amphibian tractor called the LVTP5, the ship-to-shore vehicle that was used in the Pacific during World War II, an “armored monster capable of bringing Marines ashore with dry feet.” Dozens of helicopters performed maneuvers as well. Medical divisions were present, tasked with studying “blast biology,” to determine the primary and secondary effects of flying bricks, timber, and glass. Different types of wood houses had been built to see what could withstand a nuclear blast best: wood or wallboard; masonry or metal; asbestos-shingle or tarpaper roof. The Federal Civilian Defense Administration was testing different types of bomb shelters and underground domes. One structure was ninety feet by ninety feet across and had a reinforced door weighing a hundred tons that was mounted on a monorail. The Mosler Safe Company sponsored and paid for a $500,000 nuclearbombproof steel vault, ideal for insurance companies and banks seeking ways to mitigate loss after a nuclear attack.
Richard Mingus was at the control point when the Hood bomb went off, all seventy-four kilotons of it. Almost immediately after the bomb detonated, a call came in from Mingus’s boss, a man by the name of Sergeant May. There was a major security problem, May was told. The Atomic Energy Commission had forgotten to secure Area 51. May needed to send Mingus over to the evacuated CIA facility immediately. “Once Sergeant May got off the phone he turned to me quick and said, ‘Go to rad safe, check out a Geiger counter and get over to Building 23 fast.’” Mingus followed orders. He jumped into his Atomic Energy Commission truck and raced toward Building 23.
Not only the yield size of Hood was classified; so was the fact that despite the Atomic Energy Commission’s assurance that it was not testing thermonuclear bombs, Hood was a thermonuclear bomb test. At seventy-four kilotons, it was six times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and remains in 2011 the largest bomb ever exploded over the continental United States. The flash from the Hood bomb was visible from Canada to Mexico and from eight hundred miles out at sea. “So powerful was the blast that it was felt and seen over most of the Western United States as it lighted up the pre-dawn darkness,” reported the United Press International. It took twenty-five minutes for the nuclear blast wave to reach Los Angeles, 350 miles to the west. “LA Awakened. Flash Seen, Shock Felt Here. Calls Flood Police Switch Board,” headlined the Los Angeles Times. Right around the time the blast reached Los Angeles, Richard Mingus reached Building 23, a solid concrete bunker where radiation safety officers stayed during the explosions. In the distance, Mingus saw that a large swath of the desert was on fire.
“You know about Delta?” the security officer inside Building 23 asked Mingus.
“I’ve worked there many times,” Mingus said.
“Grab another fella and get out there,” the man said. “Find a place with the least amount of radiation and set up a roadblock between the test site and Delta.” The Atomic Energy Commission may have moved Area 51 workers off the test site for the nuclear test, but entire buildings full of classified information remained behind. That the facility was not being physically secured by a guard had been an oversight. Now Richard Mingus was being asked to plug that security hole.
Mingus drove quickly up through the test site, heading north toward Area 51. “The whole of Bandit Mountain was on fire,” Mingus explains, referring to the low hills between Papoose Lake and Yucca Flat. “You could see individual Joshua trees on fire.” Mingus kept on driving, moving as fast as he could while avoiding an accident. But to get to where he needed to go, Mingus had to drive straight through ground zero. “There were huge rocks and boulders in the road sent there by the blast,” Mingus explains. “I had my windows rolled up tight and I was driving like hell and my Geiger was screaming. I was worried if I drove too fast and had a wreck in that area, that wouldn’t have been good. At guard post three eighty-five, my Geiger counter was chirping like hell. I remember distinctly it was reading eight point five Rs [never considered a safe amount]. We’d already deactivated that post because of the bomb and now it was way too hot to stay there so I drove on over the hill to Area 51.”
When Mingus arrived at Groom Lake, his Geiger counter finally settled down. It had been approximately fifty minutes since the bomb had gone off. Having reached forty-eight thousand feet, the mushroom cloud would have already floated over Area 13 and Area 51 by that time. Most likely, it was somewhere over Utah now. “When I pulled into Area 51, it was like a ghost town,” Mingus recalls. “I set up a westfacing post. I could see far. Pretty soon, the other guard arrived. He took up the post at the control tower and I stayed in the truck, parked there on the road facing west.” Mingus was fewer than ten miles from ground zero, where the Hood bomb had exploded just an hour before. The blast wave had hit Area 51 with such force, it buckled the metal doors on several of the west- facing buildings, including a maintenance hangar and the supply warehouse. Radioactive ash floated down from the sky. And yet, despite the near-constant rain of nuclear fallout, the requirement for security took precedent. Mingus drank water from his five-gallon jug and waited for the smoke from the nuclear bomb to clear. He ate the sandwich that Gloria had made for him and watched the hills burn. After several hours, he took the can of Dinty Moore stew from his lunchbox and opened it with the can opener that Gloria always made sure to pack. Mingus got out of the AEC truck and opened the hood. He set the soup can on the control block and stirred it with a spoon. It didn’t take long for the liquid to heat up. Mingus got back in the car and checked to see if his radio was working. “Delta is secure,” Mingus said before kicking back to enjoy his stew. For the rest of the day and well into the night, every half hour a voice came over the radio from the control point asking if everything was “okay.” Each time, Mingus let his boss know that Groom Lake was secure. He didn’t see another soul out there in the desert for the rest of the day. By nightfall, all that was left of the fire were the Joshua trees smoldering on the hills. The land at the test site had been appropriately chosen; mostly it was just creosote bush and sand. The bushes had burned, and the sand, after being subjected to 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit, had fused into little pieces of glass. Between the fallout and the structural damage, Area 51 had become uninhabitable. After Hood, the once-bustling classified facility transformed into a ghost town overnight — not unlike the mining towns that had preceded it a century before. The future of the secret base was, almost literally, up in the air.
Chapter Seven: From Ghost Town to Boomtown
After the Plumbbob atomic tests rocked Area 51, the CIA base sat like a ghost town. Very little is known about what happened there from the summer of 1957 through the summer of 1959. According to Richard Mingus, a pair of caretakers lived at the Groom Lake facility, a man and his wife. No record of their names has been found. What is known is that after the Plumbbob series effectively shut down operations at Area 51, workers from the Atomic Energy Commission roamed the hills and valleys measuring fallout with Geiger counters in hand. As impossible as it is to imagine in the twenty-first century, in the early days of atomic testing there was no such thing as HAZMAT suits for workers performing tasks in environments laden with WMD. Instead, workers combed the desert floor dressed in white lab coats and work boots, looking for particles of nuclear fallout. According to Atomic Energy Commission documents made public in 1993, this radioactive debris varied in size, from pinhead particles to pencil-size pieces of steel.
Much to the surprise of the nuclear scientists, the atomic weapons tests revealed that sometimes, in the first milliseconds of destruction, the atomic energy actually jettisoned splintered pieces of the bomb tower away from the intense heat, intact, before vaporization could occur. These highly radioactive pieces were then carried aloft in the clouds and deposited down on places like Groom Lake, and Atomic Energy Commission workers could then locate them with magnets. But while workers measured fallout patterns, weapons planners moved ahead with preparations for the next atomic test series, which would take place the following fall. The Operation Hardtack II nuclear test series would prove even bigger than Plumbbob, in terms of the number of tests. From September 12 to October 30, 1958, an astonishing thirty-seven nuclear bombs were exploded — from tops of tall towers, in tunnels and shafts, on the surface of the earth, and hanging from balloons. Areas 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, and 15 served as ground zero for the detonations, all within eighteen miles of Area 51.
All but abandoned by the CIA and left to the elements, the oncebustling Area 51 facility took on a spooky, postapocalyptic feel. Guards from the test site did occasional spot tests, but the classified material had all been moved. While the barren landscape weathered the fallout, the animals observed around Groom Lake suffered terribly. Wild horses, deer, and rabbits roamed around the abandoned hangars and vacant airfields covered with beta radiation burns — the skin lesions caused by radiation poisoning that had plagued so many people and animals in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war. It was also during this period that a rare breach of security over Area 51 airspace occurred. On July 28, 1957, a Douglas Aircraft Company employee named Edward K. Current made what he said was an emergency landing on the former U-2 airstrip at Groom Lake. Mr. Current told Atomic Energy Commission security officers who questioned him that he had been on a cross-country training flight when he became lost and ran low on fuel. He was held overnight and released. The following day, the Nevada Test
