Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [172]
Richard Mingus had been part of dozens of ground zero teams over the past quarter of a century but on this particular morning circa 1982 Mingus was coordinating security operations for Livermore from inside a building called the control point, which was located in Area 6, ten miles from the bomb. The nuclear bomb was just about to reach the second pick when chaos entered the scene.
“I was sitting at my desk at the control point when I got the call,” Mingus says. “Dick Stock, the device systems engineer supervising the shot at ground zero, says over the phone, ‘We’re under attack over at the device assembly building!’” In the 1980s, the device assembly building was the place where the bomb components were married with the nuclear material. Because there were several nuclear weapons tests scheduled for that same week, Mingus knew there were likely additional nuclear weapons in the process of being put together at the device assembly building, in Area 27, which Mingus had good reason to believe was now under attack. “Dick Stock said he heard the information coming over the radios that the guys on the security response team were carrying” on their belts. Now it was up to Mingus to make the call about what to do next.
In the twenty-six years he had been employed at the test site, Richard Mingus had worked his way up from security guard to Livermore’s operations coordinator. He was an American success story. After his father died in 1941, Mingus dropped out of high school to work the coal mines. Eventually he went back to school, got a diploma, and joined the Air Force to serve in the Korean War. At the test site, Mingus had paid his dues. For years he stood guard over classified projects in the desert, through scorching-hot summers and cold winters, all the while guarding nuclear bombs and lethal plutonium-dispersal tests. By the mid-1960s, Mingus had saved enough overtime pay to buy a home for his family, which now included the young son he and Gloria had always dreamed about. By the mid-1970s, Mingus had enough money to purchase a second home, a hunting cabin in the woods. By the early 1980s, he had been promoted so many times, he qualified for GS-12, which in federal service hierarchy is only three rungs below the top grade, GS-15. “I attended the school for nuclear weapons orientation at Kirtland Air Force Base and had passed a series of advanced courses,” Mingus says. “But nothing, and I mean nothing, prepares you for the experience of thinking the nuclear material you are guarding is under attack.”
During that chaotic morning, Mingus knew all he could afford to focus on was the bomb in the hole. “I thought to myself, Dick Stock said the bomb is almost two picks down the hole. We’re under attack here. What’s best? I asked myself. If someone put a gun to the head of the crane operator and said, ‘Get it out’ they’d have a live nuclear bomb in their possession. I knew I had to make a decision. Was it safer to pull the bomb up or keep sending it down? I decided it was better to have a big problem at ground zero than somewhere else so I gave the order. I said, ‘Keep the device going down.’”
Mingus had a quick conversation with Joe Behne, the test director, about what was going on. The men agreed Mingus should call the head of security for the Department of Energy, a woman by the name of Pat Williams. “She said, ‘Yes, we hear the same thing and we have to assume the same thing. We are under attack as far as I know,’” Mingus recalls.
Next Mingus called Larry Ferderber, the resident manager of the Nevada Test Site for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Two minutes later Ferderber confirms the same thing, he says, ‘I hear we’re under attack.’” Mingus and Behne went through the protocol checklist. “Joe and I discussed going down to the basement and destroying the crypto which was in my building. Then