36. Pauling said: The quotes in this two-page section, and also the newspaper quotes here, are from the extensive newspaper archive collection located in the Atomic Testing Museum library reading room in Las Vegas, Nevada.
37. The Pentagon wondered: Fehner and Gosling, Battlefield of the Cold War, 159-82.
38. caused Area 51 personnel: Interview with Richard Mingus.
39. “the Indoctrination Project: DNA 6005F, Plumbbob Series 1957, United States Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Tests, Nuclear Test Personnel Review, Chapter 4, Exercise Desert Rock VII and VIII Programs, 81, 96.
40. Committee on Human Resources: Memorandum, Members of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, September 8, 1994, “Human Experiments in Connection with the
Atomic Bomb Tests,” attachment 5, item 10.
41. “mythical attack by an aggressor force”: During the Hood nuclear bomb, the Marine Corps conducted coordinated air-ground assault maneuvers that included helicopter airlifts and tactical air support; “Exercise Desert Rock VII–VIII, Operation Plumbbob,” Defense Nuclear Agency 4747F.
42. Mingus saw that a large swath of the desert was on fire: Interview with Mingus.
43. Area 51 had become uninhabitable: Interview with Richard Mingus; also Office Memorandum, United States Government, Observed Damage at Watertown, Nevada, following the Sixth Nuclear shot of Plumbbob, July 9, 1957. R. A. Gilmore, Off-Site Rad-Safe, NTO, #0150371.
Interviews: T. D. Barnes, Peter Merlin, Al O’Donnell, Richard Mingus, Jim Freedman, Ed Lovick, Tony Bevacqua, Ray Goudey, Ernie Williams, Harry Martin, Colonel Slater, Frank Murray
1. measuring fallout with Geiger counters in hand: Interview with T. D. Barnes; Operation Plumbbob Projects and Reports: Program 2, Project 2.2., Neutron Induced Activities in Soil Elements WT-1411; Project 2.5 Initial Gamma Radiation Intensity and Neutron-Induced Gamma Radiation of NTS Soil WT-1414.
2. dressed in white lab coats and work boots: Photographs viewed at the Atomic Testing Museum library, Las Vegas.
3. from pinhead particles to pencil-size pieces of steel: DNA 6005F, Plumbbob Series 1957, United States Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Tests, Nuclear Test Personnel Review, Chapter 4, Exercise Desert Rock VII and VIII Programs, Civil Effects Test Group, Fallout Studies, 204–247; AEC Research and Development Report BNWL481-1, 113 pages.
4. surprise of the nuclear scientists: McPhee, Curve of Binding Energy, 166-67.
5. could locate them with magnets: Roadrunners Internationale newsletter, August 1, 2009, 34th edition. From the personal diary of Dan Sheahan, owner and operator of the Groom Mine, provided to the Roadrunners Internationale by his great-granddaughter Lisa Heawood.
6. weapons planners moved ahead: Interviews with Al O’Donnell, Richard Mingus, and Jim Freedman. There was a nuclear test ban moratorium on the horizon, which meant that all weapons tests were scheduled to end on October 31, 1958. At the test site, weapons engineers worked at a frenzied pace to finish as many nuclear tests as they could before the deadline.
7. the animals observed: An anonymous eyewitness related to me
the horror of watching a dying horse seek water at Area 51. The AEC has never declassified its animal observations, which I understand are extensive. In an AEC document released to the public on July 15, 1957, entitled “Responsibility for U.S. Nuclear Weapons Programs,” in a section called “Operating Controls,” it is stated that “cattle and horses grazing within a few miles of the detonation suffered skin deep beta radiation burns on their hides (1952 and 1953 series) with no effect on their breeding value and no effect on the cattle’s beef quality. Radiation fallout more than a few miles from detonation has been quite harmless to humans, animals or crops.” In The Day We Bombed Utah, John G. Fuller presents the opposite argument.
8. emergency landing on the former U-2 airstrip: Interview with Peter Merlin.
9. Edward Lovick was standing on: Interview with Edward Lovick.
10. grandfather of stealth: Before working on the A-12, Lovick’s first job at Skunk Works was to try to reduce the radar reflections being bounced back from the U-2 to the Soviet radar systems. With Area 51 still shuttered from atomic fallout, the physicist’s first efforts took place at a remote hangar in the north corner of Edwards Air Force Base in California. There, Lovick and colleagues spent hours coming up with all kinds of antiradar schemes: “It was our job to invent something that would neither compromise the aircraft’s height, nor allow its hydraulic system to overheat as had happened with Sieker. Kelly Johnson had a rule: one pound of extra weight applied to the aircraft would reduce its altitude by one foot. This meant our camouflage coating couldn’t exceed a quarter of an inch and had to weigh as little as possible.”
11. aircraft would be radically different: Interviews with Ed Lovick, Dr. Wheelon, T. D. Barnes. Other federal agencies were also secretly experimenting with supersonic flight, but not sustained flight at Mach 3. The Air Force, NASA, and the Navy were involved in the experimental X-15, a hypersonic airplane that would lay the groundwork for travel into space. But the X-15 was boosted off the back of a mother ship, whereas the Agency’s new plane would leave the tarmac on its own power and return to the base the same way.
12. twenty-second window: Peebles, Dark Eagles, 51. 13. it loses precision and speed: Interview with Dr. Wheelon.
14. minutiae involving radar returns: Jones, The Wizard War. Lovick spent hours describing for me the fundamental concepts of radar, which is an acronym for radio detection and ranging, which first came into being in 1904 when a German engineer named Christian Hulsmeyer figured out that electromagnetic waves could be used to identify, or “see,” a metal ship floating in dense fog. It didn’t take long for the military to realize the inherent value of radar as a way to detect large, moving metal objects otherwise invisible to the naked eye. This was especially true for ships and airplanes, two key means of transport in twentieth-century warfare.
15. fourteen-year-old children were doing in 1933: Interview with Lovick. By high school, Lovick had created a radio receiver from scrap metal, vacuum tubes, and discarded radio parts which enabled him “to detect signals a hundred miles away, which gave me the intense feeling of discovering something that I did not previously have evidence as being there.”
16. the Archangel-1: Robarge, Archangel, 4–5. Archangel is a term meaning “an angel of high rank” and it is also a port city in northwestern Russia, home to many Soviet radar stations that would one day be trying to track the A-12.
17. fifty Skunk Works employees returned to Area 51: Ibid., 6. 18. “build a full scale mockup”: Johnson, History of the Oxcart Program, 5.
19. code-named Titania: United States Nuclear Tests July 1945 through September 1992 DOE/NV-209-REV 15, 144. The bomb was named after a satellite of the planet Uranus.
20. Each member of Lovick’s crew: Interview with Lovick. 21. “Ike wants an airplane from Mandrake the magician”: Rich,
Skunk Works, 198.
22. “by adding the chemical compound cesium”: Johnson, History of the Oxcart Program, 4. Johnson wrote: “we proposed the use of cesium additive to the fuel. This was first brought up by Mr. Ed Lovick of ADP, its final development was passed over to P&W.” Lovick recalls traveling to Pratt and Whitney’s research center in Florida where the aircraft engines were being tested. “I realized that I had utilized theory that applied to thermal ionization of gases and would need to use parameters appropriate to electron emission from hot solid surfaces. Our results indicated that we were dealing with mixtures of the two states but we did not know how to determine how much of each kind of material, gas or solid, was involved in the production of the ionization that we measured. The results were encouraging, but we needed to know more. So we were moved to much better facilities at the P. & W. Willgoos Turbine Laboratory in East Hartford, Connecticut.” It was there that the problem was solved.
23. Oxcart being the fastest: CIA Document EO 12958 3.3(b) Oxcart Facts: A-12 Specifications; A-12 Experience Record (as of July 10, 1967). Note that in November of 1961, the X-15 rocket plane flew Mach 6, or 4,092 mph. At the time of this meeting, the CIA thought they were building the fastest airplane in the world, which technically it was, because the X-15 didn’t take off on its own power. As per interviews with T. D. Barnes, who worked on both projects.
24. Area 51 was back in business: Parangosky, The Oxcart Story, 3 (per Dr. Wheelon, Parangosky was the
