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
