There, Mingus stood in a long line of about a hundred other applicants for what seemed like hours. The Nevada Test Site, which was a sixty-five-mile commute to the northwest, had jobs. Rumors were those jobs paid well. The atomic tests, which had begun five years earlier, in 1951, had brought tens of millions of dollars in business to the Las Vegas economy. For the most part, Las Vegas as a city had endorsed the tests because they were such an economic boon. And yet it had been more than a year since the last atomic test series, which was called Operation Teapot and which was made up of twelve nuclear bomb explosions, including one that was dropped from an airplane. Controversies about fallout, particularly debates involving strontium-90, the deadly by-product of uranium and plutonium fission, had made their way into the public domain. For a while, there was even talk among locals that the test site could get shut down. Standing in line, Mingus got the sense that closing down the test site was far from reality. And he was right—weapons planners were gearing up for the largest atomic bomb test series ever to take place in the continental United States.
Mingus stood in line for a long time. Finally, a sergeant took his fingerprints and asked him if he had any military background. When Mingus said he’d served in Korea, the sergeant nodded with approval and sent him into a separate room. Las Vegas in the 1950s was a town made up largely of gamblers, swindlers, and fortune seekers. The fact that Mingus was a former soldier with an honorable discharge made him an ideal candidate for what the government was after: good men who could qualify for a Q clearance, which was required for a job involving nuclear weapons. Mingus filled out paperwork and answered a battery of questions. In just a few hours, Mingus was, tentatively, offered a job. Exactly what the job entailed, the recruiter could not say, but it paid more than twice what the best local waiters made during a stellar night at the Sands. Most important to Mingus, the job came with health insurance—Gloria’s dream. He could begin work as soon as his security clearance came in. That process could take as long as five months.
Richard Mingus had no idea that he was about to become one of the first Federal Services security guards assigned to Area 51. Or that the very first nuclear test he would be asked to stand guard over would be Project 57—America’s first dirty bomb.
From the first atomic explosions of Operation Crossroads, in 1946, until the Nevada Test Site opened its doors, in 1951, America tested its nuclear weapons on atolls and islands in the Pacific Ocean. There, in a vast open area roughly twice the size of the state of Texas, the Pentagon enjoyed privacy. The Marshall Islands were a million miles away from the American psyche, which made secret-keeping easy. But the Pacific Proving Ground was a long haul for the Pentagon in terms of moving more than ten thousand people and millions of tons of equipment back and forth from the United States for each test series. Guarding these military assets en route to the Pacific required a near-war footing. The ship carrying the nuclear material also carried the lion’s share of the nation’s nuclear physicists, scientists, and weapons engineers. The precious cargo required constant air cover and an escort by destroyer battleships while it made its zigzag course across the ocean. When Dr. Edward Teller, the Hungarian émigré and father of the hydrogen bomb, began arguing for an atomic bombing range in America to make things easier on everyone, there was hardly a voice of dissent from Washington. Officials at the Pentagon, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, and the Atomic Energy Commission all agreed with Teller and began encouraging the president to authorize a continental test site.
Science requires trial and error, Dr. Teller explained. As nuclear bombs grew more powerful, as weapons went from kilotons to megatons, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory were struggling with discrepancies between theoretical calculations—equations made on paper—and the actual results the weapons produced. If the Pacific Proving Ground was the Olympic stadium for nuclear bombs, the scientists needed a local gym, a place to keep in shape and try out new ideas. Nevada would be perfect, everyone agreed. It was only a two-hour plane ride away from Los Alamos in New Mexico, as compared to the weeklong journey it took to get people to the Pacific Proving Ground.