographs show workers in protective gear and gas masks picking up radioactive chunks with long metal tongs. Like many Atomic Energy Commission officials, Dewar saw the accident as “achieving some objectives.” That “while certainly unfortunate, unplanned, unwanted and unforeseen,” he believed that “calling the accident ‘catastrophic’ mocks the meaning of the word.” The cleanup process took four hundred people two months to complete.

So what happened to NERVA in the end? When Barnes worked on NERVA in 1968, the project was well advanced. But space travel was on the wane. By 1970, the public’s infatuation with getting a man to Mars had made an abrupt about-face. Funding dried up, and NASA projects began shutting down. “We did develop the rocket,” Barnes says. “We do have the technology to send man to Mars this way. But environmentally, we could never use a nuclear-powered rocket on Earth in case it blew up on takeoff. So the NERVA was put to bed.” That depends how one defines put to bed. President Nixon canceled the program, and it officially ended on January 5, 1973. Several employees who worked at the NERVA facility at Jackass Flats say the nuclear rocket program came to a dramatic, cataclysmic end, one that has never before been made public. “We know the government likes to test accidents in advance,” Barnes says. Darwin Morgan, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Site Office, says no such final test ever happened. “Something like that would have been too huge of an event to have happened to ‘cover up,’” Morgan says. “I’ve talked to people in our classified repository. They don’t have anything.”

The record suggests otherwise. In studying Area 25 to determine how former Atomic Energy Commission workers and contractors with cancer may have been exposed to potentially lethal doses of radiation there, investigators for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health determined that “two nuclear reactors” were in fact destroyed there. “Due to the destruction of two nuclear reactors and transport of radioactive material, the area was extensively contaminated with enriched uranium, niobium, cobalt, and cesium,” the authors of the report concluded in 2008.

The full data relating to the last tests conducted on the NERVA nuclear rocket remain classified as Restricted Data and the Department of Energy has repeatedly declined to release the documents. Atomic Energy Commission records are “well organized and complete but unfortunately, most are classified or kept in secure areas that limit public access,” Dewar wrote. As for the records from the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, Dewar said that “many SNPO veterans believe its records were destroyed after the office was abolished in 1973” and that “in particular, the chronology file of Harold Finger, Milton Klein and David Gabriel, SNPO’s directors, would [be] invaluable” in determining the complete story on NERVA. When reached for comment, Harold Finger clarified that he left the program as director in 1968. “I have no knowledge of any meltdown,” Finger said, suggesting that his former deputy Milton Klein might know more. “I left the program as director in 1971,” Klein said, “and do not have any information about what happened to NERVA in the end.”

In January of 2002, as part of the Nevada Environmental Restoration Project, the National Nuclear Security Administration conducted a study regarding proposed cleanup of the contaminated land at Area 25. The report revealed that the following radioactive elements were still present at that time: “cobalt-60 (Co-60); strontium90 (Sr-90); yttrium-90 (Y-90); niobium-94 (Nb-94); cesium-137 (Cs137); barium-137m (Ba-137m); europium-152, -154, and -155 (Eu152, Eu-154, and Eu-155); uranium-234, -235, -238 (U-234, U-235, U238); plutonium-239/240 (Pu-239/240); and americium-241 (Am241),” and that these radioactive contaminants “may have percolated into underlying soil.”

Twenty-eight years after NERVA’s questionable end at Jackass Flats, shortly after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the radiated land at Area 25 started to serve a new purpose when the Department of Homeland Security and the military began training exercises there— including how to deal with cleaning up after a terrorist attack involving a nuclear weapon. T. D. Barnes served as a consultant on several of these endeavors.

NNSA spokesman Darwin Morgan discussed the WMD training that goes on at the test site in a government film that plays at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas. “It’s a PhD experience for first responders,” Morgan said of the test site, “because the site offers real radiation they can’t get anywhere else.” Still, the National Nuclear Security Administration declined to elaborate on how, exactly, this “real radiation” that contaminated Area 25 occurred.

Perhaps in the early 1970s, the thinking at the Atomic Energy Commission was that one day a nuclear facility could very well melt down in an American city. Were this to happen, the commission could have argued, it would be a good thing to know what to expect. By 1972, the nuclear energy industry had experienced five “boom year(s),” according to Atomic Energy Commission archives. Without any kind of regulatory arm in place, the commission had been promoting and developing nuclear reactor “units,” which are the fuel cores that provide energy for nuclear power plants. By the end of 1967, the commission had placed thirty units around the country. The following year, that number jumped to ninety-one, and by 1972 there were one hundred and sixty nuclear reactor units that the Atomic Energy Commission was in charge of overseeing at power plants around the nation.

Six years after the end of the NERVA program at Jackass Flats, the nuclear facility at Three Mile Island nearly melted down, on March 28, 1979. The nuclear reactor there experienced a partial core meltdown because of a loss of coolant. Officials were apparently stunned. “The people seemed dazed by a situation that wasn’t covered in the manuals, torn between logic and standard operating procedures, indecisive in the absence of a strong executive power,” read a 1980 report on the disaster prepared for the public by the newly formed Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Special Inquiry Group. Even though similar accident scenarios had been conducted at Area 25, the “executive power,” which was the Atomic Energy Commission, apparently did not share the information with its partners at the power plants.

At the same time the Three Mile Island accident happened, a movie called The China Syndrome was opening in theaters across the country. The movie was about a government plot to conceal an imminent nuclear meltdown disaster, with Jane Fonda playing a reporter determined to expose the plot. Although it was clear to moviegoers that the film was fictional, it had been made with great attention to technical detail. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Special Inquiry Group determined that the combination of the two events — the real and the fictional — resulted in a media firestorm. The fact that the near nuclear meltdown happened in the media glare, wrote the commissioner, “may be the best insurance that it will not reoccur.” The public’s so-called mass hysteria, feared for decades by government elite, really did work in the public’s interest after all. At Three Mile Island, the media firestorm and the public’s response to it proved to act as a democratic “checks and balances” where the federal government had failed.

For as many nuclear accidents of its own making as the Atomic Energy Commission could foresee, they could not have predicted what happened on January 24, 1978, when a nuclear-powered Russian spy satellite crashed on North American soil, in Canada. NORAD analysts had been tracking Cosmos 954 since it launched, on September 18, 1977, but after three months, the movements of the spy satellite were causing NORAD ever-increasing alarm. The Russian satellite had been designed to track U.S. submarines running deep beneath the surface of the sea, and what NORAD knew about the satellite was that it was forty-six feet long and weighed 4.4 tons. To get that much payload into orbit required phenomenal power, most likely nuclear.

In December of 1977, analysts determined that the Russian satellite was slipping out of orbit, dropping closer and closer to Earth on each ninety-minute rotation of the globe. Calculations indicated that unless the Russians could get control of their satellite, Cosmos would, in all probability, reenter the atmosphere and crash somewhere in North America within a month. President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski pressed Moscow for information about what exactly was on board the crashing satellite. The Russians told Brzezinski that Cosmos 954 carried 110 pounds of highly enriched uranium 235.

Richard Mingus worked at the Department of Energy’s emergency command center, located in Las Vegas, during the crisis. The center was in charge of controlling public information about the looming nuclear disaster, following directions from the CIA. According to a secret CIA report declassified in 1997, a decision was made not to inform the public. Trying to predict the public’s reaction to a nuclear satellite crash was like “playing night baseball with the lights out,” wrote CIA analyst Gus Weiss, because “the outcome of [Cosmos] 954 would be akin to determining the winner of a train wreck.” The CIA knew exactly what would happen, and that was that “the satellite was coming down carrying a live reactor.” The CIA also believed that “a sensationalized leak would disturb the public in unforeseeable ways.” This information has never been made public before.

“It was extremely tense,” recalls Richard Mingus, who spent several days fielding calls at the emergency command center. By 1978, NEST — Nuclear Emergency Search Team — was finally trained to handle nuclear disasters. The man in charge was Brigadier General Mahlon E. Gates, also the manager of the Nevada Test Site. According to Gates, “the nucleus for NEST-related activity was established within EG&G, which had responsibility for overall logistics” to the nuclear lab workers and those assigned to NEST by the federal government. The team waited on standby at McCarran Airport, “ready to go the minute the thing crash-landed,” Mingus says. “Our job at the emergency command center was to keep people across America from panicking.” All that Brzezinski had said publicly was that America was experiencing a “space age difficulty.” Mingus believes this was the right move. “The satellite was still pretty high up, there was no radioactive danger until it actually hit the ground. But imagine the panic if people, or say a mayor of a city, started calling for cities to evacuate based on where they thought the satellite was going to crash down on the next ninety-minute rotation?” Mingus says the feeling at the command center was that if that were to happen, it would be panic like in The War of the Worlds.

When Cosmos 954 finally crashed, it hit the earth across a large swath of ice in the middle of the frozen Canadian tundra, one thousand miles north of Montana on Great Slave Lake. At McCarran Airport a fleet of unmarked NEST vans — meant to look like bakery vans but really loaded with banks of gamma- and neutron-detection equipment inside — drove into the belly of a giant C-130 transport plane and prepared to head north. NEST personnel included the usual players in the nuclear military-industrial complex: scientists and engineers from Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia, and EG&G. Troy Wade was the lead federal official dispatched to the crash site. Looking back, he explains, “It was the radioactive fuel we were most concerned about. If a piece comes down that weighs a ton, you can’t predict how far and wide the debris, including all that fuel, will go.”

For this reason, the first order of business was detecting radiation levels from the air. Wade and the EG&G remote-sensing team loaded small aircraft and helicopters into the belly of the C-130, alongside the unmarked bread vans, and headed for the Canadian tundra. As part of Operation Morning Light, NEST members scoured a fifty-by-eighthundred-mile corridor searching for radioactive debris. “This was long before the advent of GPS. There were no mountains to navigate by,” Wade says. “The pilots had no reference points. Just a lot of snow and ice out there. Temperatures of nearly fifty degrees below zero.” Helping out from high above was an Air Force U-2 spy plane.

After several long months, 90 percent of the debris from Cosmos 954 had been recovered. In the postaccident analysis, officials at NORAD determined that if the satellite had made one last orbit before crashing, its trajectory would have put it down somewhere on America’s East Coast.