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Richard Mingus had been guarding Area 51 for a little over a month when the Los Alamos scientists and the EG&G engineers began their final preparations for Project 57 at Area 13. A supervisor at the Nevada Test Site asked Mingus if he was willing to work some considerable overtime for the next few weeks. He had been requested to serve as the guard to keep both Area 51 and Area 13 secure. Considerable overtime meant double-time pay, and Mingus agreed. Finally, a shot date of April 3 was chosen. Shot, Mingus quickly learned, was commission-speak for “nuclear detonation.” As was required by an agreement between the Atomic Energy Commission and the State of Nevada, the Department of Defense prepared a simple statement for the press. “A highly classified safety test [is] being conducted by Dr. James Shreve Jr., in April 1957,” read the Las Vegas Sun. The public had no idea the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission would be simulating an airplane crash involving an XW-25 nuclear warhead by initiating a one-point detonation with high explosives at Area 13. Neither did any of the U-2 program participants living in Quonset huts just a few miles to the east. Scientists predicted the warhead would release radioactive plutonium particles, but because a test like Project 57 had never been conducted before, scientists really had no clear idea of what would happen.

Workers set up four thousand fallout collectors around a ten-by-sixteen-square-mile block of land. These galvanized steel pans, called sticky pans, had been sprayed with tacky resin and were meant to capture samples of plutonium particles released into the air. Sixty-eight air-sampler stations equipped with millipore filter paper were spread over seventy square miles. An accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon in an urban area would be far more catastrophic than one in a remote desert area such as Groom Lake, and the Department of Defense wanted to test how city surfaces would respond to plutonium contamination, so mock-ups of sidewalks, curbs, and pavement pieces were set out in the desert landscape. Some fourteen hundred blocks of highway asphalt and wood float finish concrete were fabricated and set around on the ground. To see how automobiles would contaminate when exposed to plutonium, cars and trucks were parked among the juniper bushes and Joshua trees. As zero day got closer, Mingus saw preparations pick up. Giant air-sampling balloons were tethered to the earth and floated over Area 13 at various elevations; some were five feet off the ground and others a thousand feet up, giving things a circus feel. Nine burros, 109 beagles, 10 sheep, and 31 albino rats were put in cages and set to face the dirty bomb. EG&G’s rapatronic photographic equipment would record the radioactive cloud within the first few microseconds of detonation. A wooden decontamination building was erected just a few hundred yards down from Mingus’s post. It was nothing fancy, just a wooden shack “stocked with radiation equipment and protective clothing, shower stalls… with a three-hundred-fifty-gallon hot-water supply and a dressing room with benches and hangers for clothes.” Shortly before shot day, workers installed a “two-foot-wide wooden approach walk” and covered it with kraft paper.

Shot day came and went without the test. All nuclear detonations are subject to the weather; Mother Nature, not the Pentagon’s Armed Forces Special Weapons Project officers, had final say regarding zero hour. Mother Nature’s emissary at the test site was Harold “Hal” Mueller, a meteorologist from UCLA. In the case of Project 57, there was one weather problem after the next. It was April in the high desert, which meant heavy winds, too much rain, and thick clouds. For several days, snow threatened the skies. In the second week of April, the winds were so intense that a blimp moored twelve miles south, at Yucca Flat, crashed and deflated. On April 19, one of the Project 57 balloons broke loose, forcing