Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  When ibn Saud’s son Faisal visited San Francisco, Steve Sr. established such a good rapport with him that King ibn Saud gave International Bechtel the contract to build a four-hundred-mile railroad across the desert from Riyadh to the port of Damman and another contract for a road system. The road project was to be in collaboration with the king’s favorite builder, a contractor from Yemen named Mohammed Bin Laden. (This collaboration later became Bechtel–Bin Laden and ended on September 12, 2001, or, if it didn’t end, at least disappeared from the Bechtel website.) With oil royalties pouring in, the Saudi king had the financial resources to designate more projects to a company with Bechtel’s experience—electricity for his palace, city power plants, sewer systems, airports, and roads. Soon Bechtel was entrenched in Saudi Arabia and had developed excellent relations with the Saudi royal family.

  The war in the Pacific required construction of many military bases and Air Force training bases, among them the Army’s Modification Center for the fleet of B-54 bombers in Birmingham, Alabama; a series of military airports in Alaska; and multiple bases on islands in the Pacific for the Navy. Domestically, Nevada was a good site for expanded military bases because the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management already owned 80 percent of Nevada’s land. Named for Joe Nellis, a local war hero, Nellis Air Force Base expanded far out into the desert in chunks of real estate the size of Connecticut. Sections of it were used by the US Army and Navy air divisions, and, after 1947, the newly established US Air Force.

  When atomic testing began in Nevada in 1950, other government agencies took charge of vast tracts of Nellis. The Atomic Energy Commission (now the Department of Energy) had control of Yucca and Frenchman Flats and the Atomic Test Site where more than 950 atomic tests took place in the 1950s and ’60s. The CIA controlled another Maryland-size parcel around Groom Lake, where it tested the U-2 spy planes and several generations of high-altitude surveillance planes. Only the strange lights seen in the night sky around the town of Rachel made people suspect that this was the area where the US military kept outer-space visitors. This section of Nellis was called Area 51.

  Nellis Area 2, on the north side of Route 15, is home to the largest aboveground weapons storage complex in the United States. When atomic tests were taking place, Area 2 was where the atomic weapons were stored.

  The Nevada Test and Training Range—separate from the Nevada Test Site—is the largest contiguous air- and land space available for peacetime military operations in North America. It has five thousand square miles of land and twelve thousand square miles of restricted airspace. According to the Nellis website, “The 12,000-square-nautical mile range provides a realistic arena for operational testing and training aircrews to improve combat readiness. A wide variety of live munitions can be employed on targets on the range.”

  The postwar period was a time of both a heightened sense of external threat and ideological certainties about the nature of the Soviet Union. The National Security Act of 1947 established the national security state and created the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the permanent Department of Defense, the Pentagon, and the US Air Force. John McCone moved to Washington as deputy secretary of the newly organized Air Force. He was particularly involved in the shape of nuclear weapons systems in which the Air Force would play a central and decisive role.

  As a trustee of the California Institute of Technology, McCone had remained in contact with the scientists who had played key roles in developing the atom bomb and those who were planning for peacetime uses of nuclear power. As a hard-line anticommunist and a strong Catholic, McCone believed that the atom bomb was a God-given means of defending the American way of life from godless communists. “He was a rightist Catholic,” said journalist I. F. Stone. “A man with holy war views.” Attracted to the decision-making power in Washington, McCone left Bechtel-McCone to help organize the newly formed Department of the Air Force and its highly controversial and top-secret nuclear Strategic Air Command, which put planes in the air twenty-four hours a day armed with nuclear bombs ready to bomb Russia if so ordered. As Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control makes clear, most of the danger that human beings faced from nuclear weapons in the Cold War period came from accidents involving airplanes, bombs dropped by mistake, an airplane loaded with a hydrogen bomb catching fire, missiles mistakenly released. As the United States shifted to a “permanent war economy,” John McCone was temperamentally and ideologically suited to help shape America’s new nuclear defense and the commercial nuclear power industry that accompanied it.

  Although Bechtel went back to a single name, McCone’s association with Bechtel helped to frame a new relationship between the company and the government, particularly in the field of nuclear testing and commercial nuclear-generated electric power.

  In 1948, after officials decided that nuclear tests required another testing site in addition to the Marshall Islands (islands were destroyed and Japanese fishermen and Pacific islanders exposed to radiation), the Atomic Energy Commission began looking for new test sites. The scientists favored the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where fallout would drift across the Atlantic. But the Air Force already had huge air bases in the empty deserts of Nevada—and the population of Nevada was so small that they made the decision to locate the new Atomic Test Site some sixty-five miles north of Las Vegas. Bechtel expanded its Nevada offices to begin construction for the intricate apparatus for nuclear testing. Some of the structures and technology for atomic testing can be seen today at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas.

  A new subsidiary company called Bechtel-Nevada, incorporated in Reno, was formed to do the construction work for the test sites in Nevada.* (Other civilian contractors included EG&G of Boston, General Electric, and Westinghouse.) In 1957 President Eisenhower named McCone chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, in charge of the test sites, nuclear research, mining, enrichment, and purchase of all uranium.

  Three-fourths of the uranium used at the time was being mined on the Navajo reservation. In 1990 I was in Farmington, New Mexico, on my way to visit the Four Corners Generating Station (also built by Bechtel) on the same day that former interior secretary Stewart Udall was holding special hearings to try to help compensate former Navajo miners and their families for deaths and illnesses that came about from radiation exposure and uranium mining. Never informed of the dangers from the ore they were mining, the Navajo miners had contaminated their families by coming home wearing the same clothes dusted with radioactive ore from the mines. They had received inadequate treatment for the chronic health problems and cancers they, and members of their families, subsequently came down with. The Indian Health Service had not been told of the uranium mining, so they didn’t know the source of the illness they were treating or how to correctly diagnose it. In addition, at a time when the Atomic Energy Commission was the only buyer of uranium, they were also paid shockingly low wages. As one of the Navajo wives said during the hearings, “It was the Cold War. Nobody dared ask questions. It was unpatriotic to ask questions.”

  During McCone’s chairmanship Bechtel was chosen as one of the few American companies licensed to build nuclear power plants. (Another was Stone and Webster of Boston.) Bechtel opened its nuclear division, hired Ken Davis (the Atomic Energy Commission’s director of nuclear reactor development), and began designing commercial nuclear reactors to sell to America’s largest utilities. Bechtel’s nuclear power division hired so many employees of the Atomic Energy Commission that Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut complained, “The nuclear industry was so incestuous that it was hard to tell where the public sector begins and the private one leaves off.” This permeable membrane between government and private industry became the rule, rather than the exception, in building energy infrastructure for the next half century.

  The McCone connection continued to open up new markets for Bechtel, especially after 1962, when McCone became head of the CIA. Joseph Kennedy Sr., who knew McCone from their shi
pbuilding days during the war—Kennedy Sr. had the contract for the Quincy shipyards in Massachusetts—suggested to his son President John F. Kennedy that he appoint McCone to replace Allen Dulles as director of the CIA, under whose disastrous direction the Bay of Pigs in Cuba had taken place. By then the CIA was already involved in testing spy aircraft like the U-2 from its base at Area 51 inside Nellis and was involved in new surveillance aircraft like Oxcart.* (Pilot Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot who was shot down over Russia in 1960, said KGB interrogators asked him about the spy-plane base north of Las Vegas.) Area 51 of Nellis Air Force Base became home to a lot of activity. The town of Rachel saw many mysterious sightings of unusual aircraft.

  NEVADA NIGHTS

  One moonless night in northern Nevada, writer John McPhee and his geologist friend Ken Deffeyes were returning from exploring a scavenger silver mine** when a white sphere of blinding light shot across the sky in front of them. As the light kept expanding in volume and brightness, they pulled their truck over to the side of the road and got out to get a better look.

  Standing by the side of their vehicle, staring at the heavens, McPhee described what followed as outside anything he or his colleague had ever seen before. “The ‘white sphere’ kept expanding ‘like a cloud’ until a smaller spherical object moved out from the larger one, possibly from behind it.” Although McPhee was a writer for the sophisticated New Yorker and his friend a world-famous geologist, they were no different than anyone else in rural Nevada who witnessed the same phenomenon. They suspected they were seeing extraterrestrial visitors in a flying saucer.

  The next day the Nevada State Journal reported on the “mysterious ball of light” and gave similar descriptions from other random observers. Two hunters at another location not far from McPhee’s said, “As we looked back we saw a smaller craft come out of the right lower corner. This smaller craft had a dome in the middle of it and two wings on either side, but the whole thing was oval shaped.” A third observer reported, “It looked like a star. Then a ring formed around it. A kind of ring like you’d see around Saturn. It didn’t make any noise and then it vanished.”

  The Nevada landscape is so scoured, so mathematical in its stately procession of mountains, followed by flat, empty desert basins, that extraterrestrial sightings seem plausible. But as I was reading McPhee’s account of the inexplicable spacecraft sighting in his Annals of the Former World—a book about the geologic history of the entire North American continent, including a detailed chapter on the basin and range creation of Nevada through seafloor spreading—it occurred to me that he did see a spacecraft of sorts, but not from outer space.

  McPhee and his friend were more likely to have seen a test flight of one of America’s top-secret spy planes, probably followed by a chase plane—or even a drone version mounted on the back of an M-21. These top-secret stealth planes were launched from Area 51, a CIA-operated base about eighty miles north of Las Vegas. Some were designed in elliptical shapes to avoid radar detection and engineered to travel at heights up to one hundred thousand feet (almost twenty miles) for high-altitude surveillance missions. Like the famous Oxcart, which was constructed of light-reflecting titanium, they could travel at speeds of two thousand miles per hour, often with one or two trailing chase planes. Desert optics—sunlight bouncing off dust particles in the air—could account for the circular light rings and the perception of expanding light. Flying-saucer sightings usually occur within an hour of sunset when the earth’s surface is in darkness but the sun’s rays are still lighting the atmosphere at higher altitudes. Pilots of commercial jets flying at twenty-five thousand feet sometimes look up and see a spheroid object streaking above them and report yet another unidentified flying object, or UFO. Forty years ago when McPhee was writing, the archives for U-2 and Oxcart development had not yet been opened to the public. Flying saucers or UFOs were the only available explanations. Even the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee in the 1980s, Senator Barry Goldwater, said he believed in flying saucers and that the military was keeping space aliens at air bases in Nevada.

  Thirty minutes later when McPhee and his friend reached the town of Lovelock, Nevada, where they were staying for the night, the plane they saw would have already crossed the Canadian border. It might have banked left, swung out over the Pacific, and an hour later circled back over Southern California in its approach to its home base outside Las Vegas, seeking a four-mile runway that bisected the dry lake bed of what once was Groom Lake. The runway lights came on only within minutes of the plane’s approach.

  The town of Rachel is high in the mountains at the same latitude as Groom Lake and lies within the twelve thousand square miles of restricted airspace, but outside the military-only perimeter. Located on Route 375, which residents have named “the extraterrestrial highway” because of long experience with strange lights in the sky, the town has created a cottage industry of guidebooks on UFO sightings. An artist-photographer with a powerful telephoto lens and considerable mountain climbing agility has spent a lot of time on the mountain peaks around Rachel and published long-range mysterious photographs of Area 51’s hangars, warehouses, outbuildings, planes on the runways, and vapor trails in the sky. The drones that now operate in Pakistan and Afghanistan were tested there and look very much like the bat-shaped plane that was shot down and put on public display in Iran.

  Area 51 is now the most famous top-secret installation in the world, so famous that the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas is in the process of mounting an exhibit about the site and has an ongoing lecture series about it.

  VIETNAM WAR CONTRACTS

  Bechtel remained involved in military contracting and military-related construction. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson, running against the conservative, hawkish Barry Goldwater in the presidential election, greatly expanded the war in Vietnam. The two prime contractors for building military bases in Vietnam were Bechtel and Brown and Root, a Texas construction firm that beginning in 1940 had helped to finance Lyndon Johnson’s political career. The two firms built air bases, landing fields, military compounds, roads, ports, support facilities, and energy depots throughout Southeast Asia. In a postwar audit of expenditures, the Congressional Budget Office said that the two firms had billed the government for so much concrete that they could have put a concrete skin eight feet deep over the entire country of Vietnam. Thirty years later during America’s ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the two prime military contractors for the US government were once again Bechtel and Brown and Root, although Brown and Root had a new parent company, Halliburton, the former employer of Vice President Dick Cheney. Unlike other major engineering and construction firms, Bechtel did not become a public company. It remained a family business. Its business was megaengineering. It was the largest family-owned business in the world.

  Steve Sr. retired in 1960, and his son Steve Jr. took over. A trained engineer with a master’s in business administration from Stanford, he was, people said, “more of a numbers guy” than his father. But he was still politically connected. By 1970 the numbers in their nuclear power division, on which Bechtel had been focused for growth, were dropping. (The last nuclear power plant in the United States would be licensed in 1976.) For one thing, it took a long time to build nuclear plants and the cost estimates at the beginning were not the same as the actual costs at the end of a completed installation. Utilities were finding that nuclear electricity was far more expensive than originally estimated. The issue of disposal of spent nuclear fuel was still unresolved. And finally, reassuring the public about the safety of nuclear energy—even before Three Mile Island and Chernobyl—was becoming increasingly difficult.

  Permitting hearings grew more complex as public groups educated themselves about nuclear power and raised more sophisticated objections to nuclear plants. The public distrusted government reassurances and raised the issue of failed accountability in the 1960s over strontium 90, a by-product released in nuclear testing that was carried by winds, fell to the earth
in rain, was digested by cows, and reappeared in milk. Children, who drank a lot of cow’s milk, came down with cancers and leukemia in alarming clusters unrelated to water supply. Epidemiologists could not find a common cause. The US government adopted a strategy of denial—no nuclear tests were taking place, there was no fallout, strontium 90 didn’t exist, and even if it did it was unrelated to leukemia or cancer in children. (Eventually, strontium 90 was shown to be a direct cause of childhood leukemia.) As a result, public trust in government honesty regarding the promise of nuclear technology was difficult to restore.

  The issue of nuclear waste disposal remains unresolved to the present day, even though for eight years Bechtel-Nevada was boring through Yucca Mountain, eighty miles north of Las Vegas, to create a National Nuclear Waste Repository. The cost to the American taxpayers has been an estimated $18 billion with penalties for not building up to another $21 billion (states and utilities are suing). The project was stopped in 2010 after appropriations were cut off, largely because of the opposition of Las Vegas residents and Nevada politicians who questioned the safety of transporting nuclear fuel rods from all over the country on rail lines and interstate roads that ran through Las Vegas.

  By 1974 Steven Bechtel Jr. decided the company needed a new framework for strategic planning. Although Bechtel was still building nuclear plants throughout the noncommunist world, nuclear power was no longer a growth industry. What was the next growth industry for energy? Steve Jr. determined that the company needed some outside perspective and in May 1974 offered the position of executive president to George Shultz, President Nixon’s secretary of the treasury. Shultz was the first outside president in Bechtel’s history. As a former dean of the University of Chicago Business School, former secretary of labor, and former treasury secretary, he was known as a skilled analyst of business trends and as astute as any investment banker in buying up the companies needed to dominate a new industry.