Six years after the end of the NERVA program at Jackass Flats, the nuclear facility at Three Mile Island nearly melted down, on March 28, 1979. The nuclear reactor there experienced a partial core meltdown because of a loss of coolant. Officials were apparently stunned. “The people seemed dazed by a situation that wasn’t covered in the manuals, torn between logic and standard operating procedures, indecisive in the absence of a strong executive power,” read a 1980 report on the disaster prepared for the public by the newly formed Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Special Inquiry Group. Even though similar accident scenarios had been conducted at Area 25, the “executive power,” which was the Atomic Energy Commission, apparently did not share the information with its partners at the power plants.
At the same time the Three Mile Island accident happened, a movie called The China Syndrome was opening in theaters across the country. The movie was about a government plot to conceal an imminent nuclear meltdown disaster, with Jane Fonda playing a reporter determined to expose the plot. Although it was clear to moviegoers that the film was fictional, it had been made with great attention to technical detail. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Special Inquiry Group determined that the combination of the two events—the real and the fictional—resulted in a media firestorm. The fact that the near nuclear meltdown happened in the media glare, wrote the commissioner, “may be the best insurance that it will not reoccur.” The public’s so-called mass hysteria, feared for decades by government elite, really did work in the public’s interest after all. At Three Mile Island, the media firestorm and the public’s response to it proved to act as a democratic “checks and balances” where the federal government had failed.
For as many nuclear accidents of its own making as the Atomic Energy Commission could foresee, they could not have predicted what happened on January 24, 1978, when a nuclear-powered Russian spy satellite crashed on North American soil, in Canada. NORAD analysts had been tracking Cosmos 954 since it launched, on September 18, 1977, but after three months, the movements of the spy satellite were causing NORAD ever-increasing alarm. The Russian satellite had been designed to track U.S. submarines running deep beneath the surface of the sea, and what NORAD knew about the satellite was that it was forty-six feet long and weighed 4.4 tons. To get that much payload into orbit required phenomenal power, most likely nuclear.
In December of 1977, analysts determined that the Russian satellite was slipping out of orbit, dropping closer and closer to Earth on each ninety-minute rotation of the globe. Calculations indicated that unless the Russians could get control of their satellite, Cosmos would, in all probability, reenter the atmosphere and crash somewhere in North America within a month. President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski pressed Moscow for information about what exactly was on board the crashing satellite. The Russians told Brzezinski that Cosmos 954 carried 110 pounds of highly enriched uranium 235.
Richard Mingus worked at the Department of Energy’s emergency command center, located in Las Vegas, during the crisis. The center was in charge of controlling public information about the looming nuclear disaster, following directions from the CIA. According to a secret CIA report declassified in 1997, a decision was made not to inform the public. Trying to predict the public’s reaction to a nuclear satellite crash was like “playing night baseball with the lights out,” wrote CIA analyst Gus Weiss, because “the outcome of [Cosmos] 954 would be akin to determining the winner of a train wreck.” The CIA knew exactly what would happen, and that was that “the satellite was coming down carrying a live reactor.” The CIA also believed that “a sensationalized leak would disturb the public in unforeseeable ways.” This information has never been made public before.