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 d
rove 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.”
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Page 12