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 emigre 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
