Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [235]
25. piloted by one hundred and fifty men: McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, 168.
26. Taylor designed nuclear bombs for the Pentagon: According to Taylor’s colleague the legendary Freeman Dyson, Ted Taylor made “the smallest, the most elegant and the most efficient bombs… freehand without elaborate calculation. When they were built and tested they worked.” Dyson left Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study to work on the Mars spaceship with Taylor.
27. “Everyone seems to be making plans”: McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, 170.
28. same as a Coke machine: Ibid., 174.
29. “It would have been the most sensational thing anyone ever saw”: Ibid.
30. “Whoever builds Orion will control the Earth”: Ibid., 184.
31. Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, or SNPO: Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, xix.
32. built into the side of a mountain: Interview with Barnes; see photographs. On Nevada Test Site official maps, these mountains, in Area 25, are called Calico Hills.
33. the underground tunnel was 1,150 feet long: “Corrective Investigation Plan For Corrective Action Unit 165: Areas 25 and 26 Dry Well and Washdown Areas, Nevada Test Site, Nevada.” DOE/NV-788, Environmental Restoration Division, National Nuclear Security Administration, January 2002, 12.
34. 34 million to 249 million miles to Mars: According to NASA, “the distance between Earth and Mars depends on the positions of the two planets in their orbits. It can be as small as about 33,900,000 miles (54,500,000 kilometers) or as large as about 249,000,000 miles (401,300,000 kilometers).”
35. a remote-controlled locomotive: DOE/NV #1150, “Last Stop for the Jackass & Western.”
36. “One hundredth of what one might receive”: Ibid., 287.
37. Soviet satellites spying: Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, appendix F, “The Russian Nuclear Rocket Program.” Dewar wrote, “The Soviets built a test complex vaguely similar to Jackass Flats.”
38. 2,300 Kelvin: Finger and Robbins, “An Historical Perspective,” 7.
39. “The Pentagon released information after I filed a Freedom of Information Act”: Interview with Lee Davidson. Davidson’s original 1990s story is from the Deseret News, where he was the Washington bureau reporter for twenty-eight years. During this time, Davidson reported on a number of secret AEC radiation tests in Utah, at Dugway Proving Grounds. “They had a lot of money to play with,” Davidson says of the AEC. “Here in Utah, they were trying to figure out what a meltdown would look like from a number of different angles. The AEC released more radiation in Utah than was released during the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island.”
40. “Los Alamos wanted a run-away reactor”: Dewar, To the End of the Solar System, 280.
41. “data on the most devastating accident possible”: Ibid. Notably, Dewar lays blame for the original idea of exploding the reactor on Los Alamos. The nuclear laboratory may have come up with the idea but Los Alamos takes marching orders from the Atomic Energy Commission, and in the end, the two entities agreed to go ahead and explode the nuclear reactor on the grounds that it was a safety test. “It was critical to know the total energy release in the explosion and the amount and pattern of radioactive distribution,” Dewar wrote.
42. “over 4000°C until it burst”: Ibid., 281.
43. chunks as large as 148 pounds: Ibid., 282.
44. “equipped with samplers mounted on its wings”: Ibid., 281.
45. “blew over Los Angeles”: Ibid., 280.
46. “accurate data from which to base calculations”: Ibid., 285.
47. “I don’t recall that exact test”: Interview with Harold Finger.
48. code-named Phoebus: Barth, Delbert, Final Report