I owe a debt of gratitude to Jim Hornfischer, the perfect agent for someone like me, and to my confidant Frank Morse. Thank you for the wise counsel, Steve Younger, David Willingham, Aron Ketchel, Eric Rayman, and Karen Andrews.
It takes a village to make a writer. I’m one of the lucky ones who has always known writing is what I was meant to do. I arrived at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, at the age of fifteen, typewriter in hand, and wrote for nearly twenty years straight without earning as much as one cent. Only at the age of thirty-four did things shift for me, and I’ve earned my living as a writer ever since. I say that for all of the writers following in my footsteps. Don’t give up. My village fire keepers — those to whom I am deeply indebted for their individually imperative roles — include Alice and Tom Soininen, Julie Elkins, John Soininen; my writing teacher at St. Paul’s School, Michael Burns, and at Princeton University, Paul Auster, Joyce Carol Oates, and P. Adams Sitney; my storytelling hero in Greece, John Zervos; those who supported me in Big Sur: Lisa Firestone, Thanis Iliadis, Alex Timken, Robert Jolliffe, Harriet and Jeremy Polturak, James Young, Nate Downey, Emmy Starr and Stephen Vehslage, Samantha Muldoon, Erin Gafill and Tom Birmingham; my mentors in Los Angeles: Rachel Resnick, Keith Rogers, Kathleen Silver, Rio Morse, and my friend and editor in chief at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Nancie Clare, who commissioned my original two-part series on Area 51 for the magazine; my fellow writers from group: Kirston Mann, Sabrina Weill, Michelle Fiordaliso, Nicole Lucas Haimes, Annette Murphy, Terry Rossio, Jolly Stamat, Moira McMahon, Lisa Gold; fellow storyteller Lucy Firestone; my mother-in-law, Marion Wroldsen, not only for her deep love of reading but for lending me her son.
Nothing in this world is so joyful as being the wife of Kevin Jacobsen and the mother of our two boys. While writing this book, it was Kevin who made endless sandwiches for me, brewed pots of coffee, and let me travel to wherever it was that I needed to go. Kevin hears out every first draft, usually standing in our kitchen or yard. Everything gets better after I listen to what he has to say.
Notes
1. Nevada Test and Training Range: Map reference number NTTR01, NGA stock no. 84413.
2. Nevada Test Site: Map based on NTS Boundary Coordinates: FFACO, appendix 1, January 1998, revision 2, 6. On Aug 23, 2010, the Nevada Test Site changed its name to the Nevada National Security Site. Throughout the book, I refer to it as the Nevada Test Site, as that is the name it went by for nearly sixty years.
3. 105 nuclear weapons: Department of Energy, “United States Nuclear Tests,” xii-xv. Total atmospheric for Nevada Test Site (NTS) is officially listed as 100 and total Nellis Air Force Range (NAFR) is listed as 5. Underground is 804 by U.S. plus 24 by U.S./UK for a total of 933.
4. weapons-grade plutonium and uranium: Darwin Morgan, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Site Office, clarified: “The [Nevada Test Site] has never been a repository for weapons grade plutonium or uranium. Of course there is the ‘expended’ material from 828 underground nuclear weapons tests that is contained within the cavities where the tests were conducted.” E-mail, September 21, 2010.
5. two known exceptions: Memo, Top Secret Oxcart, Oxcart Reconnaissance Operation Plan, BYE 2369-67, 15; second example from interview with Peter Merlin.
6. bomb’s price tag: Brookings Institute, “50 Facts about U.S. Nuclear Weapons,” fact no. 1 (1996 dollars: $20,000,000,000; 2011 dollars: $28,000,000,000).
7. was relayed to him by two men: Wiesner, Vannevar Bush, 98. This fact is hardly known; credit is usually given to General Leslie R. Groves and War Secretary Henry L. Stimson. Wiesner, Vannevar Bush’s biographer at the National Academy of Sciences (he was also a science adviser to President Eisenhower), wrote: “Bush… had the duty, after the death of President Roosevelt, of giving President
Truman his first detailed account of the bomb.”
8. no one knew the Manhattan Project was there: Wills, Bomb Power, 10–13. Wills elaborated on how Truman had some suspicions when he was vice president and approached War Secretary Henry L. Stimson, who told him to back off, which Truman did.
9. who would control its “unimaginable destructive power”: Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, 13.7. Also known as The Smyth Report, it was released by the government six days after Hiroshima, on August 12, 1945. Here, Smyth chronicled the administrative and technical history of the Manhattan Project, also called the Manhattan Engineering District (MED). The purpose of the report was allegedly to give citizens enough information about nuclear energy for them to participate in a public debate about what to do next. The report also encouraged the idea that handing the bomb over to civilian control, as opposed to military control, would be a more democratic scenario. Instead, the controls imposed by the Atomic Energy Commission would ultimately prove to be even more impenetrable than military controls; Hewlett and Anderson, New World.
10. the concept “born classified” came to be: Quist, Security Classification, 1. Here Quist writes: “The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 was the first and, other than its successor, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, to date the only U.S. statute to establish a program to restrict the dissemination of information. This Act transferred control of all aspects of atomic (nuclear) energy from the Army, which had managed the government’s World War II Manhattan Project to produce atomic bombs, to a five-member civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). These new types of bombs, of awesome power, had been developed under stringent secrecy and security conditions. Congress, in enacting the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, continued the Manhattan Project’s comprehensive, rigid controls on U.S. information about atomic bombs and other aspects of atomic energy. The Atomic Energy Act designated the atomic energy information to be protected as ‘Restricted Data’ and defined that data.”
11. seventy thousand nuclear bombs: Brookings Institute, “50
Facts about U.S. Nuclear Weapons,” fact no. 6.
12. Atomic Energy was the first entity to control Area 51: This is one of the central organizing premises of my book and will no doubt be contested by the Atomic Energy Commission until they are forced to declassify the project to which I refer.
13. when President Clinton: The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) was created by President Clinton on January 15, 1994, to investigate and make public the use of human beings as subjects of federally funded research. Created by executive order and subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), the advisory committee was obligated to provide public access to its activities, processes, and papers, some of which can be viewed at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/.
14. he did not have a need-to-know: Author interview with EG&G engineer.
15. “give[s] the professional classificationist unanswerable authority”: Quist, Security Classification, 24; Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 442-51.
16. largest facility is, and always has been, the Nevada Test Site: Written correspondence with Darwin Morgan, September 21, 2010, U.S. Department of Energy, Nevada Operations Office, Office of Public Affairs and Information.
17. not controlled by the Department of Defense: It cannot yet be determined for certain if the Department of Defense (DOD) was involved in running the very first program at Area 51. Research at NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) reveals that DOD had a lot more to do with Paperclips than previously known publicly. For example, documents obtained by me through a FOIA request reveal “in the early 1950s the Defense Department [Office of Defense Research and Engineering (ORE)] and the JIOA took up overall direction of PAPERCLIP, which ran under the acronym of DEFSIP, or Defense Scientist Immigration Program.” JIOA stands for
Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency and was run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These multiple agencies and multiple chains of command serve to hide information.
Interviews: Joerg Arnu, George Knapp, Thornton “T.D.” Barnes, Colonel Hugh Slater, Richard Mingus, Ernest “Ernie” Williams, Dr. Albert “Bud” Wheelon, Colonel Kenneth Collins, Colonel Sam Pizzo, Norio Hayakawa, Stanton Friedman
1. Nighttime is the best time: Interview with Joerg Arnu.
2. Robert Scott Lazar appeared on Eyewitness News: Interview with George Knapp; George Knapp, “Bob
