men floated down, landing in the sea. The four nuclear bombs — individually powerful enough to destroy Manhattan — also had parachutes, two of which did not deploy. One parachuted bomb landed gently in a dry riverbed and was later recovered relatively intact. But when the two bombs without parachutes hit the earth, their explosive charges detonated, breaking open the nuclear cores. Nuclear material was released at Palomares in the form of aerosolized plutonium, which then spread out across 650 acres of Spanish farmland — consistent with dispersal patterns from the Project 57 dirty bomb test. The fourth bomb landed in the sea and became lost. Palomares was then a small fishing village and farming community located on the Mediterranean Sea. As fortune would have it, January 17 was the Festival of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of Palomares, which meant most people in the village were at church that day and not out working in the fields.
Five thousand miles away, in Washington, DC, President Johnson learned of the disaster over breakfast. He’d been sitting in his bedroom sipping tea and eating melon and chipped beef when a staffer from the White House Situation Room knocked, entered, and set down a copy of his daily security briefing. On the first page, the president read about the war in Vietnam. On the second page he learned about the Palomares incident. The daily brief said nothing about widespread plutonium dispersal or about the lost thermonuclear bomb. Only that the “16th Nuclear Disaster Team had been dispatched to the area.” The “16th Nuclear Disaster Team” sounded official enough, but if fifteen nuclear disaster teams had preceded this one or existed concurrently, no record of any of them exists in the searchable Department of Energy archives. In reality, the group was ad hoc, meaning it was put together for the specific purpose of dealing with the Palomares incident. An official nuclear disaster response team did not exist in 1966 and would not be created for another nine years, until 1975, when retired Brigadier General Mahlon E. Gates, then the manager of the Nevada Test Site, put together the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, or NEST.
In 1966, the conditions in Palomares, Spain, were strikingly similar to the conditions at the Nevada Test Site in terms of geology. Both were dry, hilly landscapes with soil, sand, and wind shear as significant factors to deal with. But considering, with inconceivable lack of foresight, the Atomic Energy Commission had never attempted to clean up the dirty bomb that it had set off at Area 13 nine years before, the 16th Nuclear Disaster Team was, essentially, working in the dark.
Eight hundred individuals with no hands-on expertise were sent to Palomares to assist in the cleanup efforts there. The teams improvised. One group secured the contaminated area and prepared the land to remove contaminated soil. A second group worked to locate the lost thermonuclear bomb, called a broken arrow in Defense Department terms. The group cleaning up the dispersed plutonium included “specialists and scientists” from the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Sandia Laboratories, Raytheon, and EG&G. It was terribly ironic. The very same companies who had engineered the nuclear weapons and whose employees had wired, armed, and fired them were now the companies being paid to clean up the deadly mess. This was the military-industrial complex in full swing.
For the next three months, workers labored around the clock to decontaminate the site of deadly plutonium. By the time the cleanup was over, more than fourteen hundred tons of radioactive soil and plant life were excavated and shipped to the Savannah River plant in South Carolina for disposal. The majority of the plutonium dispersed on the ground was accounted for, but the Defense Nuclear Agency eventually conceded that the extent of the plutonium particles scattered by wind, carried as dust, and ingested by earthworms and excreted somewhere else “will never be known.” As for the missing hydrogen bomb, for fortyfour days the Pentagon refused to admit it was lost despite the fact that it was widely reported as being missing. “I don’t know of any missing bomb,” one Pentagon official told the Associated Press. Only after the bomb was recovered from the ocean floor did the Pentagon admit that it had in fact been lost.
The nuclear accidents did not stop there. Two years and four days later there was another airplane crash involving a Strategic Air Command bomber and four nuclear bombs. On January 21, 1968, an uncontrollable fire started on board a B-52G bomber during a secret mission over Greenland. Six of the seven crew members bailed out of the burning airplane, which crested over the rooftops of the American air base at Thule and slammed into the frozen surface of North Star Bay. The impact detonated the high explosives in at least three of the four thermonuclear bombs — similar to exploding multiple dirty bombs — spreading radioactive plutonium, uranium, and tritium over a large swath of ice. A second fire started at the crash site, consuming bomb debris, wreckage from the airplane, and fuel. After the inferno burned for twenty minutes the ice began to melt. One of the bombs fell into the bay and disappeared beneath the frozen sea. In November of 2008, a BBC News investigation found that the Pentagon ultimately abandoned that fourth nuclear weapon after it became lost.
Once again, an ad hoc emergency group was put together; there was still no permanent disaster cleanup group. This time five hundred people were involved. The conditions were almost as dangerous as the nuclear material. Temperatures fell to ?70 degrees Fahrenheit, and winds blew at ninety miles per hour. Equipment froze. In a secret SAC document, made public by a Freedom of Information Act request in 1989, the Air Force declared their efforts would be nominal, “a cleanup undertaken as good housekeeping measures,” with officials anticipating the removal of radioactive debris “to equal not less than 50 %” of the total of what was there. For eight months, a crew calling themselves the Dr. Freezelove Team worked around the clock. When they were done, 10,500 tons of radioactive ice, snow, and crash debris was airlifted out of Greenland and flown to South Carolina for disposal.
Back at the Nevada Test Site, a new industry had been born in nuclear accident cleanup. But before anything can get cleaned up, an assessment must be made regarding how much lethal radiation is present, where exactly, and in what form. All across the desert floor, new proof-of-concept, or prototypes, of radiation-detection instruments appeared. Before the nuclear bomb accidents in Spain and Greenland, individual radiation-detection machines were limited to handheld devices like Geiger counters, used to examine workers’ hands and feet and to search for radiation in limited local areas. Finally, gadgets and gizmos flooded the Nevada Test Site for fieldtesting in a post-nuclear accident world. After the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, testing had moved underground, but often these underground tests “vented,” releasing huge plumes of radiation from fissures in the earth. The test site was the perfect place to test equipment because there was an abundance of plutonium, americium, cesium, cobalt, europium, strontium, and tritium in the topsoil, and no shortage of radiation in the air.
First came new handheld devices, like a briefcase called the Neutron Detector Suitcase, a prototype designed by EG&G, which was followed by more advanced means of detecting radiation, including ground vehicles. The Sky Scanner, developed by the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, roamed down the test site’s dirt roads measuring radioactivity escaping from atomic vents. The Sky Scanner looked like a news van with a satellite dish, but inside it was full of equipment that could determine how much fallout was in the air. Next came fixed-wing aircraft that could patrol the air over an accident site. Used to detect fallout since Operation Crossroads, they were now equipped with state-of-the-art, stillclassified radiation-detection devices. This marked the birth of a burgeoning new military technology that would become one of the most important and most secret businesses of the twenty- first century. Called remote sensing, it is the ability to recognize levels of radioactivity from a distance using ultraviolet radiation, infrared, and other means of detection.
Within a decade of the disastrous nuclear accidents at Palomares and Thule, EG&G would so dominate the radiation-detection market that the laboratory built at the Nevada Test Site for this purpose was initially called the EG&G Remote Sensing Laboratory. After 9/11, the sister laboratory, at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, was called the Remote Sensing Laboratory and included sensing-detection mechanisms for all types of WMD. This facility would become absolutely critical to national security, so much so that by 2011, T. D. Barnes says that “only two people at Nellis are cleared with a need-toknow regarding classified briefings about the Remote Sensing Lab.” Barnes is a member of the Nellis/Creech Air Force Base support team and its civilian military council. But in the 1960s, three nuclear facilities — Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia — and one private corporation — EG&G — were the organizations uniquely positioned to see the writing on the wall. If nuclear accidents were going to continue to happen, then these four entities were going to secure the government contracts to clean things up.
EG&G had been taking radiation measurements and tracking radioactive clouds for the Atomic Energy Commission since 1946. For decades, EG&G Energy Measurements has maintained control of the vast majority of radiation measurements records going back to the first postwar test at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Because much of this information was originally created under the strict Atomic Energy classification Secret/Restricted Data — i.e., it was “born classified”—it has largely remained classified ever since. It cannot be transferred to another steward. For decades, this meant there was no one to compete with EG&G for the remote sensing job. How involved EG&G is in remote sensing today, their corporate headquarters won’t say.
So secret are the record groups in EG&G’s archives, even the president of the United States can be
