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In America, the Army Air Forces developed its first official drone wing after the war, for use during Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in 1946. There, drones were sent through the mushroom cloud, their operators flying them by remote control from an airborne mother ship called Marmalade flying nearby. To collect radioactive samples, the drones had been equipped with air-collection bags and boxlike filter-paper holders. Controlling the drones in such conditions was difficult. Inside the mushroom cloud, one drone, code-named Fox, was blasted “sixty feet higher than its flight path,” according to declassified memos about the drone wing’s performance there. Fox’s “bomb doors warped, all the cushions inside the aircraft burst and its inspection plates and escape hatch blew off.” Remarkably, the drone pilot maintained control from several miles away. Had he witnessed such a thing, Nikola Tesla might have smiled.

During the second set of atomic tests, called Operation Sandstone, in April of 1948, the drones were again used in a job deemed too dangerous for airmen. During an eighteen-kiloton atomic blast called Zebra, however, a manned aircraft accidentally flew through a mushroom cloud, and after this, the Air Force made the decision that because the pilot and crew inside the aircraft had “suffered no ill effects,” pilots should be flying atomic-sampling missions, not drones. Whether or not pilots were exposed to lethal amounts of radiation during the Zebra bomb or hundreds of other atomic tests has never been accurately determined. The majority of the records regarding how much radiation pilots were exposed to in these early years and who died of radiation-related diseases have allegedly been destroyed or lost. But when the Air Force pilot accidentally flew through the Zebra bomb’s mushroom cloud, the incident “commenced a chain of events that resulted in manned samplers.”

“Manned samplers were simply more efficient,” wrote officer Colonel Paul H. Fackler in a 1963 classified historical review of atomic cloud sampling made for the Air Force systems command, declassified in 1986. As the official radiation safety officer assigned to Operation Sandstone, Fackler held sway. Fackler’s colleague Colonel Cody also argued in favor of man over drone. Cody said the drone samples were obtained haphazardly by “potluck.” A human pilot would be able to maneuver around a cloud during penetration so that the “most likely parts of the cloud could be sampled.” It was a case of dangerous semantics; most likely was a euphemism for “most radioactive.” For future tests, Air Force officials decided to pursue both manned and unmanned atomic-sampling wings.

Both kinds of aircraft would be needed for an ultrasecret test that was pending in the Pacific in 1951. Operation Greenhouse would involve a new kind of nuclear weapon that was being hailed as the “Super bomb.” It was a thermonuclear weapon, or hydrogen bomb, the core of which would explode with the same energy found at the center of the sun. Los Alamos scientists explained to weapons planners that the destructive power of this new kind of science, called nuclear fusion, was entirely unknown. Fusion involves exploding a nuclear bomb inside a nuclear bomb, and privately the scientists expressed fear that the entire world’s atmosphere could catch on fire during this process. Scientists became deeply divided over the issue and whether or not to go forward. The push to create the Super was spearheaded by the indomitable Dr. Edward Teller and cosigned by weapons planners with the Department of Defense. The opposition to the Super was spearheaded by Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb and now Teller’s rival. Oppenheimer, who felt that developing a weapon capable of ending civilization was immoral, would lose his security clearance over his opposition to the Super bomb. According to Al O’Donnell, the EG&G weapons test engineer who wired many of Dr. Teller’s Super bombs in the Marshall