Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [154]
Back at the Nevada Test Site, a new industry had been born in nuclear accident cleanup. But before anything can get cleaned up, an assessment must be made regarding how much lethal radiation is present, where exactly, and in what form. All across the desert floor, new proof-of-concept, or prototypes, of radiation-detection instruments appeared. Before the nuclear bomb accidents in Spain and Greenland, individual radiation-detection machines were limited to handheld devices like Geiger counters, used to examine workers’ hands and feet and to search for radiation in limited local areas. Finally, gadgets and gizmos flooded the Nevada Test Site for field-testing in a post–nuclear accident world. After the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, testing had moved underground, but often these underground tests “vented,” releasing huge plumes of radiation from fissures in the earth. The test site was the perfect place to test equipment because there was an abundance of plutonium, americium, cesium, cobalt, europium, strontium, and tritium in the topsoil, and no shortage of radiation in the air.
First came new handheld devices, like a briefcase called the Neutron Detector Suitcase, a prototype designed by EG&G, which was followed by more advanced means of detecting radiation, including ground vehicles. The Sky Scanner, developed by the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, roamed down the test site’s dirt roads measuring radioactivity escaping from atomic vents. The Sky Scanner looked like a news van with a satellite dish, but inside it was full of equipment that could determine how much fallout was in the air. Next came fixed-wing aircraft that could patrol the air over an accident site. Used to detect fallout since Operation Crossroads, they were now equipped with state-of-the-art, still-classified radiation-detection devices. This marked the birth of a burgeoning new military technology that would become one of the most important and most secret businesses of the twenty-first century. Called remote sensing, it is the ability to recognize levels of radioactivity from a distance using ultraviolet radiation, infrared, and other means of detection.
Within a decade of the disastrous nuclear accidents at Palomares and Thule, EG&G would so dominate the radiation-detection market that the laboratory built at the Nevada Test Site for this purpose was initially called the EG&G Remote Sensing Laboratory. After 9/11, the sister laboratory, at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, was called the Remote Sensing Laboratory and included sensing-detection mechanisms for all types of WMD. This facility would become absolutely critical to national security, so much so that by 2011, T. D. Barnes says that “only two people at Nellis are cleared with a need-to-know regarding classified briefings about the Remote Sensing Lab.” Barnes is a member of the Nellis/Creech Air Force Base support team and its civilian military council. But in the 1960s, three nuclear facilities—Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia—and one private corporation—EG&G—were the organizations uniquely positioned to see the writing on the wall. If nuclear accidents were going to continue to happen, then these four entities were going to secure the government contracts to clean things up.
EG&G had been taking radiation measurements and tracking radioactive clouds for the Atomic Energy Commission since 1946. For decades, EG&G Energy Measurements has maintained control of the vast majority of radiation measurements records going back to the first postwar test at Bikini