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

Chapter Six: Atomic Accidents

Richard Bissell once said that setting up Area 51 inside a nuclear testing facility kept the curiosity-seekers at bay. With Operation Plumbbob, a 1957 atomic test series that involved thirty consecutive nuclear explosions, he got more than he bargained for. With the arms race in full swing, the Department of Defense had decided it was just a matter of time before an airplane transporting an atomic bomb would crash on American soil, unleashing a radioactive disaster the likes of which the world had never seen. In the twenty-first century, this kind of weapon would be referred to as a dirty bomb.

The dirty bomb menace posed a growing threat to the internal security of the country, one the Pentagon wanted to make less severe by testing the nightmare scenario first. The organization needed to do this in a controlled environment, away from the urban masses, in total secrecy. No one outside the project, absolutely no one, could know. Officials from the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project decided that the perfect place to do this was Area 51, inside the Dreamland airspace, about four or five miles northwest of Groom Lake. If the dirty bomb was set off outside the legal perimeter of the Nevada Test Site, secrecy was all but guaranteed. As far as specifics were concerned, there was an apocalyptic prerequisite the likes of which no government had ever dealt with before. Weapons testers needed “a site that could be relinquished for 20,000 years.”

Code-named the 57 Project, and later Project 57, the Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S. Air Force, and EG&G would work together to simulate an Air Force airplane crash involving an XW-25 nuclear warhead — a crash in which radioactive particles would “accidentally” be dispersed on the ground. The land around the mock crash site would be contaminated by plutonium, which, according to scientists, would take 24,100 years to decay by half. At the time, scientists had no idea what accidental plutonium dispersal in open air would do to beings and things in the element’s path. The 57 Project was a test that would provide critical data to that end. There were further prerequisites, ones that had initially narrowed the possibilities of usable land to that within the Nevada Test Site. The place needed to contain “no preexisting contamination,” to be reasonably flat, and to cover approximately fifty square miles. Ideally, it would be a dry lake valley, “preferably a site where mountain-valley drainage currents would induce large amount of shear,” or flow. It had to be as far away as possible from prying eyes, but most important, it had to be a place where there was no possibility that the public could learn that officials were even considering such a catastrophic scenario, let alone preparing for one. It was decided that in press releases the 57 Project would only be referred to as “a safety test,” nothing more. With a doctor named James Shreve Jr. in charge of things, the project had an almost wholesome ring to it.

One dry lake bed originally considered was Papoose Lake, located six miles due south of Groom Lake, also just outside the test site. But soil samples taken by weapons planners revealed the earth there already had trace amounts of plutonium, owing to previous nuclear explosions conducted inside the test site in 1951, 1952, and 1953, five miles to the west at another dry lake bed called Frenchman Flat. Further complicating matters, Papoose Lake was the subject of contention between the Atomic Energy Commission and two local farmers, the Stewart brothers. The dispute was over eight dead cows that had been grazing at Papoose Lake in March of 1953 when a twenty-four-kiloton nuclear bomb called Nancy was detonated nearby. Nancy sent radioactive fallout on livestock across the region, including those grazing at Papoose Lake. Sixteen of the Stewart brothers’ horses died from acute radiation poisoning, along with their cows. The commission had paid the Stewarts three hundred dollars for each dead horse but stubbornly refused to pay the men for the dead cows. Instead, a lieutenant colonel from the Army’s Veterinary Corps, Bernard F. Trum, wrote a long, jargon-filled letter to the farmers stating there was “nothing to indicate that [the blast] was the actual cause of the [cows’] deaths.” Instead, the commission insisted the cows’ deaths were “text book cases… of vitamin-A deficiency.”

Shamelessly, the commission had a second doctor, a bovine specialist with Los Alamos, to certify in writing that “Grass Tetany” or “general lack of good forage” had killed the cows, not the atomic explosion over the hill. To add insult to injury, the Atomic Energy Commission told the Stewart brothers that its Los Alamos scientists had subjected their own cows to atomic blasts in New Mexico during the original Trinity bomb test in 1945. Those cows, the commission stated, were “burnt by the radioactivity over their entire dorsum and yet have remained in excellent health for years.” In essence, the commission was saying, Our nuked cows are alive; yours should be too.

The Stewart brothers remained unconvinced and requested a note of explanation they could understand. In 1957, as weapons planners were determining where to hold Project 57, the dispute remained unresolved. Fearing that any attention brought to Papoose Lake might ignite the unresolved Stewart brothers’ controversy, officials crossed the Papoose Lake land parcel off the location list.

The focus narrowed to a large, flat expanse in the Groom Lake valley, the same valley where the CIA was running its U-2 program. There, to the northwest of Area 51, lay a perfect sixteen-square-mile flat parcel of land — relatively virgin territory that no one was using. A record search determined that all grazing rights to the area had been “extinguished,” meaning that local farmers and ranchers were already prohibited from allowing their livestock to roam there. Then weaponstest planners made an aerial inspection of Groom Lake. Colonel E. A. Blue joined the project’s director, Dr. Shreve, in an overhead scout. In a classified memo, the two men joked about how they spotted a herd of cows roaming around the chosen site, “60 to 80 cattle who hadn’t gotten the word,” and that “somehow information must be gotten to them and their masters.” Gallows humor for cows.

A land-use deal between the Department of Defense, which controlled the area for the Air Force, and the Atomic Energy Commission, the civilian organization that controlled the test site, was struck. As it was with the rest of the loosely defined Area 51, this

desired land parcel lay conveniently just outside the legal boundaries of the Nevada Test Site, to the northeast. This allowed the 57 Project to fall under the rubric of a military operation, which could assist in shielding it from official Atomic Energy Commission disclosures, the same way calling it a safety test did. Anyone with oversight regarding unsafe nuclear tests simply didn’t know where to look. In the end, the land designation even allowed Project 57 to be excluded from official Nevada Test Site maps. As of 2011, it still is.

In March of 1957, workers cordoned off the area in preparation for Project 57. The nuclear warhead was flown from Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico to the Yucca Lake airstrip at the test site and transferred to Building 11, where it would remain in storage until explosion day. Since it needed its own name for record-keeping purposes, officials decided to designate it Area 13.

Richard Mingus was tired. The twenty-four-year-old Ohio native had been working double shifts at the Sands hotel for three years and four months, ever since he returned home from the front lines of the Korean War. Newly married, Mingus and his wife, Gloria, had their first baby on the way. The Sands was the most popular spot on the Las Vegas Strip. It was the place where high rollers and partygoers went for entertainment, where they could hear the Rat Packers sing in the Copa Room. The restaurant at the Sands was a first-class operation, with silver service delivered from over-the-shoulder trays. Richard Mingus was proud to work there. Once he even got to wait on Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher. But by the summer of 1956, the novelty of hearing celebrity singers like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. perform had taken a backseat to the financial uncertainty that comes with a waiter’s life. When he’d learned Gloria, the light of his life, was pregnant, Mingus became elated. Then economic insecurity settled in. In addition to having a little one on the way, Mingus supported his widowed mother back east.

Looking back, Mingus reflects on that time in his life. “You can never guess what the future holds,” he says. That summer, life dealt Richard and Gloria Mingus a cruel blow. Gloria delivered prematurely, and their baby died in the hospital. They were without health insurance, and the bills accompanying the tragedy left Richard Mingus overwhelmed. Gloria became despondent. “I needed a solid job. And one that came with hospital benefits,” Mingus explains. “It was time for me to find a profession. So I asked one of the waiters at the Sands if he knew about anything.” Mingus learned the federal government was hiring security guards. The following morning he drove over to Second Avenue and Bonanza Street to apply.

There, Mingus stood in a long line of about a hundred other applicants for what seemed like hours. The Nevada Test Site, which was a sixty-five-mile commute to the northwest, had jobs. Rumors were those jobs paid well. The atomic tests, which had begun five years earlier, in 1951, had brought tens of millions of dollars in business to the Las Vegas economy. For the most part, Las Vegas as a city had endorsed the tests because they were such an economic boon. And yet it had been more than a year since the last atomic test series, which was called Operation Teapot and which was made up of twelve nuclear bomb explosions, including one that was dropped from an airplane. Controversies about fallout, particularly debates involving strontium-90, the deadly by-product of uranium and plutonium fission, had made their way into the public domain. For a while, there was even talk among locals that the test site could get shut down. Standing in line, Mingus got the sense that closing down the test site was far from reality. And he was right — weapons planners were gearing up for the largest atomic bomb test series ever to take place in the continental United States.

Mingus stood in line for a long time. Finally, a sergeant took his fingerprints and asked him if he had any military background. When Mingus said he’d served in Korea, the sergeant nodded with approval and sent him into a separate room. Las Vegas in the 1950s was a town made up largely of gamblers, swindlers, and fortune seekers. The fact that Mingus was a former soldier with an honorable discharge made him an ideal candidate for what the government was after: good men who could qualify for a Q clearance, which was required for a job involving nuclear weapons. Mingus filled out paperwork and answered a battery of questions. In just a few hours, Mingus was, tentatively, offered a job. Exactly what the job entailed, the recruiter could not say, but it paid more than twice what the best local waiters made during a stellar night at the Sands. Most important to Mingus, the job came with health insurance — Gloria’s dream. He could begin work as soon as his security clearance came in. That process could take as long as five months.

Richard Mingus had no idea that he was about to become one of the first Federal Services security guards assigned to Area 51. Or that the very first nuclear test he would be asked to stand guard over would be Project 57—America’s first dirty bomb.

From the first atomic explosions of Operation Crossroads, in 1946, until the Nevada Test Site opened its doors, in 1951, America tested its nuclear weapons on atolls and islands in the Pacific Ocean. There, in a vast open area roughly twice the size of the state of Texas, the Pentagon enjoyed privacy. The Marshall Islands were a million miles away from the American psyche, which made secret-keeping easy. But the Pacific Proving Ground was a long haul for the Pentagon in terms of moving more than ten thousand people and millions of tons of equipment back and forth from the United States for each test series. Guarding these military assets en route to the Pacific required a nearwar footing. The ship carrying the nuclear material also carried the lion’s share of the nation’s nuclear physicists, scientists, and weapons engineers. The precious cargo required constant air cover and an escort by destroyer battleships while it made its zigzag course across the ocean. When Dr. Edward Teller, the Hungarian émigré and father of the hydrogen bomb, began arguing for an atomic bombing range in America to make things easier on everyone, there was hardly a voice of dissent from Washington. Officials at the Pentagon, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, and the Atomic Energy Commission all agreed with Teller and began encouraging the president to authorize a continental test site.

Science requires trial and error, Dr. Teller explained. As nuclear bombs grew more powerful, as weapons went from kilotons to megatons, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory were struggling with discrepancies between theoretical calculations— equations made on paper — and the actual results the weapons produced. If the Pacific Proving Ground was the Olympic stadium for nuclear bombs, the scientists needed a local gym, a place to keep in shape and try out new ideas. Nevada would be perfect, everyone agreed. It was only a two-hour plane ride away from Los Alamos in New Mexico, as compared to the weeklong journey it took to get people to the Pacific Proving Ground.

In 1950, a top secret feasibility study code-named Project Nutmeg determined for President Truman that a huge area in southern Nevada, one of the least populated areas in the nation not situated on a coastline, was the most ideal place in the continental United States to test nuclear weapons. The Nevada Test and Training Range quickly became 4,687 square miles of government-controlled land. “The optimum conditions as to meteorological, remote available land and logistics” can be found there, the study explained. Even more convenient, there was an airstrip located just seven miles from the entrance of the test site, at a government-owned airfield called Indian Springs.

Before the Nevada Test Site was a nuclear bombing range it had been an animal sanctuary. In the 1930s, the Department of the Interior made the region a wildlife reservation. Herds of antelope and wild horses roamed the high-desert landscape with mountain lions and bighorn sheep. Kit fox and sidewinder rattlesnakes were more prevalent there than anywhere else in the country. Centuries earlier, Native Americans lived in the caves in the mountains. They left behind magnificent paintings and ornate petroglyphs on the caves’ rock walls. In the mid-1800s, settlers built silver- and copper-mining camps, giving the local geography colorful names such as Skull Mountain, Indian Springs, and Jackass Flats. But by 1942, America had entered World War II, and the entire region was withdrawn from public access for War Department use. The Army set up a conventional bombing range across what would later include the Nevada Test Site, Area 51, and the Nellis Air Force Base. It was an ideal place to train aerial gunners, far from people and resplendent with flat, dry lake beds, which were perfect for target practice and for landing airplanes. After the war ended, the bombing range was closed and its buildings were allowed to deteriorate. But the Army hung on to the land rights for possible future use. That future use became clear when 1,350 acres, or about one quarter of the restricted area, was parceled off and called the Nevada Test Site. On January 27, 1951, at 5:45 a.m., an Air Force B50D bomber dropped the first atomic bomb on U.S. soil, onto a dry lake bed called Frenchman Flat, inside the Nevada Test Site.

Edward Teller loved the closeness of Nevada and referred to the bombs being set off there as “quickie” tests. Almost immediately, a second nuclear laboratory, called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, was created by the Atomic Energy Commission with the goal of fostering competition with the Los Alamos nuclear lab. Shortly before the creation of Livermore, scientists at Los Alamos had started to challenge the military establishment regarding what the future of the nuclear bomb should or should not be. Uninterested in what the creators of the atomic bomb had to say, the Department of Defense pushed back by developing Livermore. Competition fosters productivity; the greater the rivalry, the more intense the competition will be. Indeed, it did not take long for a fierce competition to develop between the two outfits, with Los Alamos and Livermore fighting for weapons contracts and feasibility-study awards. Dreaming up prototypes for new weapons was how contracts were won. Dr. Teller argued for the need to experiment with certain “boosters,” like the radioactive isotope of hydrogen tritium, which could further enhance yield. If a scientist or his lab could make a strong enough case for the necessity of testing such a thing, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and the Atomic Energy Commission could easily allocate money for it. The goal was singular: get the highest-yield bombs to fit inside the smallest packages, ideally ones that could be put into the nose cone of a missile designed by Wernher Von Braun.

In five short years, from January 1951 to January 1956, a total of forty-nine nuclear bombs were exploded at the Nevada Test Site, bringing the worldwide total for atmospheric nuclear explosions by the United States to eighty-five. Which is when Richard Mingus joined the security force at the Nevada Test Site and Area 51, just in time for Operation Plumbbob, the largest, most ambitious series of nuclear weapons tests in the United States so far. The first test scheduled in the thirty-test Plumbbob series was Project 57.

In the flat Nevada desert, Richard Mingus took to work in top secret nuclear security like a fish to water. He loved the formal protocols and the way everything was ordered. “I developed a reputation for being tough,” Mingus recalls. From the checklists to the radio codes, everything at the Nevada Test Site and at Area 51 worked with a military precision that Mingus thrived on. What others may have found monotonous, spending long hours guarding nuclear weapons in a vast desert-landscape setting, Mingus found challenging. He passed the pistol training with flying colors. He studied the manuals with such intensity, he ended up scoring in the top 90 percent of all the trainees. His excellence earned Mingus a position as one of only five men chosen to guard the top secret base over the hill from Yucca Flat. For employees of Federal Services, Incorporated, the first thing learned was that the facility was to be referred to only as Delta site. The radio channel on which Mingus and his colleagues spoke could be heard by guards all over the test site. The code was important; it was Delta, nothing more. Mingus remembered how everything at Area 51 worked with top secret/sensitive compartmented information protocols. “Even my sergeant wasn’t cleared to go over the hill to Delta. He was my superior but he didn’t have a need-to-know what I was doing over there,” Mingus explains. “So I was very curious the first time driving out there, looking out the window… wondering what’s ahead. When we got there, it was not very fancy at all. Just an airstrip in the desert. Later, we were told the place was also called Watertown but never to use that word. Over the radio we always referred to our position at Delta, never anything else.” That first day at Delta, aka Area 51, Richard Mingus and his four colleagues were met by a CIA security representative at the west-facing perimeter gate. “He drove us into the area. We went straight to the admin building, which was just a little wooden structure with a patch cord telephone system sitting there on a desk. The sergeant looked at me, pointed to a chair, and said, ‘Dick, that’s your post.’” A surge of intimidation swept over Mingus. “A country boy like me, I looked at the phone system and I thought, This is the hottest spot on the post, the place where all the communication from the CIA comes in. I had never used a switchboard before and I knew if I wanted to keep my job I’d have to learn real fast. As it turns out, there was plenty more time to learn. The phone almost never rang. ‘Thirty-two thirty-two,’ that’s how I answered the telephone. There were not many calls. And when someone did call, they would almost always ask for the same person, a [generic] name like Joe Smith, the code name for the commander at the base.”

At Area 51, Mingus and his colleagues rotated through four sentry posts: the administration building, the top of a seventy-five-foot water tower, and the east and west gates. The gate positions were used to control access to Area 51 by land. On more than one occasion, Mingus turned away what he calls “overly curious Air Force,” individuals who “just because they had rank, they thought they should be able to come on in.” Mingus denied access to anyone not badged for Area 51. “A few times things got real tense. We worked on strict orders and it was my job to keep people out.” The water-tower post at the facility was used by guards to keep an eye on the sky. “We were on the lookout for a rogue helicopter or small aircraft, that type of thing,” Mingus recalls. During this time, the security guards got to know many of the U-2 pilots. “They’d fly low enough over me so I could see their faces in the cockpit. They got a kick out of flying over our security posts. They’d buzz over us and after they landed they’d always make a joke about not wanting us sleeping on the job.”

Richard Mingus had been guarding Area 51 for a little over a month when the Los Alamos scientists and the EG&G engineers began their final preparations for Project 57 at Area 13. A supervisor at the Nevada Test Site asked Mingus if he was willing to work some considerable overtime for the next few weeks. He had been requested to serve as the guard to keep both Area 51 and Area 13 secure. Considerable overtime meant double-time pay, and Mingus agreed. Finally, a shot date of April 3 was chosen. Shot, Mingus quickly learned, was commission-speak for “nuclear detonation.” As was required by an agreement between the Atomic Energy Commission and the State of Nevada, the Department of Defense prepared a simple statement for the press. “A highly classified safety test [is] being conducted by Dr. James Shreve Jr., in April 1957,” read the Las Vegas Sun. The public had no idea the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission would be simulating an airplane crash involving an XW-25 nuclear warhead by initiating a one-point detonation with high explosives at Area 13. Neither did any of the U-2 program participants living in Quonset huts just a few miles to the east. Scientists predicted the warhead would release radioactive plutonium particles, but because a test like Project 57 had never been conducted before, scientists really had no clear idea of what would happen.

Workers set up four thousand fallout collectors around a ten-bysixteen-square-mile block of land. These galvanized steel pans, called sticky pans, had been sprayed with tacky resin and were meant to capture samples of plutonium particles released into the air. Sixtyeight air-sampler stations equipped with millipore filter paper were spread over seventy square miles. An accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon in an urban area would be far more catastrophic than one in a remote desert area such as Groom Lake, and the Department of Defense wanted to test how city surfaces would respond to plutonium contamination, so mock-ups of sidewalks, curbs, and pavement pieces were set out in the desert landscape. Some fourteen hundred blocks of highway asphalt and wood float finish concrete were fabricated and set around on the ground. To see how automobiles would contaminate when exposed to plutonium, cars and trucks were parked among the juniper bushes and Joshua trees. As zero day got closer, Mingus saw preparations pick up. Giant air-sampling balloons were tethered to the earth and floated over Area 13 at various elevations; some were five feet off the ground and others a thousand feet up, giving things a circus feel. Nine burros, 109 beagles, 10 sheep, and 31 albino rats were put in cages and set to face the dirty bomb. EG&G’s rapatronic photographic equipment would record the radioactive cloud within the first few microseconds of detonation. A wooden decontamination building was erected just a few hundred yards down from Mingus’s post. It was nothing fancy, just a wooden shack “stocked with radiation equipment and protective clothing, shower stalls… with a three-hundred-fifty-gallon hot-water supply and a dressing room with benches and hangers for clothes.” Shortly before shot day, workers installed a “two-foot-wide wooden approach walk” and covered it with kraft paper.

Shot day came and went without the test. All nuclear detonations are subject to the weather; Mother Nature, not the Pentagon’s Armed Forces Special Weapons Project officers, had final say regarding zero hour. Mother Nature’s emissary at the test site was Harold “Hal” Mueller, a meteorologist from UCLA. In the case of Project 57, there was one weather problem after the next. It was April in the high desert, which meant heavy winds, too much rain, and thick clouds. For several days, snow threatened the skies. In the second week of April, the winds were so intense that a blimp moored twelve miles south, at Yucca Flat, crashed and deflated. On April 19, one of the Project 57 balloons broke loose, forcing General Starbird to issue a telegram notifying Washington, DC, of a potential public relations nightmare. The balloon had sailed away from Area 13 and was headed in the direction of downtown Las Vegas. “A twenty-three foot balloon towing two hundred feet one eighth inch steel aircraft cable escaped Area 13 at 2255 hours April 19 PD,” read Starbird’s terse memo. His “best estimate is that balloon will self-rupture and fall within boundaries of the Las Vegas bombing and gunnery range,” and thereby go unnoticed. But General Starbird and everyone else involved knew if the balloon were to escape the test site’s boundaries, the entire Plumbbob series was at risk of cancellation. Lucky for Starbird, the balloon crash-landed inside the Nevada Test and Training Range.

The concept of using balloons in nuclear tests was first used in this series. In thirteen of the thirty Plumbbob explosions scheduled to take place in spring and summer of 1957, a balloon would be carrying the nuclear device off the ground. Before balloons were used, expensive metal towers had been constructed to hold the bomb, towers that guards like Richard Mingus spent hours tossing paper airplanes from. “You needed something to keep your mind off the fact that the bomb you were standing next to was live and could flatten a city,” Mingus says. To get weapons test engineers like Al O’Donnell up that high— the towers were usually three hundred, five hundred, or seven hundred feet tall — in order to wire the bomb, rudimentary elevators had to be built next to the bomb towers; these were also very expensive. A balloon shot was far more cost-effective and also produced a lot less radioactivity than vaporizing metal did. For the public, however, the safety and security of hanging nuclear bombs from balloons raised an obvious question: What if one of the balloons were to get away?

Finally, during the early-morning hours of April 24, the weather cleared and the go-ahead was given for Project 57. At 6:27 a.m., local time, the nuclear warhead in Area 13 was hand-fired by an employee from EG&G, simulating the plane crash without actually crashing a plane. Mingus remembers the day because “it was just a few days after Easter, as I recall. Finally a good weather day. I don’t remember snow but I do remember I had to get muddy to get to my post. Area 13 was way out in the boondocks. Barely any people around because it was a military test, not AEC. There wasn’t much traffic and from where I was parked in my truck, I could see a mile down the road. I remember it was cold and I had my winter coat on. No radiation-protection gear.” The predicted pattern of fallout was to the north. When the dust from the small radioactive cloud settled, plutonium had spread out over 895 square acres adjacent to Groom Lake. Mingus says, “It wasn’t spectacular. It didn’t have a big fireball. But it involved an extreme amount of radiation, which made it nasty. I remember how dirty it was.”

The bomb was indeed dirty. Plutonium, if inhaled, is one of the most deadly elements known to man. Unlike other radiation that the body can handle in low dosages, such as an X-ray, one-millionth of a gram of plutonium will kill a person if it gets in his or her lungs. According to a 1982 Defense Nuclear Agency request for an unclassified “extract” of the original report, most of which remains Secret/Restricted Data, Project 57 tests confirmed for the scientists that if a person inhales plutonium “it gets distributed principally in bone and remains there indefinitely as far as human life is concerned. One cannot outlive the influence because the alpha half-life of plutonium239 is of the order of 20,000 years.” These findings came as a result of many tests performed on the dead burros, beagles, sheep, and albino rats that had been exposed to the dirty bomb. So why wasn’t Richard Mingus dead?

The same report revealed that “air samplers indicated high airborne concentrations of respirable plutonium remarkably far downwind.” Plutonium is a poison of paradox. It can be touched without lethal effects. Because it emits alpha particles, the weakest form of radiation, plutonium can be blocked from entering the body by a layer of paper or a layer of skin. Equally incongruous is the fact that plutonium is not necessarily lethal if ingested. “Once in the stomach, its stay in the body is short, for [particles] are excreted as an inert material with virtually no body assimilation,” read another report. In other words, plutonium is deadly for humans and animals only if particles reach the lower respiratory tract.

Mingus never breathed any particles into his lungs as he kept watch for ten to twelve hours at a time on a desolate stretch of land between Area 13 and Area 51, guarding two of the most classified projects in post-World War II American history: Projects 57 and Aquatone, the U-2. As the weeks wore on and Project 57’s plutonium particles settled onto the desert floor, Mingus watched men from Sandia, Reynolds Electric and Engineering Company, and EG&G go in and out of the contamination site. They’d put on face masks and seal areas on their bodies where their clothing met their skin by using household tape. They passed by a small metal sign that read DO NOT ENTER, CONTAMINATED AREA so they could swap out trays, feed the animals that were still alive, and remove the dead and dying ones. They replaced spent millipore paper with fresh strips and then headed back down to the laboratory and the animal morgue inside the Nevada Test Site. Meanwhile, Mingus watched overhead as the U-2 pilots made their final test flights, putting in as many flight hours as they could before their missions became real. Soon these pilots would be dispatched overseas, where they would be stationed on secret bases and fly dangerous missions that technically did not exist and that the public would not learn about for decades.

Data obtained as a result of Project 57 confirmed for the Department of Defense what it already knew. “Plutonium has a 24,000 year half-life. It does not decay.” Once plutonium embeds in soil, it tends not to move. “There are few instances of plutonium depletion with time. There is little tendency for the plutonium to change position (depth) in soil with time.” Provided a person doesn’t inhale plutonium particles, and provided the plutonium doesn’t get into the bloodstream or the bones, a person can pass through an environment laden with plutonium and live into his eighties; Richard Mingus is a case in point.

Within a year of the detonation of the dirty bomb, the scientists were satisfied with their preliminary data, and Project 57 wound down. The acreage at Area 13 was fenced off with simple barbed wire. Stickers that read contaminated materials were attached to the bumpers and hoods of Atomic Energy Commission vehicles before they were buried deep underground. Clothing contaminated with “alpha-emitting material was sealed in plastic bags and buried in the contaminated waste area.” And yet, by the summer of 1958, Project 57’s director, Dr. James Shreve, authored a very troubling report — one that was marked Secret-Restricted Data — noting that the measurements research group had made a potentially deadly observation. “Charles Darwin studied an acre of garden in which he claimed 53,000 hard working earthworms moved 18 tons of soil,” wrote Dr. Shreve. “Translocation of soil, earthworms’ ingestion of plutonium, could turn out to be a significant influence, intentional or unintentional, in the rehabilitation of weapon-accident environment.” In other words, plutonium-carrying earthworms that had passed through Area 13, or birds that ate those earthworms, could at some point in the future get to a garden down the road or trees in another field. “The idea of an entirely separate program on ecology in Area 13 had occurred to [names unclear] in the summer of 1957,” wrote Shreve, “but the AEP/UCLA logical group to undertake the investigation was too committed on Operation Plumbbob to consider the responsibility.” The twenty-nine nuclear bombs about to blow in the rest of the Plumbbob series would take precedent over any kind of effort to contain future harm done by the first test in the series, the Project 57 dirty bomb. Out in the desert, men with extraordinary power and punishing schedules worked without any effective oversight. As one EG&G weapons engineer remarked, “Things at the test site rolled fast and loose.” Not until as late as 1998 was the top layer of earth from Area 13 scraped up and removed. By then, earthworms in the area, and birds eating those earthworms, had been moving plutonium-laden soil who knows how far for more than forty years.

With the plutonium-contamination test out of the way, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project began moving forward with the rest of the 1957 open-air nuclear-test series. It was a boon to the Las Vegas economy, supplying millions of dollars in resources and in jobs. Each test was reported to cost about three million dollars— approximately seventy-six million in 2011 dollars — although it is impossible to learn what that figure did or did not include.

Nearly seven thousand civilians were badged to work at the test site during Operation Plumbbob. Another fourteen to eighteen thousand employees of the Department of Defense also participated; official figures vary. But despite all the money being pumped into Las Vegas, the debate over fallout threatened to cancel the tests. Just two weeks before Project 57 contaminated 895 acres adjacent to Groom Lake with plutonium, Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling made a statement that spooked the public and threatened the tests. Pauling said that as a result of nuclear tests, 1 percent of children born the following year would have serious birth defects. The Atomic Energy Commission responded by positioning their own doctors’ opinions prominently in the news. Dr. C. W. Shilling, deputy director of biology and medicine for the Atomic Energy Commission, ridiculed Linus Pauling, saying that “excessively hot baths can be as damaging to the human sex glands as radioactive fallout in the amount received in the last five years from the testing of atomic weapons.” In hindsight, this is astonishingly erroneous, but at the time it was what Americans were willing to believe.

Almost every newspaper in the country carried stories about the debate, often presenting diametrically opposed views on the subject in columns side by side. “Children are smaller on island sprinkled with nuclear fallout,” read the Santa Fe New Mexican; “Study Finds Kids Born to Marshall Islanders Are Perfectly Normal,” headlined another; “2000 Scientists Ask President to Ban Bomb Tests,” the Los Angeles Mirror declared. Editorials, such as the one published on June 7 in the Los Angeles Times, suggested that a recent influx of seagull and pelican deaths along the California coast was proof that the biblical End of Times was at hand.

All across Europe there were protests. Japan tried to get the tests canceled. When it became clear that the tests would go forward, one hundred enraged Japanese students protested at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. When things turned violent, heavy police reinforcements were called in. Prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru called the tests a “menace” and, in a personal appeal to President Eisenhower, proclaimed that unless all nuclear tests were stopped, the Earth would be hurled into a “pit of disaster.” Soviet scientist Professor Federov publicly accused the United States of developing a weapon that was meant to cause worldwide drought and flood. To counter the campaign aimed at putting an end to nuclear testing, the Atomic Energy Commission kept the propaganda rolling out. Colorful characters such as Willard Frank Libby, one of the Agency’s leading scientists and known as Wild Bill of the Atom Bomb, insisted that “science is like an art. You have to work at it or you will go stale. Testing is a small risk.” In the end the weaponeers won. When it was finally announced that the Plumbbob series had received presidential approval, the press release described the twenty-four nuclear tests (the other six were called safety tests) as “low yield tests,” promising none would be more than “30 kilotons.” The six “safety tests” were generally excluded from mention. The magnitude of the megaton bombs set off in the Pacific had fundamentally warped the notion of atomic destruction. The Hiroshima bomb, which killed seventy thousand people instantly and another thirty to fifty thousand by radiation poisoning over the next few days, was less than half the size of what the U.S. government was now calling “low yield.”

The tests were important, the president promised the public. The government needed to build up its “encyclopedia of nuclear information.” The Army needed its troops to practice “maneuvers” on a nuclear battlefield and to record how soldiers would perform in the event of a nuclear battle. The government had to know: At what distance could a military jeep drive through a nuclear shock wave? How did a blast wave affect a hill versus a dale? What effect would weapons have on helicopters, blimps, and airplanes when they flew close by a mushroom cloud? The Pentagon wondered and said it needed to find out. And so, in the sparsely populated desert of southern Nevada, the Plumbbob nuclear weapons tests went ahead as planned.

Following Project 57, the first nuclear explosion in the series to form a mushroom cloud was called Boltzmann, detonated on May 28, 1957. At twelve kilotons, it was approximately the same size as the Hiroshima bomb and caused Area 51 personnel located eleven miles over the hill to be temporarily evacuated from the base. The bomb was described in a press release simply as a “Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory device.” On June 9, 1957, the New York Times printed the Atomic Energy Commission’s “partial schedule” of the Operation Plumbbob atomic tests so that summer tourists wanting to see a mushroom cloud could plan their itineraries accordingly. “This is the best time in history for the non-ancient but none the less honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching,” the New York Times said. According to Richard Mingus, it seemed that higher-ranking CIA officers at Area 51 did not agree with the Gray Lady’s assessment. “After one blast really shook the place, a group of them jumped in someone’s private aircraft and took off pretty fast.” One report, declassified in 1993, noted the damage: “The blast buckled aircraft hangar doors, shattered windows in the mess hall and broke a ventilator panel on a dormitory.” Area 51 employees were once again evacuated. Neither Richard Bissell nor his team was prepared for such drastic effects and certainly not as a matter of course. Whether the Agency protested or complied remains classified, but the U-2s were quickly flown to a remote area of the north base at Edwards Air Force Base in California and hidden in hangars there. Nothing was going to stop the Atomic Energy Commission and its tests. Operation Plumbbob was in full swing.

Then came the Hood bomb.

It was the middle of the night on July 5, 1957. Richard Mingus was getting ready to head to the test site for work. Gloria was finally pregnant again, and it had been a celebratory Fourth of July. Now Mingus prepared himself for what he knew was going to be an exceedingly long day. The shot was going to be big; so big, the commission had already evacuated every last person from Area 51.

Only the caretakers were left. Richard Mingus kissed Gloria good-bye and climbed into his new 1957 DeSoto. How Mingus loved his car, with its four doors and long fins, a luxury made affordable by long overtime hours at the test site. The morning of the Hood bomb, Mingus drove the sixty-five miles to the main gate at Camp Mercury, located at the southernmost end of the test site, off Highway 95. It was somewhere around 1:30 a.m. Hood was scheduled for detonation early that morning, in Area 9. On the seat beside him, Mingus carried his lunch, always lovingly packed by Gloria in a small, wooden lunch box. Inside there was a sandwich, a can opener, and a can of Mingus’s favorite: Dinty Moore stew. Once inside the gates of the test site, Mingus parked his DeSoto and transferred his belongings into an Atomic Energy Commission truck. Then he drove the familiar route from Camp Mercury to the control point. First he made sure to stop by the ice house, where he could fill up a five-gallon can with water, making sure to put a big block of ice inside. “The size of the Hood bomb was classified but everyone knew it was going to be really big,” Mingus explains.

Three miles to the north, at Area 9, the Army would be conducting hundreds of tests during and immediately after the explosion. Seventy Chester White pigs wearing military uniforms were enclosed in cages facing the bomb and placed a short distance from ground zero. The pigs had been anesthetized to counter the pain of the beta radiation burns they were certain to receive. Using the pigs, the Army wanted to determine which fabrics best withstood an atomic bomb blast. Farther back, lying in trenches, were one hundred soldiers, all of whom were participating in twenty-four scientific experiments. In classified papers obtained by the author, scientists called this the Indoctrination Project. A committee called the Committee on Human Resources was conducting these secret tests on soldiers to determine how they would react psychologically when nuclear bombs started going off. The Committee on Human Resources wanted to study the “psychology of panic” and thereby develop “emotional engineering programs” for soldiers for future use.

A second battalion of 2,100 troops was stationed farther back, in Area 4 and Area 7, troops whose job was to simulate a “mythical attack by an aggressor force against Las Vegas, conducted over four days.” A mile to the south, twenty-five hundred Marines would be working on combined air-ground exercises during Hood, using an amphibian tractor called the LVTP5, the ship-to-shore vehicle that was used in the Pacific during World War II, an “armored monster capable of bringing Marines ashore with dry feet.” Dozens of helicopters performed maneuvers as well. Medical divisions were present, tasked with studying “blast biology,” to determine the primary and secondary effects of flying bricks, timber, and glass. Different types of wood houses had been built to see what could withstand a nuclear blast best: wood or wallboard; masonry or metal; asbestos-shingle or tarpaper roof. The Federal Civilian Defense Administration was testing different types of bomb shelters and underground domes. One structure was ninety feet by ninety feet across and had a reinforced door weighing a hundred tons that was mounted on a monorail. The Mosler Safe Company sponsored and paid for a $500,000 nuclearbombproof steel vault, ideal for insurance companies and banks seeking ways to mitigate loss after a nuclear attack.

Richard Mingus was at the control point when the Hood bomb went off, all seventy-four kilotons of it. Almost immediately after the bomb detonated, a call came in from Mingus’s boss, a man by the name of Sergeant May. There was a major security problem, May was told. The Atomic Energy Commission had forgotten to secure Area 51. May needed to send Mingus over to the evacuated CIA facility immediately. “Once Sergeant May got off the phone he turned to me quick and said, ‘Go to rad safe, check out a Geiger counter and get over to Building 23 fast.’” Mingus followed orders. He jumped into his Atomic Energy Commission truck and raced toward Building 23.

Not only the yield size of Hood was classified; so was the fact that despite the Atomic Energy Commission’s assurance that it was not testing thermonuclear bombs, Hood was a thermonuclear bomb test. At seventy-four kilotons, it was six times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and remains in 2011 the largest bomb ever exploded over the continental United States. The flash from the Hood bomb was visible from Canada to Mexico and from eight hundred miles out at sea. “So powerful was the blast that it was felt and seen over most of the Western United States as it lighted up the pre-dawn darkness,” reported the United Press International. It took twenty-five minutes for the nuclear blast wave to reach Los Angeles, 350 miles to the west. “LA Awakened. Flash Seen, Shock Felt Here. Calls Flood Police Switch Board,” headlined the Los Angeles Times. Right around the time the blast reached Los Angeles, Richard Mingus reached Building 23, a solid concrete bunker where radiation safety officers stayed during the explosions. In the distance, Mingus saw that a large swath of the desert was on fire.

“You know about Delta?” the security officer inside Building 23 asked Mingus.

“I’ve worked there many times,” Mingus said.

“Grab another fella and get out there,” the man said. “Find a place with the least amount of radiation and set up a roadblock between the test site and Delta.” The Atomic Energy Commission may have moved Area 51 workers off the test site for the nuclear test, but entire buildings full of classified information remained behind. That the facility was not being physically secured by a guard had been an oversight. Now Richard Mingus was being asked to plug that security hole.

Mingus drove quickly up through the test site, heading north toward Area 51. “The whole of Bandit Mountain was on fire,” Mingus explains, referring to the low hills between Papoose Lake and Yucca Flat. “You could see individual Joshua trees on fire.” Mingus kept on driving, moving as fast as he could while avoiding an accident. But to get to where he needed to go, Mingus had to drive straight through ground zero. “There were huge rocks and boulders in the road sent there by the blast,” Mingus explains. “I had my windows rolled up tight and I was driving like hell and my Geiger was screaming. I was worried if I drove too fast and had a wreck in that area, that wouldn’t have been good. At guard post three eighty-five, my Geiger counter was chirping like hell. I remember distinctly it was reading eight point five Rs [never considered a safe amount]. We’d already deactivated that post because of the bomb and now it was way too hot to stay there so I drove on over the hill to Area 51.”

When Mingus arrived at Groom Lake, his Geiger counter finally settled down. It had been approximately fifty minutes since the bomb had gone off. Having reached forty-eight thousand feet, the mushroom cloud would have already floated over Area 13 and Area 51 by that time. Most likely, it was somewhere over Utah now. “When I pulled into Area 51, it was like a ghost town,” Mingus recalls. “I set up a westfacing post. I could see far. Pretty soon, the other guard arrived. He took up the post at the control tower and I stayed in the truck, parked there on the road facing west.” Mingus was fewer than ten miles from ground zero, where the Hood bomb had exploded just an hour before. The blast wave had hit Area 51 with such force, it buckled the metal doors on several of the west-facing buildings, including a maintenance hangar and the supply warehouse. Radioactive ash floated down from the sky. And yet, despite the near-constant rain of nuclear fallout, the requirement for security took precedent. Mingus drank water from his five-gallon jug and waited for the smoke from the nuclear bomb to clear. He ate the sandwich that Gloria had made for him and watched the hills burn. After several hours, he took the can of Dinty Moore stew from his lunchbox and opened it with the can opener that Gloria always made sure to pack. Mingus got out of the AEC truck and opened the hood. He set the soup can on the control block and stirred it with a spoon. It didn’t take long for the liquid to heat up. Mingus got back in the car and checked to see if his radio was working. “Delta is secure,” Mingus said before kicking back to enjoy his stew. For the rest of the day and well into the night, every half hour a voice came over the radio from the control point asking if everything was “okay.” Each time, Mingus let his boss know that Groom Lake was secure. He didn’t see another soul out there in the desert for the rest of the day. By nightfall, all that was left of the fire were the Joshua trees smoldering on the hills. The land at the test site had been appropriately chosen; mostly it was just creosote bush and sand. The bushes had burned, and the sand, after being subjected to 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit, had fused into little pieces of glass. Between the fallout and the structural damage, Area 51 had become uninhabitable. After Hood, the once-bustling classified facility transformed into a ghost town overnight — not unlike the mining towns that had preceded it a century before. The future of the secret base was, almost literally, up in the air.