Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [233]
17. reverse engineering Colonel Redfa’s MiG: Interview with Barnes.
18. Test pilots flew a total of 102 MiG missions: Barnes, “Exploitation of MiGs at Area 51, Project Have Doughnut,” http://area51specialprojects.com/migs_area51.html; Tolip, “Black Ops: American Pilots Flying Russian Aircraft During the Cold War,” MilitaryHeat.com, October 4, 2007.
19. gave birth to the Top Gun fighter-pilot school: Interview with Barnes.
20. The scales had tipped: Wilcox, Scream of Eagles, 76–77.
Chapter Eighteen: Meltdown
Interviews: Richard Mingus, T. D. Barnes, Troy Wade, Darwin Morgan, Milton M. Klein, Harold B. Finger
1. to see what would happen: Atomic Energy Commission, Summary of Project 57, the first safety test of Operation Plumbbob, report to the General Manager by the Director, Division of Military Application, Objective, 24.
2. bomber flying with four armed hydrogen bombs: “Palomares Summary Report,” Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico: Field Command Defense Nuclear Agency Technology and Analysis Directorate, January 15, 1975.
3. SAC bombers would already be airborne: When LeMay left SAC in 1957 to become the Air Force vice chief of staff, he left behind a fighting force of 1,665 bomber aircraft, 68 bases around the world, and 224,014 men. The man who took over was Thomas S. Powers.
4. “all of a sudden, all hell”: Ron Hayes, “H-bomb Incident Crippled Pilot’s Career,” Palm Beach Post, January 17, 2007.
5. aerosolized plutonium: Gordon Dunning, “Protective and Remedial Measures Taken Following Three Incidents of Fallout,” United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1968. This was originally given as a speech called “Radiation Protection of the Public in Large Scale Nuclear Disaster,” for an international agency symposium in Interlaken, Switzerland, in May 1968.
6. President Johnson learned: Moran, Day We Lost the H-Bomb, 36.
7. official nuclear disaster response team: Memo, Secret, United States Atomic Energy Commission, No. 234505, “Responsibility for Search and Rescue Operations,” to M. E. Gates, Manager, Nevada Operations, November 19, 1974.
8. to assist in the cleanup efforts: Nuclear Weapon Accident Response Procedures (NARP) Manual, Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Atomic Energy), September 1990, xii.
9. “will never be known”: Schwartz, Atomic Audit, 408.
10. “I don’t know of any missing bomb”: Anthony Lake, “Lying Around Washington,” Foreign Policy, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 93. Thirty-eight U.S. Navy ships participated in the search for the bomb, which was eventually located five miles offshore in 2,850 feet of water by a submersible called Alvin.
11. during a secret mission over Greenland: SAC History Staff, Project Crested Ice, SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA, SPECIAL HANDLING REQUIRED, AFR 127-4: FOIA 89-107 OAS-) 1793. This source document provided many facts for this section.
12. A second fire started at the crash site: The cloud formed by the explosion measured “850 m high, 800 m in length, and 800 m in depth, and undoubtedly carried some plutonium downwind,” according to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
13. One of the bombs fell into the bay: Gordon Corea, “Mystery of Lost US Nuclear Bomb,” BBC News, November 10, 2008.
14. “a cleanup undertaken as good housekeeping measures”: SAC History Staff, Project Crested Ice, 28.
15. “abundance of plutonium, americium, cesium”: Rollins, “Nevada Test Site—Site Description,” Table 2-4.
16. Called remote sensing: Department of Energy Fact Sheet DOE/NV #1140. The Remote Sensing Laboratory was established in the 1950s, an offshoot of atomic cloud sampling projects. Today, it is a secret industry about which very little is known publicly; http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/factsheets/DOENV_1140.pdf.
17. initially called the EG&G Remote Sensing Laboratory: EG&G Energy Measurements Division (EG&G/EM) of EG&G, Inc., managed and operated the research facility under DOE Contract DE-ACO3-93NV11265. On January 1, 1996, Bechtel Nevada