In 1950, a top secret feasibility study code-named Project Nutmeg determined for President Truman that a huge area in southern Nevada, one of the least populated areas in the nation not situated on a coastline, was the most ideal place in the continental United States to test nuclear weapons. The Nevada Test and Training Range quickly became 4,687 square miles of government-controlled land. “The optimum conditions as to meteorological, remote available land and logistics” can be found there, the study explained. Even more convenient, there was an airstrip located just seven miles from the entrance of the test site, at a government-owned airfield called Indian Springs.
Before the Nevada Test Site was a nuclear bombing range it had been an animal sanctuary. In the 1930s, the Department of the Interior made the region a wildlife reservation. Herds of antelope and wild horses roamed the high-desert landscape with mountain lions and bighorn sheep. Kit fox and sidewinder rattlesnakes were more prevalent there than anywhere else in the country. Centuries earlier, Native Americans lived in the caves in the mountains. They left behind magnificent paintings and ornate petroglyphs on the caves’ rock walls. In the mid-1800s, settlers built silver-and copper-mining camps, giving the local geography colorful names such as Skull Mountain, Indian Springs, and Jackass Flats. But by 1942, America had entered World War II, and the entire region was withdrawn from public access for War Department use. The Army set up a conventional bombing range across what would later include the Nevada Test Site, Area 51, and the Nellis Air Force Base. It was an ideal place to train aerial gunners, far from people and resplendent with flat, dry lake beds, which were perfect for target practice and for landing airplanes. After the war ended, the bombing range was closed and its buildings were allowed to deteriorate. But the Army hung on to the land rights for possible future use. That future use became clear when 1,350 acres, or about one quarter of the restricted area, was parceled off and called the Nevada Test Site. On January 27, 1951, at 5:45 a.m., an Air Force B-50D bomber dropped the first atomic bomb on U.S. soil, onto a dry lake bed called Frenchman Flat, inside the Nevada Test Site.
Edward Teller loved the closeness of Nevada and referred to the bombs being set off there as “quickie” tests. Almost immediately, a second nuclear laboratory, called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, was created by the Atomic Energy Commission with the goal of fostering competition with the Los Alamos nuclear lab. Shortly before the creation of Livermore, scientists at Los Alamos had started to challenge the military establishment regarding what the future of the nuclear bomb should or should not be. Uninterested in what the creators of the atomic bomb had to say, the Department of Defense pushed back by developing Livermore. Competition fosters productivity; the greater the rivalry, the more intense the competition will be. Indeed, it did not take long for a fierce competition to develop between the two outfits, with Los Alamos and Livermore fighting for weapons contracts and feasibility-study awards. Dreaming up prototypes for new weapons was how contracts were won. Dr. Teller argued for the need to experiment with certain “boosters,” like the radioactive isotope of hydrogen tritium, which could further enhance yield. If a scientist or his lab could make a strong enough case for the necessity of testing such a thing, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and the Atomic Energy Commission could easily allocate money for it. The goal was singular: get the highest-yield bombs to fit inside the smallest packages, ideally ones that could be put into the nose cone of a missile designed by Wernher Von Braun.
In five short years, from January 1951 to January 1956, a total of forty-nine nuclear bombs were exploded at the Nevada Test Site, bringing the worldwide total for atmospheric nuclear explosions by the United States to eighty-five. Which is when Richard Mingus joined the security force at the Nevada Test Site and Area 51, just in time for Operation Plumbbob, the largest, most ambitious series of nuclear weapons tests in the United States so far. The first test scheduled in the thirty-test Plumbbob series was Project 57.