In the twenty-six years he had been employed at the test site, Richard Mingus had worked his way up from security guard to Livermore’s operations coordinator. He was an American success story. After his father died in 1941, Mingus dropped out of high school to work the coal mines. Eventually he went back to school, got a diploma, and joined the Air Force to serve in the Korean War. At the test site, Mingus had paid his dues. For years he stood guard over classified projects in the desert, through scorching-hot summers and cold winters, all the while guarding nuclear bombs and lethal plutonium-dispersal tests. By the mid-1960s, Mingus had saved enough overtime pay to buy a home for his family, which now included the young son he and Gloria had always dreamed about. By the mid-1970s, Mingus had enough money to purchase a second home, a hunting cabin in the woods. By the early 1980s, he had been promoted so many times, he qualified for GS-12, which in federal service hierarchy is only three rungs below the top grade, GS-15. “I attended the school for nuclear weapons orientation at Kirtland Air Force Base and had passed a series of advanced courses,” Mingus says. “But nothing, and I mean nothing, prepares you for the experience of thinking the nuclear material you are guarding is under attack.”
During that chaotic morning, Mingus knew all he could afford to focus on was the bomb in the hole. “I thought to myself, Dick Stock said the bomb is almost two picks down the hole. We’re under attack here. What’s best? I asked myself. If someone put a gun to the head of the crane operator and said, ‘Get it out’ they’d have a live nuclear bomb in their possession. I knew I had to make a decision. Was it safer to pull the bomb up or keep sending it down? I decided it was better to have a big problem at ground zero than somewhere else so I gave the order. I said, ‘Keep the device going down.’”
Mingus had a quick conversation with Joe Behne, the test director, about what was going on. The men agreed Mingus should call the head of security for the Department of Energy, a woman by the name of Pat Williams. “She said, ‘Yes, we hear the same thing and we have to assume the same thing. We are under attack as far as I know,’” Mingus recalls.
Next Mingus called Larry Ferderber, the resident manager of the Nevada Test Site for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Two minutes later Ferderber confirms the same thing, he says, ‘I hear we’re under attack.’” Mingus and Behne went through the protocol checklist. “Joe and I discussed going down to the basement and destroying the crypto which was in my building. Then we decided that it was too early for that. When you look out and you see guns firing, like on the USS Pueblo, then it’s time to start destroying things. But not before.”
Instead, Mingus called Bill Baker, the man who ran the device assembly building. With an attack now confirmed by the spokesperson for the Department of Energy and the test site manager, Mingus had to work fast. “I asked Bill Baker what was going on,” Mingus recalls. “He said, real calm, ‘We’re fine over here. I’m looking out the window. I can see Captain Williams standing outside.’” Mingus got off the telephone and had another discussion with Joe Behne. “I told Joe, I said, ‘We can’t buy his word. He could be under duress. He could have a knife at his neck or a gun at his head.’”
Meanwhile, just a few miles to the east, hovering several hundred feet over the guard post between the test site and Area 51, a group of men were leaning out of a helicopter firing semiautomatic weapons at the guards on the ground. But the bullets in their weapons were blanks, not real ammunition, and the men in the helicopter were security guards from Wackenhut Security, not enemies of the state. Wackenhut Security had decided to conduct a mock attack of an access point to Area 51 to test the system for weaknesses. With astounding lack of foresight, Wackenhut Security had not bothered to inform the Department of Energy of their mock-attack plans.
Back at the control point, in Area 6, Richard Mingus’s telephone rang. It was Pat Williams, the woman in charge of security for the Department of Energy. “She was real brief,” Mingus says. “She said, ‘It was a test and we didn’t know about it.’ Then she just hung up.” Mingus was astonished. “Looking back, in all my years, I have to say it was one of the scariest things I’d ever run into. It was like kids were running the test site that day.” Mingus didn’t write up any paperwork on the incident. “I don’t believe I made a note in my record book,” he says. Instead, Mingus kept working. “We had a nuclear bomb to get down into its hole and explode.” Test director Joe Behne believes paperwork exists. “I know it’s in the record. It was not a minor incident,” he says. “For those of us that were there that day it was almost unbelievable, except we believed [briefly] it was real—that Ground Zero was being attacked from a warlike enemy. The incident is bound to be in the logbooks. All kinds of people got calls.”