Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [116]
Drones were needed to take blast and gust measurements inside the thermonuclear clouds, and to take samples of radioactive debris inside. During the Greenhouse test series, which did not wind up setting the world on fire, the first drone in went out of control and crashed into the sea before it ever reached the stem of the mushroom cloud. Two other drone missions were aborted after not responding to controls, and a fourth sustained such heavy damage in the shock wave, it lost control and crash-landed on a deserted island called Bogallua, where it caught fire and exploded. When the test series was over, the Air Force ultimately concluded that the unmanned samplers were unreliable. “Following Operation Greenhouse, the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission looked more favorably upon manned samplers,” wrote a Defense Nuclear Agency historian in 1963. “Greenhouse became the last atomic test series during which drone aircraft were used for this purpose.” So when it came time to detonate the world’s first full-scale thermonuclear device—an unimaginably monstrous 10.4 megaton bomb code-named Mike—in the next test series, called Operation Ivy in the fall of 1952, it was decided that six human pilots, all volunteers, would fly straight into the center of the radioactive stem and mushroom cloud. Another group of pilots was assigned to fly along the outer edges of the predicted fallout zones. That group included Hervey Stockman, who, four years later, would become the first CIA pilot to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2.
In anticipation of the Mike bomb’s manned sampling mission, the pilots practiced at the airfield at Indian Springs, thirty miles due south of Area 51. These pilots, including Stockman, then flew sampling missions through the kiloton-size atomic bombs being exploded at the Nevada Test Site as part of a spring 1952 test series called Operation Tumbler-Snapper. “Up to this time,” Stockman explains, “the scientists had put monkeys in the cockpits of remotely controlled drone aircraft [at the test site]. They would fly these things through the [atomic] clouds. Then they began to be interested in the effects of radiation on humanoids. They realized that with care and cunning they could put people in there.”
The Air Force worked hard to change the pilots’ perception of themselves as guinea pigs, at least for the historical record. According to a history of the atomic cloud sampling program, declassified in 1985, by the time Stockman and his fellow pilots left Indian Springs for the Marshall Islands to fly missions through megaton-size thermonuclear bomb clouds, the men accepted that they “were doing something useful…not serving as guinea pigs as they seriously believed when first called upon to do the sampling.”
Stockman offers another perspective. “In those days, I didn’t think much about the moral questions. I was young. The visual picture when these things go off is absolutely stunning. I was very much in awe of it,” Stockman recalls. “The [atomic bombs] that were going on in the proving grounds in Nevada were minute in comparison to these [thermonuclear bomb] monsters out there in the Pacific. Those were big brutes. When they went off they would punch right through the Earth’s atmosphere and head out into space.”
After finally arriving in the Pacific, pilots flew “familiarization flights and rehearsals” in the days leading up to the Mike bomb. But nothing could prepare an airman for the actual test. Stockman’s colleague Air Force pilot Jimmy P. Robinson was one of the six pilots who “volunteered” to fly through the Ivy Mike mushroom cloud. Because the physical bomb was the size of a large airplane hangar, it couldn’t be called a weapon per se. The bomb was so large that it was built from the ground up, on an island on the north side of the atoll called