First came new handheld devices, like a briefcase called the Neutron Detector Suitcase, a prototype designed by EG&G, which was followed by more advanced means of detecting radiation, including ground vehicles. The Sky Scanner, developed by the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, roamed down the test site’s dirt roads measuring radioactivity escaping from atomic vents. The Sky Scanner looked like a news van with a satellite dish, but inside it was full of equipment that could determine how much fallout was in the air. Next came fixed-wing aircraft that could patrol the air over an accident site. Used to detect fallout since Operation Crossroads, they were now equipped with state-of-the-art, still-classified radiation-detection devices. This marked the birth of a burgeoning new military technology that would become one of the most important and most secret businesses of the twenty-first century. Called remote sensing, it is the ability to recognize levels of radioactivity from a distance using ultraviolet radiation, infrared, and other means of detection.
Within a decade of the disastrous nuclear accidents at Palomares and Thule, EG&G would so dominate the radiation-detection market that the laboratory built at the Nevada Test Site for this purpose was initially called the EG&G Remote Sensing Laboratory. After 9/11, the sister laboratory, at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, was called the Remote Sensing Laboratory and included sensing-detection mechanisms for all types of WMD. This facility would become absolutely critical to national security, so much so that by 2011, T. D. Barnes says that “only two people at Nellis are cleared with a need-to-know regarding classified briefings about the Remote Sensing Lab.” Barnes is a member of the Nellis/Creech Air Force Base support team and its civilian military council. But in the 1960s, three nuclear facilities—Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia—and one private corporation—EG&G—were the organizations uniquely positioned to see the writing on the wall. If nuclear accidents were going to continue to happen, then these four entities were going to secure the government contracts to clean things up.
EG&G had been taking radiation measurements and tracking radioactive clouds for the Atomic Energy Commission since 1946. For decades, EG&G Energy Measurements has maintained control of the vast majority of radiation measurements records going back to the first postwar test at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Because much of this information was originally created under the strict Atomic Energy classification Secret/Restricted Data—i.e., it was “born classified”—it has largely remained classified ever since. It cannot be transferred to another steward. For decades, this meant there was no one to compete with EG&G for the remote sensing job. How involved EG&G is in remote sensing today, their corporate headquarters won’t say.
So secret are the record groups in EG&G’s archives, even the president of the United States can be denied access to them, as President Clinton was in 1994. One year earlier, a reporter named Eileen Welsome had written a forty-five-page newspaper story for the Albuquerque Tribune revealing that the Atomic Energy Commission had secretly injected human test subjects with plutonium starting in the 1940s without those individuals’ knowledge or consent. When President Clinton learned about this, he created an advisory committee on human radiation experiments to look into secrets kept by the Atomic Energy Commission and to make them public. In several areas, the president’s committee succeeded in revealing disturbing truths, but in other areas it failed. In at least one case, regarding a secret project at Area 51, the committee was denied access to records kept by EG&G and the Atomic Energy Commission on the grounds that the president did not have a need-to-know about them. In another case, regarding the nuclear rocket program at Area 25 in Jackass Flats, the president’s committee also failed to inform the public of the truth. Whether this is because the record group in EG&G’s archive was kept from the committee or because the committee had access to it but chose not to report the facts in earnest remains unknown. Instead, what happened at Jackass Flats, well after atmospheric testing had been outlawed around the world, gets a one-line reference in the Advisory Committee’s 937-page Final Report, grouped in with dozens of other tests involving “intentional releases” near human populations. “At AEC sites in Nevada and Idaho, radioactive materials were released in tests of the safety of bombs, nuclear reactors, and proposed nuclear rockets and airplanes,” the report innocuously reads.