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

by Annie M. Jacobsen

  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.” Thes
e 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 not
ion 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.