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By Root 820 0

at the age of thirty-four did things shift for me, and I’ve earned my living as a writer ever since. I say that for all of the writers following in my footsteps. Don’t give up. My village fire keepers—those to whom I am deeply indebted for their individually imperative roles—include Alice and Tom Soininen, Julie Elkins, John Soininen; my writing teacher at St. Paul’s School, Michael Burns, and at Princeton University, Paul Auster, Joyce Carol Oates, and P. Adams Sitney; my storytelling hero in Greece, John Zervos; those who supported me in Big Sur: Lisa Firestone, Thanis Iliadis, Alex Timken, Robert Jolliffe, Harriet and Jeremy Polturak, James Young, Nate Downey, Emmy Starr and Stephen Vehslage, Samantha Muldoon, Erin Gafill and Tom Birmingham; my mentors in Los Angeles: Rachel Resnick, Keith Rogers, Kathleen Silver, Rio Morse, and my friend and editor in chief at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Nancie Clare, who commissioned my original two-part series on Area 51 for the magazine; my fellow writers from group: Kirston Mann, Sabrina Weill, Michelle Fiordaliso, Nicole Lucas Haimes, Annette Murphy, Terry Rossio, Jolly Stamat, Moira McMahon, Lisa Gold; fellow storyteller Lucy Firestone; my mother-in-law, Marion Wroldsen, not only for her deep love of reading but for lending me her son.

Nothing in this world is so joyful as being the wife of Kevin Jacobsen and the mother of our two boys. While writing this book, it was Kevin who made endless sandwiches for me, brewed pots of coffee, and let me travel to wherever it was that I needed to go. Kevin hears out every first draft, usually standing in our kitchen or yard. Everything gets better after I listen to what he has to say.

NOTES

Prologue: The Secret City

1. Nevada Test and Training Range: Map reference number NTTR01, NGA stock no. 84413.

2. Nevada Test Site: Map based on NTS Boundary Coordinates: FFACO, appendix 1, January 1998, revision 2, 6. On Aug 23, 2010, the Nevada Test Site changed its name to the Nevada National Security Site. Throughout the book, I refer to it as the Nevada Test Site, as that is the name it went by for nearly sixty years.

3. 105 nuclear weapons: Department of Energy, “United States Nuclear Tests,” xii–xv. Total atmospheric for Nevada Test Site (NTS) is officially listed as 100 and total Nellis Air Force Range (NAFR) is listed as 5. Underground is 804 by U.S. plus 24 by U.S./UK for a total of 933.

4. weapons-grade plutonium and uranium: Darwin Morgan, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, Nevada Site Office, clarified: “The [Nevada Test Site] has never been a repository for weapons grade plutonium or uranium. Of course there is the ‘expended’ material from 828 underground nuclear weapons tests that is contained within the cavities where the tests were conducted.” E-mail, September 21, 2010.

5. two known exceptions: Memo, Top Secret Oxcart, Oxcart Reconnaissance Operation Plan, BYE 2369-67, 15; second example from interview with Peter Merlin.

6. bomb’s price tag: Brookings Institute, “50 Facts about U.S. Nuclear Weapons,” fact no. 1 (1996 dollars: $20,000,000,000; 2011 dollars: $28,000,000,000).

7. was relayed to him by two men: Wiesner, Vannevar Bush, 98. This fact is hardly known; credit is usually given to General Leslie R. Groves and War Secretary Henry L. Stimson. Wiesner, Vannevar Bush’s biographer at the National Academy of Sciences (he was also a science adviser to President Eisenhower), wrote: “Bush… had the duty, after the death of President Roosevelt, of giving President Truman his first detailed account of the bomb.”

8. no one knew the Manhattan Project was there: Wills, Bomb Power, 10–13. Wills elaborated on how Truman had some suspicions when he was vice president and approached War Secretary Henry L. Stimson, who told him to back off, which Truman did.

9. who would control its “unimaginable destructive power”: Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, 13.7. Also known as The Smyth Report, it was released by the government six days after Hiroshima, on August 12, 1945. Here, Smyth chronicled the