In 2002, with America again at war, the administration of George W. Bush revived the development of the nuclear bunker-buster weapon, now calling it the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. In April of the same year, the Department of Defense entered into discussions with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to begin preliminary design work on the new nuclear weapon. By fiscal year 2003, the Stockpile Services Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator line item received $14.5 million; in 2004 another $7.5 million; and in 2005 yet another $27.5 million. In 2006, the Senate dropped the line item. Either the program was canceled or it got a new name and entered into the black world—perhaps at Area 51 and Area 52.
Or perhaps next door at the Nevada Test Site, underground. For as far-fetched and ironic as this sounds—developing a bunker-busting nuclear bomb at an underground nuclear testing facility in Nevada—this is exactly what DOE officials proposed in an unclassified report released quietly in 2005. In this report, officials with the agency formerly known as the Atomic Energy Commission proposed to revive the NERVA program—the Area 25 nuclear-powered rocket program designed to send man to Mars—and to do it, of all places, underground.
Unlike the NERVA program of the 1960s, argued Michael Williams, the author of the report, “DOE Ground Test facilities for space exploration enabling nuclear technologies can no longer be vented to the open atmosphere,” meaning a facility like the one that previously existed out at Jackass Flats was out of the question. But for the new NERVA project, Williams proposed, the Department of Energy could easily conduct its nuclear tests inside “the existing [underground] tunnels or new tunnels at the Nevada Test site for this purpose.”
Former Los Alamos associate director of nuclear weapons Stephen Younger, who currently serves as the president of operations at the Nevada Test Site, categorically denies that any underground nuclear weapons tests are in the works at the test site. But he does confirm that “subcritical” nuclear tests currently take place there, inside an underground tunnel complex located beneath Area 1. To access that facility, Younger says, employees use an elevator that travels a thousand feet underground. What goes on there are “scientific experiments with plutonium and high explosives,” Younger says, “not weapons tests.” Younger insists the “same cannot be said about the Russians.” He says that inside their underground facility at Novaya Zemlya—the location where the Soviet Union detonated their fifty-megaton thermonuclear bomb, called Tsar Bomba, in 1961—“the Russians are developing new nuclear weapons around the clock. Mr. [Vladimir] Putin has said that repeatedly. He keeps saying that because they want us to know.”
There is no way to know precisely what is happening today at the Nevada Test and Training Range—aboveground at Area 51 or Area 52, or in the underground tunnels beneath the test site, because most of what is currently happening out in the Nevada desert is classified and the federal agencies involved believe the people do not have a need-to-know. The question is, does the public have a right to know? Does Congress? Many secret projects that have gone on at Area 51 have delivered results that have kept America safe. The first flight over the Soviet Union, by Hervey Stockman in a U-2 spy plane in 1956, provided the CIA with critical intelligence, namely, that the Russians were not lining up their military machine for a sneak attack. The intelligence provided by an A-12 Oxcart spy plane mission kept the Johnson administration from declaring war on North Korea during the Vietnam War. The F-117 stealth bomber crippled Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs. But there are other kinds of secret actions that have gone on at Area 51, at least one of which should never have been authorized and should not be kept as a national secret anymore.
After World War II, the American government’s hiring and protection of Nazi scientists was based on the premise that these scientists were the world’s best and their information was needed in order to advance science—and win the next war. In doing so, America made a deal with the devil. This deal became a wicked problem for the agencies involved, and playing the game with former Nazis gave way to an entirely new set of problems, one of which has been the federal government’s ongoing complicity in covering up many of these scientists’ original crimes. Approximately six hundred million pages of information about the government’s postwar use of Nazi criminals’ expertise remains classified as of 2011. Many documents about Area 51 exist in that pile.
The reason why the federal government will not officially admit that Area 51 exists is not the secret spy planes, the stealth bombers, or the drones that were, and still are, flight-tested there. The reason is something else. It is a program undertaken by five EG&G engineers at Area 51. This program involved the Roswell crash remains and predated the development of the original CIA facility, currently called Area 51, which was built by Richard Bissell beginning in 1955. Area 51 is named as such not because it was a randomly chosen quadrant, as has often been presumed, but because the 1947 crash remains from Roswell, New Mexico, were sent from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base out to a secret spot in the Nevada desert—in 1951.