Shot day came and went without the test. All nuclear detonations are subject to the weather; Mother Nature, not the Pentagon’s Armed Forces Special Weapons Project officers, had final say regarding zero hour. Mother Nature’s emissary at the test site was Harold “Hal” Mueller, a meteorologist from UCLA. In the case of Project 57, there was one weather problem after the next. It was April in the high desert, which meant heavy winds, too much rain, and thick clouds. For several days, snow threatened the skies. In the second week of April, the winds were so intense that a blimp moored twelve miles south, at Yucca Flat, crashed and deflated. On April 19, one of the Project 57 balloons broke loose, forcing General Starbird to issue a telegram notifying Washington, DC, of a potential public relations nightmare. The balloon had sailed away from Area 13 and was headed in the direction of downtown Las Vegas. “A twenty-three foot balloon towing two hundred feet one eighth inch steel aircraft cable escaped Area 13 at 2255 hours April 19 PD,” read Starbird’s terse memo. His “best estimate is that balloon will self-rupture and fall within boundaries of the Las Vegas bombing and gunnery range,” and thereby go unnoticed. But General Starbird and everyone else involved knew if the balloon were to escape the test site’s boundaries, the entire Plumbbob series was at risk of cancellation. Lucky for Starbird, the balloon crash-landed inside the Nevada Test and Training Range.
The concept of using balloons in nuclear tests was first used in this series. In thirteen of the thirty Plumbbob explosions scheduled to take place in spring and summer of 1957, a balloon would be carrying the nuclear device off the ground. Before balloons were used, expensive metal towers had been constructed to hold the bomb, towers that guards like Richard Mingus spent hours tossing paper airplanes from. “You needed something to keep your mind off the fact that the bomb you were standing next to was live and could flatten a city,” Mingus says. To get weapons test engineers like Al O’Donnell up that high—the towers were usually three hundred, five hundred, or seven hundred feet tall—in order to wire the bomb, rudimentary elevators had to be built next to the bomb towers; these were also very expensive. A balloon shot was far more cost-effective and also produced a lot less radioactivity than vaporizing metal did. For the public, however, the safety and security of hanging nuclear bombs from balloons raised an obvious question: What if one of the balloons were to get away?
Finally, during the early-morning hours of April 24, the weather cleared and the go-ahead was given for Project 57. At 6:27 a.m., local time, the nuclear warhead in Area 13 was hand-fired by an employee from EG&G, simulating the plane crash without actually crashing a plane. Mingus remembers the day because “it was just a few days after Easter, as I recall. Finally a good weather day. I don’t remember snow but I do remember I had to get muddy to get to my post. Area 13 was way out in the boondocks. Barely any people around because it was a military test, not AEC. There wasn’t much traffic and from where I was parked in my truck, I could see a mile down the road. I remember it was cold and I had my winter coat on. No radiation-protection gear.” The predicted pattern of fallout was to the north. When the dust from the small radioactive cloud settled, plutonium had spread out over 895 square acres adjacent to Groom Lake. Mingus says, “It wasn’t spectacular. It didn’t have a big fireball. But it involved an extreme amount of radiation, which made it nasty. I remember how dirty it was.”
The bomb was indeed dirty. Plutonium, if inhaled, is one of the most deadly elements known to man. Unlike other radiation that the body can handle in low dosages, such as an X-ray, one-millionth of a gram of plutonium will kill a person if it gets in his or her lungs. According to a 1982 Defense Nuclear Agency request for an unclassified “extract” of the original report, most of which remains Secret/Restricted Data, Project 57 tests confirmed for the scientists that if a person inhales plutonium “it gets distributed principally in bone and remains there indefinitely as far as human life is concerned. One cannot outlive the influence because the alpha half-life of plutonium-239 is of the order of 20,000 years.” These findings came as a result of many tests performed on the dead burros, beagles, sheep, and albino rats that had been exposed to the dirty bomb. So why wasn’t Richard Mingus dead?