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 notion 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.
Following Project 57, the first nuclear explosion in the series to form a mushroom cloud was called Boltzmann, detonated on May 28, 1957. At twelve kilotons, it was approximately the same size as the Hiroshima bomb and caused Area 51 personnel located eleven miles over the hill to be temporarily evacuated from the base. The bomb was described in a press release simply as a “Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory device.” On June 9, 1957, the New York Times printed the Atomic Energy Commission’s “partial schedule” of the Operation Plumbbob atomic tests so that summer tourists wanting to see a mushroom cloud could plan their itineraries accordingly. “This is the best time in history for the non-ancient but none the less honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching,” the New York Times said. According to Richard Mingus, it seemed that higher-ranking CIA officers at Area 51 did not agree with the Gray Lady’s assessment. “After one blast really shook the place, a group of them jumped in someone’s private aircraft and took off pretty fast.” One report, declassified in 1993, noted the damage: “The blast buckled aircraft hangar doors, shattered windows in the mess hall and broke a ventilator panel on a dormitory.” Area 51 employees were once again evacuated. Neither Richard Bissell nor his team was prepared for such drastic effects and certainly not as a matter of course. Whether the Agency protested or complied remains classified, but the U-2s were quickly flown to a remote area of the north base at Edwards Air Force Base in California and hidden in hangars there. Nothing was going to stop the Atomic Energy Commission and its tests. Operation Plumbbob was in full swing.
Then came the Hood bomb.
It was the middle of the night on July 5, 1957. Richard Mingus was getting ready to head to the test site for work. Gloria was finally pregnant again, and it had been a celebratory Fourth of July. Now Mingus prepared himself for what he knew was going to be an exceedingly long day. The shot was going to be big; so big, the commission had already evacuated every last person from Area 51.
Only the caretakers were left. Richard Mingus kissed Gloria good-bye and climbed into his new 1957 DeSoto. How Mingus loved his car, with its four doors and long fins, a luxury made affordable by long overtime hours at the test site. The morning of the Hood bomb, Mingus drove the sixty-five miles to the main gate at Camp Mercury, located at the southernmost end of the test site, off Highway 95. It was somewhere around 1:30 a.m. Hood was scheduled for detonation early that morning, in Area 9. On the seat beside him, Mingus carried his lunch, always lovingly packed by Gloria in a small, wooden lunch box. Inside there was a sandwich, a can opener, and a can of Mingus’s favorite: Dinty Moore stew. Once inside the gates of the test site, Mingus parked his DeSoto and transferred his belongings into an Atomic Energy Commission truck. Then he drove the familiar route from Camp Mercury to the control point. First he made sure to stop by the ice house, where he could fill up a five-gallon can with water, making sure to put a big block of ice inside. “The size of the Hood bomb was classified but everyone knew it was going to be really big,” Mingus explains.
Three miles to the north, at Area 9, the Army would be conducting hundreds of tests during and immediately after the explosion. Seventy Chester White pigs wearing military uniforms were enclosed in cages facing the bomb and placed a short distance from ground zero. The pigs had been anesthetized to counter the pain of the beta radiation burns they were certain to receive. Using the pigs, the Army wanted to determine which fabrics best withstood an atomic bomb blast. Farther back, lying in trenches, were one hundred soldiers, all of whom were participating in twenty-four scientific experiments. In classified papers obtained by the author, scientists called this the Indoctrination Project. A committee called the Committee on Human Resources was conducting these secret tests on soldiers to determine how they would react psychologically when nuclear bombs started going off. The Committee on Human Resources wanted to study the “psychology of panic” and thereby develop “emotional engineering programs” for soldiers for future use.
A second battalion of 2,100 troops was stationed farther back, in Area 4 and Area 7, troops whose job was to simulate a “mythical attack by an aggressor force against Las Vegas, conducted over four days.” A mile to the south, twenty-five hundred Marines would be working on combined air-ground exercises during Hood, using an
