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

by Annie M. Jacobsen

  By relying on satellites to fight the war on terror as well as many of the foreseeable conflicts in the immediate future, the single greatest wicked problem facing the Pentagon in the twenty-first century is the looming threat of the militarization of space. To weaponize space, historical thinking in the Pentagon goes, would be to safeguard space in a preemptive manner. A war in space over satellite control is not a war the United States necessarily wants to fight, but it is a war the United States is most assuredly unwilling to lose.

  “Over eighty percent of the satellite communications used in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility is provided by commercial vendors,” reads the Pentagon’s “Surprise in Space” report. And when, in 2007, the Chinese — unannounced and unexpectedly — shot down one of their own satellites with one of their own weapons, the incident opened the Pentagon’s eyes to a whole host of potential wickedproblem scenarios in space.

  Around 5:00 p.m. eastern standard time on July 11, 2007, a small, six-foot-long Chinese satellite was circling the Earth 539 miles up when it was targeted and destroyed by a Chinese ballistic missile launched from a mobile launcher at the Songlin test facility in Szechuan Province, running on solid fuel and topped with a “kinetic kill vehicle,” or explosive device. The satellite was traveling at speeds of around sixteen thousand miles per hour, and the ballistic missile was traveling approximately eighteen thousand miles per hour. The hit was dead-on. As radical and impressive as it sounds, the technology was not what raised flags and eyebrows at the Pentagon. The significance of the event came from the fact that with China’s satellite kill, the world moved one dangerous step closer to the very wicked problem of weaponizing space. To enter into that game means entering into the kind of mutual-assured-destruction military industrial-complex madness that has not been engaged in since the height of the Cold War.

  Actions of this magnitude, certainly by those of a superpower like China, are almost always met by the U.S. military with a response, either overt or veiled, and the Chinese satellite kill was no exception. Seven months later, in February of 2008, an SM-3 Raytheon missile was launched off the deck of the USS Lake Erie in the North Pacific. It traveled approximately 153 miles up into space where it hit a fivethousand-pound U.S. satellite described as being about the size of a school bus and belonging to the National Reconnaissance Office. The official Pentagon story was that the satellite had gone awry and the United States didn’t want the satellite’s hazardous fuel source, stated to be the toxin hydrazine, to crash on foreign soil. “Our objective was to intercept the satellite, reduce the mass that might survive re-entry [and] vector that mass into unpopulated areas ideally the ocean,” General James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the press. International leaders cried foul, saying the test was designed to show the world that the United States has the technology to take out other nations’ satellites. “China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries,” declared Liu Jianchao, China’s foreign ministry spokesman — certainly an example of the pot calling the kettle black.

  In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union actually considered using space as a launching pad for war. President Eisenhower’s science adviser James Killian — a man with so much power that he was not required to tell the truth to Congress — fielded regular suggestions from the Pentagon to develop, in his own words, “satellite bombers, military bases on the moon, and so on.” Killian was the man who spearheaded the first nuclear weapon explosions in space, first in the upper atmosphere (Orange), then near the ozone layer (Teak), and finally in outer space (Argus). But Killian shied away from the idea of weaponizing space not because he saw putting weapons in space as an inherently reckless or existentially bad idea but because Killian believed nuclear weapons would not work well from space.

  “A satellite cannot simply drop a bomb,” Killian declared in a public service announcement released from the White House on March 26, 1958, a report written for “nontechnical” people at the behest of the president. “An object released from a satellite doesn’t fall. So there is no special advantage in being over the target,” Killian declared. Here was James Killian, who, by his own admission, was not a scientist, explaining to Americans why dropping bombs from space wouldn’t work. “Indeed the only way to ‘drop’ a bomb directly down from a satellite is to carry out aboard the satellite a rocket launching of the magnitude required for an intercontinental missile.” In other words, Killian was saying that to get an ICBM up to a launchpad in space was simply too cumbersome a process. Killian believed that the better way to put a missile on a target was to launch it from the ground. That the extra effort to get missiles in space wasn’t worth the task. This may have been true in the 1950s, but decades later James Killian would be proven wrong.

  Flash forward to 2011. Analysts with the United States Space Surveillance Network, which is located in an Area 51-like facility on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, spend all day, every day, 365 days a year, tracking more than eight thousand man-made objects orbiting the Earth. The USSS Network is responsible for detecting, tracking, cataloging, and identifying artificial objects orbiting Earth, including active and inactive satellites, spent rocket bodies, and space debris. After the Chinese shot down their own satellite in 2007, the network’s job got considerably more complicated. The Chinese satellite kill produced an estimated thirty-five thousand pieces of onecentimeter-wide debris and another fifteen hundred pieces that were ten centimeters or more. “A one-centimeter object is very hard to track but can do considerable damage if it collides with any spacecraft at a high rate of speed,” said Laura Grego, a scientist with the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The United States said the NRO satellite it shot down did not create space debris because, being close to Earth when it was shot down, its pieces burned up as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere.

  These scenarios create another wicked problem for the U.S. military. Every modern nation relies on satellites to function. The synchronized encryption systems used by banks around the world rely on satellites. Weather forecasts are derived from satellite information, as is the ability of air traffic controllers to keep airplanes safely aloft. The U.S. global positioning system, or GPS, works on satellites, as will the European version of GPS, the Galileo positioning system, which will come online in 2012. The U.S. military relies on satellites not just for its drone programs but for almost all of its military communications worldwide. Were anyone to take down the satellite system, or even just a part of it, the world would see chaos and panic that would make The War of the Worlds seem tame. When considering the actions of the United States and the Soviet Union during the atomic buildup of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s — the nuclear hubris, the fiscal waste, and the imprudent public policy — it is nothing short of miraculous that the space-based nuclear tests of the late 1950s and early 1960s did not propel the two superpowers to fight for military control of space. Instead, in the last decades of the Cold War, the United States and the USSR worked with a tacit understanding that space was off-limits for warfare. Neither nation tried to put missiles on the moon. And neither nation shot down another nation’s spy satellites. According to Colonel Leghorn, this is because “spy satellites launched into space were accepted as eyes in the skies that governments had to live with.” The governments Leghorn is referring to are Russia and the United States. But today, allegiances and battle lines have been considerably redrawn. At least one enemy army, that of al-Qaeda, would rather die than live according to the superpowers’ rules.

  In spite of, or perhaps because of, his ninety-one years, Leghorn speaks with great authority. In addition to being considered the father of aerial reconnaissance, Leghorn founded the Itek Corporation in 1960, which developed the high-resolution photographic system for America’s first reconnaissance satellite, Corona. The Corona program was highly successful and, most notably, was originally designed
and run by Richard Bissell for the CIA at the same time he was in charge of operations at Area 51. After leaving the Air Force, Leghorn spent decades in the commercial-satellite business. From the satellite images produced by Itek satellites, the CIA learned that in order to escape scrutiny by America’s eyes in the sky, many foreign governments moved their most secret military facilities underground.

  Out in the Nevada desert, while the CIA redoubled its efforts at Area 51 to develop ground sensor technology and infrared tracking techniques to learn more about underground facilities (which also requires the use of drones), the Department of Defense and the Air Force got to work on a different approach. In the 1980s, the military worked to develop the bunker buster, a nuclear weapon designed to fire deep into Earth’s surface, hit underground targets, and detonate belowground. Weapons designer Sandia was brought on board. It was called the W61 Earth Penetrator, and testing took place at Area 52 in 1988. The idea was to launch the earth-penetrator weapon from forty thousand feet above but after many tests (minus the nuclear warhead), it became clear that a nuclear bomb would have little or no impact on granite, which is the rock of choice in which to build sensitive sites underground. After President Clinton ended all U.S. nuclear testing in 1993 (the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1996 and signed by five of the then seven or eight nuclear-capable countries), the idea of developing an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon lost its steam. But the building of underground facilities by foreign governments continued to plague war planners, so along came a nonnuclear space-based weapons project called Rods from God. That weapons project involved slender metal rods, thirty feet long and one foot in diameter, that could be launched from a satellite in space and hit a precise target on Earth at ten thousand miles per second. T. D. Barnes says “that’s enough force to take out Iran’s nuclear facility, or anything like it, in one or two strikes.” The Federation of American Scientists reported that a number of similar “long-rod penetration” programs are believed to currently exist.

  After the Gulf War, DARPA hired a secretive group called the JASON scholars (a favored target in conspiracy-theorist circles) and its parent company, MITRE Corporation, to report on the status of underground facilities, which in government nomenclature are referred to as UGFs. The unclassified version of the April 1999 report begins, “Underground facilities are being used to conceal and protect critical activities that pose a threat to the United States.” These threats, said JASON, “include the development and storage of weapons of mass destruction, principally nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons,” and also that “the proliferation of such facilities is a legacy of the Gulf War.” What this means is that the F-117 stealth bomber showed foreign governments “that almost any above ground facility is vulnerable to attack and destruction by precision guided weapons.” For DARPA, this meant it was time to develop a new nuclear bunker buster — Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty or not.

  In January of 2001, the Federation of American Scientists reported their concern over the disclosure that the nuclear weapons laboratories were working on low-yield nukes, or “mini-nukes,” to target underground facilities despite the congressional ban against “research and development which could lead to the production by the United States of a new, low-yield nuclear weapon.” Los Alamos fired back, claiming they could develop a mini-nuke conceptually. “One could design and deploy a new set of nuclear weapons that do not require nuclear testing to be certified,” stated Los Alamos associate director for nuclear weapons Stephen M. Younger, asserting that “such simple devices would be based on a very limited nuclear test database.” The Federation of American Scientists saw Younger’s assertion as improbable: “It seems unlikely that a warhead capable of performing such an extraordinary mission as destroying a deeply buried and hardened bunker could be deployed without full-scale [nuclear] testing” first. On July 1, 2006, Stephen Younger became president of National Security Technologies, or NSTec, the company in charge of operations at the Nevada Test Site, through 2012.

  In 2002, with America again at war, the administration of George W. Bush revived the development of the nuclear bunker-buster weapon, now calling it the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. In April of the same year, the Department of Defense entered into discussions with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to begin preliminary design work on the new nuclear weapon. By fiscal year 2003, the Stockpile Services Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator line item received $14.5 million; in 2004 another $7.5 million; and in 2005 yet another $27.5 million. In 2006, the Senate dropped the line item. Either the program was canceled or it got a new name and entered into the black world — perhaps at Area 51 and Area 52.

  Or perhaps next door at the Nevada Test Site, underground. For as far-fetched and ironic as this sounds — developing a bunker-busting nuclear bomb at an underground nuclear testing facility in Nevada— this is exactly what DOE officials proposed in an unclassified report released quietly in 2005. In this report, officials with the agency formerly known as the Atomic Energy Commission proposed to revive the NERVA program — the Area 25 nuclear-powered rocket program designed to send man to Mars — and to do it, of all places, underground.

  Unlike the NERVA program of the 1960s, argued Michael Williams, the author of the report, “DOE Ground Test facilities for space exploration enabling nuclear technologies can no longer be vented to the open atmosphere,” meaning a facility like the one that previously existed out at Jackass Flats was out of the question. But for the new NERVA project, Williams proposed, the Department of Energy could easily conduct its nuclear tests inside “the existing [underground] tunnels or new tunnels at the Nevada Test site for this purpose.”

  Former Los Alamos associate director of nuclear weapons Stephen Younger, who currently serves as the president of operations at the Nevada Test Site, categorically denies that any underground nuclear weapons tests are in the works at the test site. But he does confirm that “subcritical” nuclear tests currently take place there, inside an underground tunnel complex located beneath Area 1. To access that facility, Younger says, employees use an elevator that travels a thousand feet underground. What goes on there are “scientific experiments with plutonium and high explosives,” Younger says, “not weapons tests.” Younger insists the “same cannot be said about the Russians.” He says that inside their underground facility at Novaya Zemlya — the location where the Soviet Union detonated their fiftymegaton thermonuclear bomb, called Tsar Bomba, in 1961—“the Russians are developing new nuclear weapons around the clock. Mr. [Vladimir] Putin has said that repeatedly. He keeps saying that because they want us to know.”

  There is no way to know precisely what is happening today at the Nevada Test and Training Range — aboveground at Area 51 or Area 52, or in the underground tunnels beneath the test site, because most of what is currently happening out in the Nevada desert is classified and the federal agencies involved believe the people do not have a need-to-know. The question is, does the public have a right to know? Does Congress? Many secret projects that have gone on at Area 51 have delivered results that have kept America safe. The first flight over the Soviet Union, by Hervey Stockman in a U-2 spy plane in 1956, provided the CIA with critical intelligence, namely, that the Russians were not lining up their military machine for a sneak attack. The intelligence provided by an A-12 Oxcart spy plane mission kept the Johnson administration from declaring war on North Korea during the Vietnam War. The F-117 stealth bomber crippled Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs. But there are other kinds of secret actions that have gone on at Area 51, at least one of which should never have been authorized and should not be kept as a national secret anymore.

  After World War II, the American government’s hiring and protection of Nazi scientists was based on the premise that these scientists were the world’s best and their information was needed in order to advance science — and win the next war. In doing so, America made a deal with the devil. This deal became a wicked prob
lem for the agencies involved, and playing the game with former Nazis gave way to an entirely new set of problems, one of which has been the federal government’s ongoing complicity in covering up many of these scientists’ original crimes. Approximately six hundred million pages of information about the government’s postwar use of Nazi criminals’ expertise remains classified as of 2011. Many documents about Area 51 exist in that pile.

  The reason why the federal government will not officially admit that Area 51 exists is not the secret spy planes, the stealth bombers, or the drones that were, and still are, flight-tested there. The reason is something else. It is a program undertaken by five EG&G engineers at Area 51. This program involved the Roswell crash remains and predated the development of the original CIA facility, currently called Area 51, which was built by Richard Bissell beginning in 1955. Area 51 is named as such not because it was a randomly chosen quadrant, as has often been presumed, but because the 1947 crash remains from Roswell, New Mexico, were sent from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base out to a secret spot in the Nevada desert — in 1951.

  The gypsies have a saying: You’re not really dead until the last person who knows you dies. For investigative journalists it goes something like this: As long as there is an eyewitness willing to tell the truth, the truth can be known.