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EPILOGUE

In the summer of 2010 a book arrived in the mail from Colonel Leghorn, the father of overhead reconnaissance, age ninety-one. The pages were musty and smelled like an attic. What he had sent was his 1946 Army Air Forces commemorative yearbook from the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests. What is most striking is how the story of America’s first postwar nuclear test begins as a “mysterious Army-Navy assignment” in a “sand-swept town—Roswell.”

“Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell.”

The word repeats six times in the first few pages of the government-issued yearbook, making it clear that it was from the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico that the first shot in what would be a forty-three-year-old Cold War was fired. And what a colossal opening shot Operation Crossroads was, an unprecedented show of force aimed at letting Joseph Stalin know that America was not done with the nuclear bomb. Forty-two thousand people were present in the Pacific for the two nuclear bomb tests, including Stalin’s spies. The U.S. government spent nearly two billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) to show the world the nuclear power it now possessed.

“Stalin learned from Hitler,” the EG&G engineer says, “revenge… and other things.” And that to consider Stalin’s perspective one should think about two key moments in history, one right before World War II began and another right before it ended. On August 23, 1939, one week before war in Europe officially began, Hitler and Stalin agreed to be allies and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, meaning each country promised not to attack the other when war in Europe broke out. And yet almost immediately after shaking hands, Hitler began plotting to double-cross Stalin. Twenty-two months later, Hitler’s sneak attack against Russia resulted in millions of deaths. And then, just a few weeks before World War II ended, Stalin, Truman, and Churchill met in Potsdam, Germany—from July 17, 1945, to August 2, 1945—and agreed to be postwar allies. Just one day before that conference began, America had secretly tested the world’s first and only atomic bomb, inside the White Sands Proving Ground in the New Mexico desert. Truman’s closest advisers had suggested that Truman share the details of the atomic test with Stalin at Potsdam, but Truman did not. It didn’t matter. Nuclear weapons historians believe that Joseph Stalin was already well aware of what the Manhattan Project engineers had accomplished. Stalin had spies inside the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory who had been providing him with bomb blueprints and other information since 1941. By the time the Potsdam conference rolled around, Stalin was already well at work on his own atomic bomb. Despite Stalin and Truman pretending to be allies, neither side trusted the other side, neither man trusted the other man. Each side was instead making plans to build up its own atomic arsenal for future use. When Operation Crossroads commenced just twelve months after the handshakes at Potsdam, the Cold War battle lines were already indelibly drawn.

It follows that Stalin’s black propaganda hoax—the flying disc peopled with alien look-alikes that wound up crashing near Roswell, New Mexico—could have been the Soviet dictator’s revenge for Truman’s betrayal at Crossroads. His double cross had to have been in the planning stages during the handshaking at Potsdam, metaphorically mirroring what Hitler had done during the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. By July of 1947, Stalin was still two years away from being able to successfully test his own nuclear bomb. The flying disc at Roswell, says the EG&G engineer, was “a warning shot across Truman’s bow.” Stalin may not have had the atomic bomb just yet, but he had seminal hover and fly technology, pilfered from the Germans, and he had stealth. Together, these technologies made the American military gravely concerned. Perplexed by the flying disc’s movements, and its radical ability to confuse radar, the Army Air Forces was left wondering what else Stalin had in his arsenal