The same report revealed that “air samplers indicated high airborne concentrations of respirable plutonium remarkably far downwind.” Plutonium is a poison of paradox. It can be touched without lethal effects. Because it emits alpha particles, the weakest form of radiation, plutonium can be blocked from entering the body by a layer of paper or a layer of skin. Equally incongruous is the fact that plutonium is not necessarily lethal if ingested. “Once in the stomach, its stay in the body is short, for [particles] are excreted as an inert material with virtually no body assimilation,” read another report. In other words, plutonium is deadly for humans and animals only if particles reach the lower respiratory tract.
Mingus never breathed any particles into his lungs as he kept watch for ten to twelve hours at a time on a desolate stretch of land between Area 13 and Area 51, guarding two of the most classified projects in post–World War II American history: Projects 57 and Aquatone, the U-2. As the weeks wore on and Project 57’s plutonium particles settled onto the desert floor, Mingus watched men from Sandia, Reynolds Electric and Engineering Company, and EG&G go in and out of the contamination site. They’d put on face masks and seal areas on their bodies where their clothing met their skin by using household tape. They passed by a small metal sign that read DO NOT ENTER, CONTAMINATED AREA so they could swap out trays, feed the animals that were still alive, and remove the dead and dying ones. They replaced spent millipore paper with fresh strips and then headed back down to the laboratory and the animal morgue inside the Nevada Test Site. Meanwhile, Mingus watched overhead as the U-2 pilots made their final test flights, putting in as many flight hours as they could before their missions became real. Soon these pilots would be dispatched overseas, where they would be stationed on secret bases and fly dangerous missions that technically did not exist and that the public would not learn about for decades.
Data obtained as a result of Project 57 confirmed for the Department of Defense what it already knew. “Plutonium has a 24,000 year half-life. It does not decay.” Once plutonium embeds in soil, it tends not to move. “There are few instances of plutonium depletion with time. There is little tendency for the plutonium to change position (depth) in soil with time.” Provided a person doesn’t inhale plutonium particles, and provided the plutonium doesn’t get into the bloodstream or the bones, a person can pass through an environment laden with plutonium and live into his eighties; Richard Mingus is a case in point.
Within a year of the detonation of the dirty bomb, the scientists were satisfied with their preliminary data, and Project 57 wound down. The acreage at Area 13 was fenced off with simple barbed wire. Stickers that read contaminated materials were attached to the bumpers and hoods of Atomic Energy Commission vehicles before they were buried deep underground. Clothing contaminated with “alpha-emitting material was sealed in plastic bags and buried in the contaminated waste area.” And yet, by the summer of 1958, Project 57’s director, Dr. James Shreve, authored a very troubling report—one that was marked Secret–Restricted Data—noting that the measurements research group had made a potentially deadly observation. “Charles Darwin studied an acre of garden in which he claimed 53,000 hard working earthworms moved 18 tons of soil,” wrote Dr. Shreve. “Translocation of soil, earthworms’ ingestion of plutonium, could turn out to be a significant influence, intentional or unintentional, in the rehabilitation of weapon-accident environment.” In other words, plutonium-carrying earthworms that had passed through Area 13, or birds that ate those earthworms, could at some point in the future get to a garden down the road or trees in another field. “The idea of an entirely separate program on ecology in Area 13 had occurred to [names unclear] in the summer of 1957,” wrote Shreve, “but the AEP/UCLA logical group to undertake the investigation was too committed on Operation Plumbbob to consider the responsibility.” The twenty-nine nuclear bombs about to blow in the rest of the Plumbbob series would take precedent over any kind of effort to contain future harm done by the first test in the series, the Project 57 dirty bomb. Out in the desert, men with extraordinary power and punishing schedules worked without any effective oversight. As one EG&G weapons engineer remarked, “Things at the test site rolled fast and loose.” Not until as late as 1998 was the top layer of earth from Area 13 scraped up and removed. By then, earthworms in the area, and birds eating those earthworms, had been moving plutonium-laden soil who knows how far for more than forty years.