According to my source, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted experiments on humans in a classified government facility in the Nevada desert beginning in 1951. Although this was done in direct violation of the Nuremberg Code of 1947, it is far from the first time the Commission had acted in violation of the most basic moral principle involving voluntary human consent. In 1993, reporter Eileen Welsome wrote a newspaper story stating that the Atomic Energy Commission had conducted plutonium experiments on human beings, most notably retarded children and orphan boys from the Fernald State School, outside Boston, without the children’s or their guardians’ knowledge or consent. After this horrible revelation came to light, President Clinton opened an investigation to look into what the Atomic Energy Commission had done and the secrets it had been able to safeguard inside its terrifying and unprecedented system of secret-keeping. I asked the engineer why President Clinton hadn’t learned about the S-4 facility at Area 51—or had he?
“I think he might have come very close,” the engineer said about President Clinton. “But they kept it from him.”
“Who are they?” I asked. The engineer told me that his elite group had been given the keys to the original facility at Area 51. “Who inherited those keys from you five engineers?” I wanted to know.
“You don’t have a need-to-know” is all he would say.
EPILOGUE
In the summer of 2010 a book arrived in the mail from Colonel Leghorn, the father of overhead reconnaissance, age ninety-one. The pages were musty and smelled like an attic. What he had sent was his 1946 Army Air Forces commemorative yearbook from the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests. What is most striking is how the story of America’s first postwar nuclear test begins as a “mysterious Army-Navy assignment” in a “sand-swept town—Roswell.”
“Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell… Roswell.”
The word repeats six times in the first few pages of the government-issued yearbook, making it clear that it was from the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico that the first shot in what would be a forty-three-year-old Cold War was fired. And what a colossal opening shot Operation Crossroads was, an unprecedented show of force aimed at letting Joseph Stalin know that America was not done with the nuclear bomb. Forty-two thousand people were present in the Pacific for the two nuclear bomb tests, including Stalin’s spies. The U.S. government spent nearly two billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) to show the world the nuclear power it now possessed.