Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [171]
One of the greatest potential threats to Area 51 in terms of an enemy attack would be from low-flying aircraft or helicopter. “A helicopter would be the aerial vehicle of choice,” says Barnes. “Whereas an airplane would be seen airborne long before it reached its target, a helicopter could be trucked in and then launched only a short distance from the restricted area. In that case, the helicopter would breach the security protection before defending aircraft from Area 51 could become airborne.” Which is why, to prepare against such threats, security guards like Richard Mingus would often participate in counterattack tests using large low-flying helium balloons as targets. “The balloons simulated helicopters,” Mingus explains. The tests used aging V-100 Commando armored personnel carriers, complete with mounted machine guns, left over from the Vietnam War. With four-wheel drive, high clearance, and excellent mobility, the retired amphibious armored car would ferry Mingus and his team of heavily armed sensitive assignment specialists as far as they could get up the mountain range, until the terrain became too steep.
“We’d park the V-100, run the rest of the way up the mountain with machine guns, set up on top of the mountain, and fire at these forty-inch weather balloons. There’d always be a driver, a supervisor, and a loader on the SAS team. We each had an assignment. One guy kept score.” Scores were important because the stakes were so high. The Nevada Test Site was the single most prolific atomic bombing facility in the world. It had a three-decade-long history of impeccable security, as did Area 51. Which is what made the breach that Mingus witnessed so radical.
It was a scorching-hot day during the Ronald Reagan presidency, the kind of day at the test site when people knew not to touch metal surfaces outside or they’d wind up getting burned. Mingus believes it was 1982 but can’t say for sure, as the event was specifically kept off of his Department of Energy logbook. No longer a security guard, Mingus had been promoted to security operations coordinator for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. At the time the near catastrophe occurred, the rank-and-file security entourage was escorting a nuclear device down Rainier Mesa Road. The bomb, one of eighteen exploded underground at the Nevada Test Site in 1982, was going to be exploded in an underground shaft. As the five-man security response team trailed behind the bomb transport vehicle (in an armored vehicle of its own), they made sure to keep a short distance behind the nuclear device, as was protocol. “There was a driver, a supervisor, a gunner operating the turret, a loader making sure the ammo feeds into the machine guns and doesn’t jam, and two riflemen,” Richard Mingus explains. There is always distance between the security team and the bomb: “One of the riflemen handles the tear gas and the other works the grenade launcher. You can shoot both weapons from either the shoulder or the hip. They’ll hit a target fifty or seventy-five yards away because if you find yourself under attack and having to shoot, you want distance. You don’t want the tear gas coming back and getting you in the nose.”
After the security response team and the nuclear bomb arrived at that day’s ground zero, a team of engineers and crane operators began the process of getting the weapon safely and securely inside an approximately eight-hundred-foot-deep hole that had been drilled into the desert floor and would house the bomb. Inserting a live nuclear weapon into a narrow, five-foot-diameter shaft required extraordinary precision by a single engineer operating a heavy metal crane. There was no room for error. The crane worked in hundred-foot increments, which in test site–speak were called picks. Only after the second