Department of Defense entered into discussions with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to begin preliminary design work on the new nuclear weapon. By fiscal year 2003, the Stockpile Services Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator line item received $14.5 million; in 2004 another $7.5 million; and in 2005 yet another $27.5 million. In 2006, the Senate dropped the line item. Either the program was canceled or it got a new name and entered into the black world — perhaps at Area 51 and Area 52.
Or perhaps next door at the Nevada Test Site, underground. For as far-fetched and ironic as this sounds — developing a bunker-busting nuclear bomb at an underground nuclear testing facility in Nevada— this is exactly what DOE officials proposed in an unclassified report released quietly in 2005. In this report, officials with the agency formerly known as the Atomic Energy Commission proposed to revive the NERVA program — the Area 25 nuclear-powered rocket program designed to send man to Mars — and to do it, of all places, underground.
Unlike the NERVA program of the 1960s, argued Michael Williams, the author of the report, “DOE Ground Test facilities for space exploration enabling nuclear technologies can no longer be vented to the open atmosphere,” meaning a facility like the one that previously existed out at Jackass Flats was out of the question. But for the new NERVA project, Williams proposed, the Department of Energy could easily conduct its nuclear tests inside “the existing [underground] tunnels or new tunnels at the Nevada Test site for this purpose.”
Former Los Alamos associate director of nuclear weapons Stephen Younger, who currently serves as the president of operations at the Nevada Test Site, categorically denies that any underground nuclear weapons tests are in the works at the test site. But he does confirm that “subcritical” nuclear tests currently take place there, inside an underground tunnel complex located beneath Area 1. To access that facility, Younger says, employees use an elevator that travels a thousand feet underground. What goes on there are “scientific experiments with plutonium and high explosives,” Younger says, “not weapons tests.” Younger insists the “same cannot be said about the Russians.” He says that inside their underground facility at Novaya Zemlya — the location where the Soviet Union detonated their fiftymegaton thermonuclear bomb, called Tsar Bomba, in 1961—“the Russians are developing new nuclear weapons around the clock. Mr. [Vladimir] Putin has said that repeatedly. He keeps saying that because they want us to know.”
There is no way to know precisely what is happening today at the Nevada Test and Training Range — aboveground at Area 51 or Area 52, or in the underground tunnels beneath the test site, because most of what is currently happening out in the Nevada desert is classified and the federal agencies involved believe the people do not have a need-to-know. The question is, does the public have a right to know? Does Congress? Many secret projects that have gone on at Area 51 have delivered results that have kept America safe. The first flight over the Soviet Union, by Hervey Stockman in a U-2 spy plane in 1956, provided the CIA with critical intelligence, namely, that the Russians were not lining up their military machine for a sneak attack. The intelligence provided by an A-12 Oxcart spy plane mission kept the Johnson administration from declaring war on North Korea during the Vietnam War. The F-117 stealth bomber crippled Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs. But there are other kinds of secret actions that have gone on at Area 51, at least one of which should never have been authorized and should not be kept as a national secret anymore.
After World War II, the American government’s hiring and protection of Nazi scientists was based on the premise that these scientists were the world’s best and their information was needed in order to advance science — and win the next war. In doing so, America made a deal with the devil. This deal became a wicked problem for the agencies involved, and playing the game with former Nazis gave way to an entirely new set of problems, one of which has been the federal government’s ongoing complicity in covering up many of these scientists’ original crimes. Approximately six hundred million pages of information about the government’s postwar use of Nazi criminals’ expertise remains classified as of 2011. Many documents about Area 51 exist in that pile.
The reason why the federal government will not officially admit that Area 51 exists is not the secret spy planes, the stealth bombers, or the drones that were, and still are, flight-tested there. The reason is something else. It is a program undertaken by five EG&G engineers at Area 51. This program involved the Roswell crash remains and predated the development of the original CIA facility, currently called Area 51, which was built by Richard Bissell beginning in 1955. Area 51 is named as such not because it was a randomly chosen quadrant, as has often been presumed, but because the 1947 crash remains from Roswell, New Mexico, were sent from Wright- Patterson Air Force Base out to a secret spot in the Nevada desert — in 1951.
The gypsies have a saying: You’re not really dead until the last person who knows you dies. For investigative journalists it goes something like this: As long as there is an eyewitness willing to tell the truth, the truth can be known.
The flying craft that crashed in New Mexico, the myth of which has come to be known as the Roswell Incident, happened in 1947, sixtyfour years before the publication of this book. Everyone directly involved in that incident — who acted on behalf of the government — is apparently dead. Like it does about Area 51, the U.S. government refuses to admit the Roswell crash ever happened, but it did— according to the seminal testimony of one man interviewed over the course of eighteen months for this book. He participated in the engineering project that came about as a result of the Roswell Incident. He was one of the elite engineers from EG&G who were tasked with the original Area 51 wicked engineering problem.
In July of 1947, Army intelligence spearheaded the efforts to retrieve the remains of the flying disc that crashed at Roswell. And as with other stories that have become the legends of Area 51, part of the conspiracy theory about Roswell has its origins in truth. The crash did reveal a disc, not a weather balloon, as has subsequently been alleged by the Air Force. And responders from the Roswell Army Air Field found not only a crashed craft, but also two crash sites, and they found bodies alongside the crashed craft. These were not aliens. Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs. Unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall. Physically, the bodies of the aviators revealed anatomical conundrums. They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes. One fact was clear: these children, if that’s what they were, were not healthy humans. A second fact was shocking. Two of the child-size aviators were comatose but still alive.
Everything related to the crash site was sent to Wright Field, later called Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio, where it all remained until 1951. That is when the evidence was packed up and transported to the Nevada Test Site. It was received, physically, by the elite group of EG&G engineers. The Atomic Energy Commission, not the Air Force and not the Central Intelligence Agency, was put in charge of the Roswell crash remains. According to its unusual charter, the Atomic Energy Commission was the organization best equipped to handle a secret that could never be declassified. The Atomic Energy Commission needed engineers they could trust to handle the work that was about to begin. For this, they looked to the most powerful defense contractor in the nation that no one had ever heard of — EG&G.
The engineers with EG&G were chosen to receive the crash remains and to set up a secret facility just outside the boundary of the Nevada Test Site, sixteen miles to the northwest of Groom Lake, approximately five and a half miles north of the northernmost point where Area 12 and Area 15 meet. A facility this remote would never be visited by anyone outside a small group with a strict need-to-know and would never have to be accounted for or appear on any official Nevada Test Site map. These five men were told there was more engineering work to be done, and that they would be the only five individuals with a set of keys to the facility. The project, the men were told, was the most clandestine, most important engineering program since the Manhattan Project, which was why the man who had been in charge of that one would function as the director of this project as well.
Vannevar Bush had been President Roosevelt’s most trusted science adviser during World War II. He held engineering doctorates from both Harvard University and MIT, in addition to being the former vice president and former dean of engineering at MIT. The decisions Vannevar Bush made were ostensibly for the good of the nation; they were sound. The men from EG&G were told that the project they were about to work on was so important that it would remain black forever, meaning it would never see the light of day. The men knew that a secrecy classification inside the Atomic Energy Commission charter made this possible, because they all worked on classified engineering projects that were hidden from the rest of the world. They understood born classified meant that no one would ever have a need-to-know what Vannevar Bush was going to ask them to do. The operation would have no name, only a letter-number designation: S-4, or SigmaFour.
The problem that the EG&G engineers would face would be highly complex, wide-ranging, without a definite formulation and with no set solution. This wicked problem was wholly without precedent. Solving it would undoubtedly have unintended consequences, because playing the engineering game would change the game. But there were two puzzles to solve, not just one. Two engineering mysteries for the elite group of EG&G
