1. to see what would happen: Atomic Energy Commission, Summary of Project 57, the first safety test of Operation Plumbbob, report to the General Manager by the Director, Division of Military Application, Objective, 24.
2. bomber flying with four armed hydrogen bombs: “Palomares Summary Report,” Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico: Field Command Defense Nuclear Agency Technology and Analysis Directorate, January 15, 1975.
3. SAC bombers would already be airborne: When LeMay left SAC in 1957 to become the Air Force vice chief of staff, he left behind a fighting force of 1,665 bomber aircraft, 68 bases around the world, and 224,014 men. The man who took over was Thomas S. Powers.
4. “all of a sudden, all hell”: Ron Hayes, “H-bomb Incident Crippled Pilot’s Career,” Palm Beach Post, January 17, 2007.
5. aerosolized plutonium: Gordon Dunning, “Protective and Remedial Measures Taken Following Three Incidents of Fallout,” United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1968. This was originally given as a speech called “Radiation Protection of the Public in Large Scale Nuclear Disaster,” for an international agency symposium in Interlaken, Switzerland, in May 1968.
6. President Johnson learned: Moran, Day We Lost the H-Bomb,
36.
7. official nuclear disaster response team: Memo, Secret, United States Atomic Energy Commission, No. 234505, “Responsibility for Search and Rescue Operations,” to M. E. Gates, Manager, Nevada Operations, November 19, 1974.
8. to assist in the cleanup efforts: Nuclear Weapon Accident Response Procedures (NARP) Manual, Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Atomic Energy), September 1990, xii.
9. “will never be known”: Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 408.
10. “I don’t know of any missing bomb”: Anthony Lake, “Lying Around Washington,” Foreign Policy, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 93. Thirtyeight U.S. Navy ships participated in the search for the bomb, which was eventually located five miles offshore in 2,850 feet of water by a submersible called Alvin.
11. during a secret mission over Greenland: SAC History Staff, Project Crested Ice, SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA, SPECIAL HANDLING REQUIRED, AFR 127-4: FOIA 89-107 OAS-) 1793. This source document provided many facts for this section.
12. A second fire started at the crash site: The cloud formed by the explosion measured “850 m high, 800 m in length, and 800 m in depth, and undoubtedly carried some plutonium downwind,” according to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
13. One of the bombs fell into the bay: Gordon Corea, “Mystery of Lost US Nuclear Bomb,” BBC News, November 10, 2008.
14. “a cleanup undertaken as good housekeeping measures”: SAC History Staff, Project Crested Ice, 28.
15. “abundance of plutonium, americium, cesium”: Rollins, “Nevada Test Site — Site Description,” Table 2– 4.
16. Called remote sensing: Department of Energy Fact Sheet DOE/NV #1140. The Remote Sensing Laboratory was established in the 1950s, an offshoot of atomic cloud sampling projects. Today, it is a secret industry about which very little is known publicly; http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/factsheets/DOENV_1140.pdf.
17. initially called the EG&G Remote Sensing Laboratory: EG&G Energy Measurements Division (EG&G/EM) of EG&G, Inc., managed and operated the research facility under DOE Contract DE- ACO3
93NV11265. On January 1, 1996, Bechtel Nevada Corporation operated the research and production facilities under DOE M&O Contract DE-ACO8-96NV11718.
18. to secure the government contracts to clean things up: And what a massive market it would become. In addition to future nuclear accidents, there would be a colossal amount of radiation detection work to be done in, on, and around the Pacific Proving Ground. Between 1946 and 1958, the Atomic Energy Commission had exploded forty nuclear bombs, including the largest thermonuclear bomb ever exploded by the United States, the fifteen-megaton Castle Bravo bomb — a thousand times as powerful as the weapon dropped on Hiroshima. In June of 1971, an EG&G crew was dispatched to Eniwetok Atoll by the Atomic Energy Commission “for the purposes of pre- cleanup surveying.” EG&G had armed, wired, and fired all the bombs in the Pacific. Now, using radiation detection equipment, the company determined that the island was still uninhabitable by all life forms in the water and the air — even after thirteen years. But clean-up efforts could begin. These efforts would take decades, cost untold dollars, and involve several different contractors. EG&G would lead the way.
19. EG&G had been taking radiation measurements: Interviews with Al O’Donnell, Jim Freedman; Eniwetok Precleanup Survey Soil and Terrestrial, Radiation Survey (Lynch, Gudiksen and Jones) No. 44878; draft revised 5/14/73.
20. corporate headquarters won’t say: Interview with Meagan Stafford, EG&G/URS public relations, Sard Verbinnen & Co., July 16, 2010.
21. President Clinton was in 1994: Interview with EG&G engineer. DOE Openness Initiative, Human Radiation Experiments, EG&G Energy Measurements, Las Vegas, Nevada, Finding Aids, Radioactive Fallout: “EG&G/EM played an important role in monitoring airborne radiation from weapons testing, and it retained many records relating to monitoring air-borne radiation including reports on the Nevada Aerial Tracking Systems for the 1960s. The company has
developed a computerized inventory of the collection which includes some 24,000 classified documents, films, view-graphs, and other materials. Currently the company is attempting to reorganize its archives into a usable collection designed to accommodate future research efforts. The dismantling process that was begun in 1986 has been halted. The CIC will retain fallout records from the aboveground testing program. All other original research documentation, film, notebooks, and other records relating to EG&G/EM’s important role in monitoring airborne radiation and weapons testing, including reports and maps of cloud tracking still housed at EM, will be retained by EM. Classified Material Control (CMC) contains numerous reports on later testing programs and Aerial Tracking Systems reports for the 1960s. The company also holds original survey data for the period before 1971, but this has not been inventoried. There is an effort under way to obtain the funding to inventory and create a computerized database for these records.”
22. the president did not have a need-to-know: Interview with EG&G engineer.
23. one-line reference: Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Final Report, 506–507.
24. If Area 51 had a doppelgдnger: At Groom Lake, for a thirteenyear period beginning in 1955, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force comanaged spy plane programs using science and technology to advance the art of aerial espionage. Forty miles to the southwest, at Jackass Flats, beginning around 1955 and for a period of seventeen years, the Atomic Energy Commission, NASA, and the Department of Defense comanaged nuclear rocket programs using science and technology to try to get man to Mars. There is an interesting paradox. At Area 51, the spy plane programs were funded by black budgets, meaning their existence was hidden from Congress and the public. Not until they were declassified by the CIA — the U-2 program in 1998 and the A-12 Oxcart program in 2007—were their existences confirmed. The term Area 51 has remained redacted, or blacked out, from declassified documents. When Air Force and CIA officials are
asked to comment on Area 51, they have no comment, because technically the facility does not exist. At Area 25, the nuclear rocket ship programs have been funded with public awareness. No one at the Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission, or NASA will deny that nuclear rocket development went on there. But what was really going on behind the facade at Jackass Flats has always been labeled Restricted Data, which is classified.
25. piloted by one hundred and fifty men: McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, 168.
26. Taylor designed nuclear bombs for the Pentagon: According to Taylor’s colleague the legendary Freeman Dyson, Ted Taylor made “the smallest, the most elegant and the most efficient bombs… freehand without elaborate calculation. When they were built and tested they worked.” Dyson left Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study to work on the Mars spaceship with Taylor.
27. “Everyone seems to be making plans”: McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, 170.
28. same as a Coke machine: Ibid., 174.
29. “It would have been the most sensational thing anyone ever saw”: Ibid.
30. “Whoever builds Orion will control the Earth”: Ibid., 184. 31. Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, or SNPO: Dewar, To the
