by Phil Patton
Derek, I learned, was a child of the Blitz. He had been taken from London to the country when the Germans began the first exhibition of airpower as terror. His father had been in North Africa with Monty, and during six-hour cease-fires he and his fellows had played soccer with the Germans, then gone back to trying to kill each other.
Derek flew helicopters in Vietnam. He had “taken two armor-piercing in the stomach” and swore the Vietcong paid their troops a twenty-five-dollar bonus for every chopper pilot they took out. Before he came to Las Vegas and the test site, he had worked for the DOE in Colorado, and a discussion of Denver Bronco star quarterback John Elway was one of the few things that brought a smile to Derek’s face.
The base camp at Mercury provided an inventory of government architecture, from Nissen huts to pastel cinder-block apartments. A sign in the cafeteria advertised an upcoming bowling tournament.
The road through the site runs from the highway turnoff at Mercury and, if you could cross the Ridge, on to S-4—Papoose Lake, putative site of the saucer base. Along the road were old signs warning about security and safety, their stridency muted by wind and sun, which had brought the grain of the plywood back up through the paint.
At Frenchman Flat, to the south end of the site, I stood on ground zero—on many ground zeroes, actually. Most of the first blasts were set off in the air or from towers and balloons in Jackass Flats. But nothing now was hot; the radiation had long since faded and in places some of the top layer of soil had been removed.
We pulled up to a set of test structures constructed at Frenchman Flat for the 1957 explosion called Priscilla. It was a virtual sculpture garden of shapes: an underground garage entrance, built to test garages as fallout shelters; concrete dome shelters, spheres with just their bald tops protruding from the earth; the remnants of a railroad bridge trestle and a safe contributed by the Mosler company from whose concrete sides the rebar was pulled back like the bones of a cooked trout; the twisted forms of airplane hangars, reddened with rust, like an Anthony Caro sculpture executed in fast-rusting Cor-ten steel. A series of concrete boxes used to test blast resistance and known as the motel or the sugar loaves suggested a Donald Judd sculpture.
The artifacts of testing looked like art. But it also worked the other way: These shapes had inspired Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and other ambitious creators of sixties-era “earth art” to leave behind sculpture as monumental as the Ozymandian works of ancient civilizations. In our own time, no one had come closer to putting timeless marks on the face of the planet than the boys at the test site.
Looking at the expressionism of twisted girder and the minimalism of repeated cubes, I suddenly understood how much the reductivist endgame of modern art had in common with the no-win endgame of nuclear warfare. Was anything more abstract than mutual assured destruction? Was it an accident that the end of modernism and the end of the Cold War came almost simultaneously?
We paused at the Sedan Crater, in Area 10, recently added to the National Register of Historic Places.
It is 325 feet deep and 1,280 feet wide and was created by a hydrogen blast on July 6, 1962, the part of Edward Teller’s Plowshare program aimed at devising peaceful uses for nuclear explosives. A few tumbleweeds had gathered in its bottom like dust bunnies in an ill-kept apartment. Say a Third World dictator whose country owns a major canal balks at renewing the treaty lease. Well, Teller figured, you just light up a few nukes and dig a new one in the country next door.
Sedan lifted eleven million tons of earth into the air in a blossoming explosion that took on the shape of a great shrub above the desert. It jolted the ground with the force of an earthquake registering 4.7 on the Richter scale. Apollo astronauts in training used the crater to simulate one on the moon.
We stopped by Doomtown, in Area 1, where a couple of houses still stood from the 1955 Apple II blast: little bits of Levittown in the desert, stocked with mannequins from the JCPenney department store and canned and frozen foods flown in from Chicago the night before the blast.
I felt as if Derek were a real estate agent and I a prospective buyer, checking out the dry, gray plywood floors. I stood in one of the living rooms for a while, then walked around the place, as if considering the landscaping. I noticed that the chimney had been twisted on its axis so that bricks protruded a couple of inches.
To the north is another little village of test structures, called Japan Town, where realistic Japanese buildings were exposed to fallout in order to compare the results with the effects of the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
From a long way off, behind the Control Point, I could see the Device Assembly Facility, the DAF, which had been built for assembling nukes at a cost of $100 million just before testing stopped. The DAF looks like a huge, long bunker or a giant surfacing submarine. Inside are special rooms whose roofs are slung on wire cables so they will collapse and trap blast and radiation in case of an accidental explosion. The DAF was surrounded by watchtowers, wired fences, video cameras, and high-tech radar sensors on poles. It cried out to be included in a movie and it occurred to me that we taxpayers ought to recover our expenditures by renting it out to Hollywood.
We passed “News Nob,” where, by the early fifties, any reporter worth his typewriter, any broadcaster worth his mike, had to see an A-bomb for himself. Congressmen, aides, and top government officials were brought here as well, and for the St. Pat’s blast of 1953 the revelry was at its peak. The officials of the test site hosted a group of journalists who produced upbeat stories in publications from The New York Times to National Geographic.
We dropped by Command Post One, the blockhouse control center. Out front were guards in camou. They opened the doors and flipped on the lights for us. It was cold and quiet inside. No explosions had been set off for a year and a half, and the building had the slightly musty smell of a vacation house left closed and vacant for a long time. Inside the control room the thick wooden tables and consoles turned out to be Formica, and chipped at that. I sat at last in the chair from which the big booms had been set off. It seemed cheap, the size pitifully pompous, like the chair of a minor county functionary full of his own importance.
Everything in the room felt years out of date, almost seedy, more like the furnishings of a government health clinic than the powerful high-tech control center seen in old newsreels. The telephones had Lucite cube buttons you punched to choose a line. Next to one of the buttons I saw the designation “dremland” (sic). It was a line used to coordinate test operations with the tower at Groom. I surreptitiously jotted down the number and I imagined calling it from all sorts of places around the world, staying in touch with the tower in Dreamland.
We stopped for lunch back at Mercury. In the afternoon, we returned to the distant northern part of the test site. Here, Derek said, coyotes and deer roamed. They had lived so far from human contact for so long they would often come right up to you. “They have no fear at all,” he said. “It’s as if time had stopped.” The talk turned to the other side of the Ridge, and the parts of the site we could not visit. “Area 51?” Derek said. “I’m probably the only one out here who knows what they are really doing over there.”
Derek looked at me, gauging my reaction. I didn’t dare to ask: “So what is it then?” Because the answer would be either the serious “Well, of course I can’t tell you” or the facetious, clichéd joke: “Well, I could tell you but then I would have to kill you.”
I looked over toward Gate 700, and it occurred to me that this might be the closest I would get to the heart of Dreamland, Groom Lake, and certainly, in physical distance, to its mysterious sibling, Papoose Lake.
I just let the question, as Henry James would say, “hang in the air.”
A few days later I met one of the men who had helped build the road I saw running off through Gate 700, connecting the NTS to Dreamland. At noon one hot day I drove through a quiet suburb of Las Vegas. It was empty and silent, neat little houses on neat little lots. Modified ranch with a sligh
t Mexican accent. Stucco. Lots of ironwork. Pastels. Neatly clipped lawns.
Joe Bacco was sitting on his porch. He had worked for years as a maintenance man, fixing roads and other facilities at the nuclear test site and in Area 51. He wore on his identification the number “8,” which allowed him to cross the border into Area 51. We talked in the dining room, under the eyes of a Madonna on the wall.
I met Bacco at a hearing on the future of the test site. After the high-pitched Greenpeacers and the Shoshone nation reps and the man who said he had worked with plutonium daily with no ill effects had spoken, Bacco got his turn.
Joe Bacco sweats constantly now. There is a perpetual thin sheen over his body, as if he were in a New Orleans August instead of the dry Nevada desert. His eyes, always partly closed, as if swollen, glisten like his body. Bacco takes showers every few hours.
In 1970 an underground explosion called Baneberry leaked, sending a towering cloud, mushroomlike in shape and size, above the flats and cracking the ground like an earthquake. The fissures were two or three feet wide in some places and made the roads into Area 12, site of the blast, impassable.
The camp at Area 12, where some nine hundred workers lived in trailers and, sometimes, tents, was swept with fallout. Three hundred were found to be contaminated with radiation. The NTS authorities panicked. The radiation release was a PR nightmare; sabotage was suspected. The authorities immediately sent Bacco and a crew of other workers to patch the road. The members of his crew are almost all dead now, he tells me. “It was hotter than a motherfucker,” he said, referring to radiation.
“The foreman was Herschel Baker, and there was Charlie Archulet, who’s dead now.” He lists the names of his other crewmates. “We had to put chains on the four-by-four.”
It was snowing heavily that day yet sparks flew from Bacco’s long johns. It was so hot, the workers’ safety badges were quickly overwhelmed with radiation. “There was electricity all over my body,” he told me. “Red and green sparks.
“Later I was paralyzed, and I was passing blood for six or seven months.”
It was an account full of primal fear, as much from what he had seen as experienced.
He talked of men who had fallen asleep in trailers before the blast and been killed. He had hauled out bodies. Beside the baseball diamond in Mercury, workers had burned dead cattle and drums of waste, incinerated the badges that recorded how much radiation the workers had received, “to hide the evidence.”
One of the men contaminated by Baneberry, the supervisor, Harley Roberts, fought the AEC and later DOE, and helped win rights and recognition for the workers. Baker and others in the crew developed leukemia within two years of the shot. In 1972 Roberts and a worker named William Nunamaker filed suit for some eight million dollars against the NTS, charging negligence. The case lingered on for ten years as the court kept postponing judgment. But by 1974, Harley Roberts was dead.
Bacco’s requests for benefits had been denied. Both his old employer REECO, Reynolds Electric, the largest contractor at the site, and the Department of Energy claimed to have no record of his employment, even though he had his work identification card. “They thought, This is a sucker, we use him,” Bacco said. “I was a guinea pig.”
Where had I heard stories before of employment records being made to disappear? In Lazar’s tale, of course.
At the hearing, Bacco told his story with a practiced rhythm. He explained how the Department of Energy had tried to settle with him.
“The lawyer offered me twenty thousand. I told him a big bad word. What I wanted was my job back. I talked to the doctor. All I said was, do me a favor, when I die give my body to research.
“ ‘Well, Joe,’ the doctor said, ‘you ought to feel lucky you’re still living. Just keep taking those showers.’ ”
The lady from DOE shook her head sadly. This sort of thing was all supposed to be in the past for the department. Yes, mistakes had been made, but a new page had been turned.
The original creators of the test site were motivated by nothing less than a desperate need to save the planet. A few thousand acres of land, a few hundred lives, were necessary casualties. They were driven with all the intensity of scientists in fifties sci-fi movies, rushing to come up with a weapon to defeat mutant giant ants or invading saucers. But that was in the past. The lady from DOE explained that with testing stopped, the department was looking for new uses for the test site: A solar energy farm was being considered.
The test site tours were at once part of the new attitude and a revival of the proud tradition of News Nob, where Walter Cronkite, Bob Considine, Dave Garroway, John Cameron Swayze, and others were courted as they reported on the Bomb. DOE was trumpeting its new openness, making available old records, pledging never again to expose soldiers and downwind civilians to radiation.
Derek and I did not discuss the way that the bombs exploded at the test site had affected Dreamland.
Among the newly opened records were documents showing that Dreamland itself had been a victim of fallout and of nuclear blasts, even after U-2 testing began there. Work on the U-2 and later the Blackbirds would be placed at the mercy of the needs of nuclear testing. Even the crews and pilots at Groom Lake were in danger. Kelly Johnson had been concerned from the beginning about the dangers of fallout and, sure enough, the work at Groom would frequently be interrupted with warnings or evacuations whenever testing took place. The authorities debated which tests at Groom Lake, if any, would justify delaying a nuclear test.
The first part of Operation Plumbob was called Project 57, conceived to ensure that a nuclear weapon damaged or dropped in an accident or otherwise broken open would not detonate—even if some of its conventional explosives went off.
The test took place just seven miles from the main base at Groom, in the Groom Lake Valley, near the mine. A ten-by-sixteen-mile block of land surrounding the planned location was added to the test site and designated Area 13.
No one involved with Project 57 seems to have had much of a contingency plan if the bomb wiped out the U-2 program already under way at the lake, not to mention the mine and its operators. Later it occurred to the people in charge that, with the base at Groom growing, this was not a good thing. So in the 1980s the government spent twenty-one million dollars to have the land scraped and the toxic portions removed, a process clearly visible in spy satellite shots.
In June 1957, training for the U-2 pilots was moved to Texas, probably because of the bomb tests. Soon afterward, Project 57 began with a huge blast called Hood detonated from a balloon fifteen hundred feet over Area 9, about fourteen miles southwest of Groom Lake. At seventy-four kilotons it was the most powerful airburst ever set off within the continental United States. There was no public announcement. Fallout descended on Groom Lake, and the concussion shattered windows in the mess hall and a barracks and buckled the doors of two metal buildings.
During the tests, the crews at the new base were regularly warned and evacuated. They were unaware that they were part of a long tradition and that other neighbors of the test site had not been so lucky.
During these years, a man named Bob Sheahan assembled a unique photo album of Dreamland. The mushroom clouds rising from the spots I had visited at Frenchman Flat and Yucca Flat were visible from his home at Groom Mine, on a ridge about forty miles from ground zero. He took dozens of pictures of the blasts, a whole catalog of mushrooms—twenty, thirty Hiroshimas, seen from the edge of what was to become Dreamland.
Bob Sheahan had grown up around Groom Mine, with its cluster of work buildings and adjacent cabins. The mine has been in his family since 1885 and his father, Dan, ran it now. Bob was thirty-one, a former engineering student at the University of Nevada, when one day in early 1951 a polite, well-dressed man from the Atomic Energy Commission came calling. There would be atomic blasts, he warned them, at the new proving ground about thirty miles to the southwest, and some radioactive fallout might drift over the mountains. It would head northeast toward them, cross
ing the Groom Range at Coyote Gap, near the site of what would become the town of Rachel, with its little monitoring site on the town square. The AEC man gave the Sheahans a Geiger counter and taught them how to use it. He left flat sticky plates to catch fallout for later testing. He set up a radio.
Dan Sheahan had the Atomic Energy Commission boys sign his guest book. “We’re all family,” he said.
The first shot, on February 2, 1951, broke the Sheahans’ front door and cracked several windows. Others quickly followed. With the Korean War turning ugly, research into tactical nuclear weapons was pushing ahead hard.
Soon the Sheahans began to see signs of the fallout. Bits of metal big enough to pick up with a magnet, all that was left of the vaporized steel towers, fell out of the sky. The Geiger counter showed the metal was hot.
Strange white spots about the size of a silver dollar began to appear on the backs of cattle and horses. These, the AEC man would tell them, were called beta burns. One day Sheahan saw an object on the ground, and when he got close he found it was a dead deer, marked with the same white spots as the cattle. He noticed something else strange: There were very few rabbits. Usually, the desert was full of them—you would mount any rise and startle one—but now he hardly saw any.
The first series of shots came in rapid succession. They were part of the series called Upshot Knothole. But the fallout from the series called Operation Buster Jangle was worse. These were run mostly by the Army, which set up a whole tent town at the proving ground called Camp Desert Rock and exposed tanks and troops and all sorts of equipment to the edges of the blast. In one test, the Army tried to determine the effects of an atomic blast on uniforms at varying distances from ground zero. Miniature uniforms complete with zippers, snaps, and toggles were custom sewn to fit each of 111 white Chester hogs. The pig was chosen because, flattering to our species or not, its muscle and fat distribution most nearly resemble those of a human being.
