by Phil Patton
Most of the pigs, each in its specially tailored little pig uniform, ended up barbecued alive, and there must have been a smell of roasting pork that might not have been entirely repulsive. The test was jokingly called “The Charge of the Swine Brigade.” But the troops too were being exposed—far more than many knew—to radiation.
On May 5, 1952, soldiers came to warn the Sheahans of an impending very “dirty shot” and suggested they evacuate. Dan and Bob Sheahan stayed; the rest of the family went to Las Vegas. The next day, a blast went off that broke windows and ripped sheet metal from the buildings.
Worst of them all was the ninth shot in the series, code-named Harry, on March 24, 1953. It irradiated some four thousand sheep being herded through Coyote Gap. Within a few days they would all die.
The fallout from the Harry blast traveled as far as St. George, Utah—to the northeast—with deadly effect. Years later the trail of cancers it left among the “downwinders” became the subject of lawsuits. By the nineties, however, it was clear that most of the American population had been downwinders. A report credited the blasts with causing some seventy thousand cases of thyroid cancer alone.
After “Dirty Harry,” cattle drinking from Papoose Lake died, but the Sheahans still felt the AEC was taking care of them. They once made a trip to the office at the test site. An officer forthrightly explained to them that the shots were set off when the winds blew toward Groom, to avoid sending the fallout toward Las Vegas.
Once, the soldiers came to check the Sheahans’ water hole. They took samples and the sergeant assured them it was fine. Then one of the enlisted men asked if he could have a cup of water. “Can’t you wait until we get back to camp, soldier?” his commander gruffly interrupted. When the men realized the implications of their exchange, both became silent and embarrassed.
During all this time, Dan and Bob Sheahan had to halt operations at the mine, sometimes for two weeks at a time, because of the tests. Nor was the mine safe from conventional weapons. It was still part of the gunnery and bombing range, and in 1954, an overeager trainee strafed the mine buildings, presumably mistaking them for one of the target buildings on the range.
Finally Dan Sheahan discovered that his wife, Martha, had cancer. He would eventually sue the AEC, but the Sheahans held on to their land and mine, passing it to the next generation, Pat and Bob, and worked out an uneasy truce with the Air Force. But Bob never showed off his photographs, and into the nineties he was afraid to talk at all about the mine lest the Air Force make his life difficult.
By the seventies, Martha Sheahan had wondered how the military could say they were defending freedom at the base while trampling on the freedoms of those on its edge. But after the guards showed up at the mine in 1984, the Sheahans fell silent. At least some of the family were given security clearances, and when I talked to them in the mid-nineties other family members were still unwilling to criticize what the government had done. “They take care of us,” one family member said of the Air Force. He refused to talk. He didn’t want to be identified.
The dirty blasts of the early fifties baptized Groom and Papoose lakes in radiation. And the base that would grow up there, like a gigantic sci-fi mutant, would share the ethos of emergency, justifying the pollution of the “unpopulated” areas around it.
In its own irrepressible way, Las Vegas seized on the proximity of the test site in a more festive manner. The bright boomerangs and bubbles of neon on the Strip arrived just about the same time the flying saucers did. In honor of the destruction of Doomtown, the suburban town built in 1955 for the Apple II explosion, one Vegas hotel filled its swimming pool with mushrooms. Parties assembled to watch the blasts from convenient high spots. There were picnics on Mount Charleston, halfway up to Mercury, a future site of Interceptor expeditions. Even weddings were scheduled to coincide with nuclear tests: honeymoon in Las Vegas! Did the earth move for you too, dear? The mushroom cloud became another party theme, like the themes of the Old West, the Middle East, Ancient Rome, invoked as keynotes for decor at the Frontier, the Sands, or Caesars Palace. The Flamingo served an Atomic Cocktail—vodka, brandy, schnapps, and a touch of sherry. Gigi, its top hairdresser, arranged wire to produce an Atomic Hairdo. In May 1957 the Sands held a Miss Atomic Bomb contest in which the competing beauties appeared with the iconic mushroom cloud, modeled in cotton, glued to their silvery swimsuits.
Las Vegas is hardly typical of the United States, but for a time the whole country shared in the eagerness to embrace the atom. The historian Paul Boyer calls it the search for the silver lining to the mushroom cloud. There was an effort to downplay the effects of fallout and blast—it was actually proposed that a good wide-brimmed hat could offer a lot of protection—and civil defense drills became a common activity for schoolchildren. The stylized logo of the atom, with its zippy futuristic orbiting electrons, was soon joined by the three triangles on yellow of the fallout shelter as nuclear age icons. Disney published a children’s book called Our Friend the Atom, and the Boy Scouts added an atomic energy merit badge to their sashes. But beneath the cheery atom culture—so well documented in the 1982 film The Atomic Cafe—was a deeper and frequently denied fear. The atomic bomb shook heartland America to the core.
While Las Vegas was dancing to “The Atomic Bounce,” country-and-western music struggled to deal with the darker fears of the bomb. As I drove the fringes of Dreamland, I often played tapes of music from the fifties. One song in particular seemed to sum up poignantly middle America’s effort to deal with the shadow of the mushroom cloud. “The Great Atomic Power,” by Ira and Charlie Louvin and Buddy Bain, documented the bomb’s impact on the nation:
Do you fear this man’s invention that they call atomic power?
Are we all in great confusion?
Do we know the time or hour?
When a terrible explosion may rain down upon our land,
Leaving horrible destruction,
Blotting out the works of man.
Are you ready for that great atomic power?
Will you rise and meet your savior in the air?
Will you shout or will you cry
when the fire rains from on high?
Are you ready for that great atomic power?
The Louvins’ song belonged to a tradition of songs beginning with “Atomic Bomb,” penned by the sleepless Fred Kirby the very night the first bomb was dropped on Japan, August 7, 1945. Recorded by many groups, “Atomic Bomb” was joined by such numbers as “The Hell Bomb,” “Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb,” and similar songs, which were big hits in the late forties and early fifties.
Like others in the genre, “The Great Atomic Power” was a conflation of Bible and Cold War, a rendition of the apocalypse as nuclear holocaust. The bomb’s coming was the Second Coming and you’d better be ready, better turn to Jesus for salvation. The song was a desperate, even heroic, effort to graft the impact of the bomb onto fundamentalist Christian theology, to force the terrible new knowledge into the net of traditional teaching and, grotesquely, deform it. Here was Jesus as the ultimate version of Strategic Air Command—“He will be your shield and sword”—right off the logos painted on the noses of B-36s and B-47s.
“When the mushroom of destruction falls in all its fury great, God will surely save his children from that awful awful fate.”
SAC’s Gen. Curt LeMay, however, wasn’t waiting for God; his plan was to hit the Russians with everything he had before they could light up the skies over New York and Washington, over Dallas or Nashville, or over Omaha, home of SAC, seat of the religion of airpower.
7. Victory Through Airpower
Embracing the Nevada Test Site and looming over Las Vegas on the map, the Nellis Air Force Base wrapped Dreamland in the ideology of airpower.
The huge bright tank of jet fuel at the entrance to the base read GLOBAL POWER FOR AMERICA. Emblazoned with the shield and sword of the Air Combat Command, the tank shimmered in the heat just up the road from the pawnshops and watering holes (SNA
FU Lounge) that have sprung up on the verges of the base.
Dreamland is part of Nellis’s vast bombing ranges, but Nellis is best known as the home of the Air Force’s Red Flag training games, the equivalent of the Navy’s famed Top Gun school. During Red Flag exercises the sky for hundreds of miles around the base is filled with aircraft—twenty-two thousand sorties are flown a year.
I stopped by the edge of Nellis’s runway one afternoon during a Red Flag to watch the airplanes returning. A half dozen or so cars and trucks had gathered, with people lounging in the driver’s seats or sitting lazily on the hoods. Their expressions bore the patient, purposeless air of fishermen.
F-15s and F-16s came home in pairs, each touching down with a little puff of smoke as its tires hit the pavement. A big AWACS plane, a huge hump of an antenna on its back, came in over our heads, and a helicopter drifted past, creating a little crater of dust.
For Red Flag, the planners at Nellis are constantly creating “notional countries,” imagined allies and aggressor nations that play out the scenarios of conflict, drawing fictional nations on the map of the area around Dreamland. In one Red Flag scenario, for instance, a friendly little country named Cavalier is menaced by aggressive Sirocco.
In the absence of war, or rather in the Cold War the military has fought in the last half century, the game is the thing: Witness the constant playing of war games, from the high level of Herman Kahn, the doomsday theorist of nuclear holocausts, to those of Top Gun and Red Flag.
Geopolitical scenarios played out by Pentagon planners are popularized in the military technothrillers of Tom Clancy, Dale Brown, Harry Coyle, and others. Dreamland crops up in them repeatedly. Clancy makes reference to flying saucer lore when he has a character joke about “the Frisbees of Dreamland.” Brown, who flew in Red Flags during his Air Force days, describes a fictional High Tech Aerospace Weapons Center, HAWC, at Groom Lake in his novels Sky Masters and Flight of the Old Dog, “a secret U.S. Air Force research facility in Dreamland that conducts flight-test experiments on new and modified aircraft and new weapon systems.”
Sky Masters—dedicated to Curtis LeMay, “the Iron Eagle”—describes the testing of fuel air bombs, a real technology in which a huge cloud of gasoline vapor is ignited, producing a shock wave that crushes troops on the ground—a miniature Tokyo firestorm.
For Nellis, Dreamland is always “the Box.” Military Operating Areas, forbidden to civilian air traffic, show up on aviation maps, marked with the acronym MOA—an unintentional irony, since the moa, a now extinct bird from New Zealand, was flightless. They are given names like Talon and Cheyenne.1
Pilots take the Box very seriously—because their commanders do. It is the most restricted MOA, off-limits even to the military pilots, at all altitudes and all times.
At the beginning of every Red Flag session crews spend several hours and one two-hour sortie being oriented to the various Nellis ranges, memorizing landmarks so that in the heat of “battle” they do not stray into the Box. Even crossing buffer zones around R-4808 (airspaces R-4807, R-4806, R-4809) results in the crews being given a slap on the wrist, but it happens frequently.
A former Red Flag player explained to me, “If a pilot accidentally strayed into the area, the day’s exercises would immediately terminate and the offending aircraft would be ordered to land at an isolated area on the east side of Nellis AFB. Intelligence officers would confiscate the radar film, detain the crew, search everything in the cockpit, and then conduct a lengthy interview to determine why there was an overflight. Overflying R-4808 is cause for very heavy penalties, including an automatic Article 15 [administrative reprimand, which for officers is the kiss of death], demotion, and loss of pay. If the overflight was intentional, one could expect a court-martial, a dishonorable discharge, and imprisonment.”
Nellis was created as part of the network of bases built up in the vast West in anticipation of World War II—the Las Vegas Army Air Corps Gunnery School, established in January 1941. By June, the school was graduating four thousand students every five or six weeks. A number of auxiliary runways were built in the huge expanse of the range, including two five-thousand-foot runways laid out in a cross tilted to the northwest on the edge of Groom Lake. Soon the lake bed was littered with .30- and .50-caliber shells.
After the war, Nellis served as a major mustering-out point for airmen and soldiers. It was closed down in 1947 but reactivated two years later, in time to become the main fighter-pilot training center during the Korean War and, eventually, the temple of fighter tactics and esprit. It would become the home of the Thunderbirds, the Air Force aerobatic team.
Today, in the dry cleaners and pizza joints surrounding Nellis, proud entrepreneurs display signed Thunderbird photos, Thunderbird banners, Thunderbird plaques. The Air Force aerobatics team figures here something like the football teams in other cities. There are weekly tours of the Thunderbird hangar, led by a disarming PR man. On the tour I joined, the crowd was largely oldsters. “Aren’t they handsome?” said one woman, looking at the photographs of the pilots on the wall. In an auditorium, the guide sketched Thunderbird history and glory in slides and narrative. At the end of the presentation, questions were entertained. Immediately came the impertinent inquiry from a retiree at the back of the room: “Do you have anything to do with this Area 51?” A faint scattered laugh came from the knowing minority.
“That’s where we get our pilots,” said the PR man, quick-witted. “No, seriously, that’s a good one. I wish I knew.”
On a ridge above the dry lake called Muroc, one hundred miles north of Los Angeles, some fifty years before I stood on Freedom Ridge, a loose gaggle of men stood shivering in front of small fires. In the hour just before dawn on January 8, 1944, some two dozen engineers and workers of the original Lockheed Skunk Works awaited the first flight of the jet fighter they had produced in only sixty-eight days, the XP-80.
Among them was a man named Wally Bison, who had worked in the Skunk Works from the beginning.
“It was cold, colder than a well,” Bison told me years later. “All of a sudden somebody said, ‘Here he comes,’ and the airplane passed by a couple of hundred feet off the deck in dead silence. Then the jet blast came, a sound we’d never heard before. I was goose pimples from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet.” That sound, he said, seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere in particular.
The plane was called Lulu Belle, but the guys around the shop had wanted to call it “the Fartin’ Fury of Forty-four.” These men worked on a relentless schedule; the big legends above the girlie calendars gloomily read, “Our Days Are Numbered.”
The formal name of the facilities around Rogers Dry Lake, where Jack Northrop and other aviation pioneers had tested planes in the twenties, was the Muroc Bombing and Gunnery Range. As early as 1933 the Air Corps had established a gunnery range on the lake bed not far from a small settlement established by Clifford and Eve Corum in 1910. When the Corums had applied to set up a sub–post office under their name in the store for the convenience of customers, the authorities replied that the name Corum had already been taken by another office. So they reversed the letters and it became Muroc. The word, with its accidental overtones of Morocco, of the French mur and rock, had an appropriately rugged, dry sound.
With the coming of the war, the military arrived in force at Muroc and other dry lakes—China Lake, El Mirage—and chased off the hotrodders and cyclists. The Navy built a wooden mock-up of a Japanese cruiser, a gray looming practice target, with only the dry lake for waves. They named it the Muroc Maru, and for years it floated on the liquid of mirage. Within months of Pearl Harbor there were thousands of men and hundreds of bombers and fighters here and at tens of other new bases springing up throughout the West, safely inland and isolated.
The airplane that flew that day in January 1944 was the second “black” aircraft, the first product of the Lockheed Skunk Works and as secret as the Manhattan Project. Bell Aviation had built the first, the XP-59, and
flown it here in 1943. Optimistically named “Aircomet,” the XP-59 turned out to be little better than the best prop planes of the day—a lesson from the beginning that black projects could turn out turkeys as well as eagles.
But the project had already begun to display the little signs of camaraderie and conspiratorial clannishness of black projects to come. The Bell crew took the derby hat as their symbol and would fly wearing derbies and gorilla masks, waving cigars as they buzzed hapless fighter trainees, who nearly fell from the sky in shock. Forbidden to acknowledge their work openly, they sported insignia from which the propellers had been removed.
When they went out to Juanita’s in Rosamond, and Pancho Barnes’s famous bar closer to the base, they wore black derbies and fake mustaches from a Hollywood prop store.
But once the Lockheed jet flew, the XP-59 was doomed. Lockheed’s XP-80 proved a durable design. Quickly improved with a more powerful engine, it became the YP-80A, “the Gray Ghost.” Eventually some six thousand aircraft based on the type would be produced, a whole family of jets, including the P-80 and F-80 military fighter, the Shooting Star, and the T-33 trainer.
That cold January day, the head of the Skunk Works, Kelly Johnson, stood impatiently by the airplane in a long overcoat and knit watch cap. Johnson, then just thirty-three years old and the designer of the Lockheed Electra, the P-38 Lightning fighter, and—for Howard Hughes—the lovely tri-tailed Constellation airliner, had flown to Wright Field in Dayton just the summer before. At one-thirty on the afternoon of June 8, 1943, he had been handed a signed contract to build the airplane that was now complete.
Wally Bison, the Skunk Works veteran, remembered something else. An old man when I talked to him, he had a hard time recalling names, and he kept apologizing. But Bison remembered that Johnson took the whole gang to a restaurant for lunch—and paid for it. Used to bringing his lunch to work in a brown bag, Bison saw this as an act of unprecedented largesse on the part of the penny-pinching Johnson.
