“We’d park the V-100, run the rest of the way up the mountain with machine guns, set up on top of the mountain, and fire at these forty-inch weather balloons. There’d always be a driver, a supervisor, and a loader on the SAS team. We each had an assignment. One guy kept score.” Scores were important because the stakes were so high. The Nevada Test Site was the single most prolific atomic bombing facility in the world. It had a three-decade-long history of impeccable security, as did Area 51. Which is what made the breach that Mingus witnessed so radical.
It was a scorching-hot day during the Ronald Reagan presidency, the kind of day at the test site when people knew not to touch metal surfaces outside or they’d wind up getting burned. Mingus believes it was 1982 but can’t say for sure, as the event was specifically kept off of his Department of Energy logbook. No longer a security guard, Mingus had been promoted to security operations coordinator for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. At the time the near catastrophe occurred, the rank-and-file security entourage was escorting a nuclear device down Rainier Mesa Road. The bomb, one of eighteen exploded underground at the Nevada Test Site in 1982, was going to be exploded in an underground shaft. As the five-man security response team trailed behind the bomb transport vehicle (in an armored vehicle of its own), they made sure to keep a short distance behind the nuclear device, as was protocol. “There was a driver, a supervisor, a gunner operating the turret, a loader making sure the ammo feeds into the machine guns and doesn’t jam, and two riflemen,” Richard Mingus explains. There is always distance between the security team and the bomb: “One of the riflemen handles the tear gas and the other works the grenade launcher. You can shoot both weapons from either the shoulder or the hip. They’ll hit a target fifty or seventy-five yards away because if you find yourself under attack and having to shoot, you want distance. You don’t want the tear gas coming back and getting you in the nose.”
After the security response team and the nuclear bomb arrived at that day’s ground zero, a team of engineers and crane operators began the process of getting the weapon safely and securely inside an approximately eight-hundred-foot-deep hole that had been drilled into the desert floor and would house the bomb. Inserting a live nuclear weapon into a narrow, five-foot-diameter shaft required extraordinary precision by a single engineer operating a heavy metal crane. There was no room for error. The crane worked in hundred-foot increments, which in test site–speak were called picks. Only after the second pick was reached, meaning the bomb was two hundred feet down, was the security eased up. Then and only then would two of the men from the response team be released. Until that moment, the bomb was considered unsecured.
Richard Mingus had been part of dozens of ground zero teams over the past quarter of a century but on this particular morning circa 1982 Mingus was coordinating security operations for Livermore from inside a building called the control point, which was located in Area 6, ten miles from the bomb. The nuclear bomb was just about to reach the second pick when chaos entered the scene.
“I was sitting at my desk at the control point when I got the call,” Mingus says. “Dick Stock, the device systems engineer supervising the shot at ground zero, says over the phone, ‘We’re under attack over at the device assembly building!’” In the 1980s, the device assembly building was the place where the bomb components were married with the nuclear material. Because there were several nuclear weapons tests scheduled for that same week, Mingus knew there were likely additional nuclear weapons in the process of being put together at the device assembly building, in Area 27, which Mingus had good reason to believe was now under attack. “Dick Stock said he heard the information coming over the radios that the guys on the security response team were carrying” on their belts. Now it was up to Mingus to make the call about what to do next.