The tests were important, the president promised the public. The government needed to build up its “encyclopedia of nuclear information.” The Army needed its troops to practice “maneuvers” on a nuclear battlefield and to record how soldiers would perform in the event of a nuclear battle. The government had to know: At what distance could a military jeep drive through a nuclear shock wave? How did a blast wave affect a hill versus a dale? What effect would weapons have on helicopters, blimps, and airplanes when they flew close by a mushroom cloud? The Pentagon wondered and said it needed to find out. And so, in the sparsely populated desert of southern Nevada, the Plumbbob nuclear weapons tests went ahead as planned.
Following Project 57, the first nuclear explosion in the series to form a mushroom cloud was called Boltzmann, detonated on May 28, 1957. At twelve kilotons, it was approximately the same size as the Hiroshima bomb and caused Area 51 personnel located eleven miles over the hill to be temporarily evacuated from the base. The bomb was described in a press release simply as a “Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory device.” On June 9, 1957, the New York Times printed the Atomic Energy Commission’s “partial schedule” of the Operation Plumbbob atomic tests so that summer tourists wanting to see a mushroom cloud could plan their itineraries accordingly. “This is the best time in history for the non-ancient but none the less honorable pastime of atom-bomb watching,” the New York Times said. According to Richard Mingus, it seemed that higher-ranking CIA officers at Area 51 did not agree with the Gray Lady’s assessment. “After one blast really shook the place, a group of them jumped in someone’s private aircraft and took off pretty fast.” One report, declassified in 1993, noted the damage: “The blast buckled aircraft hangar doors, shattered windows in the mess hall and broke a ventilator panel on a dormitory.” Area 51 employees were once again evacuated. Neither Richard Bissell nor his team was prepared for such drastic effects and certainly not as a matter of course. Whether the Agency protested or complied remains classified, but the U-2s were quickly flown to a remote area of the north base at Edwards Air Force Base in California and hidden in hangars there. Nothing was going to stop the Atomic Energy Commission and its tests. Operation Plumbbob was in full swing.
Then came the Hood bomb.
It was the middle of the night on July 5, 1957. Richard Mingus was getting ready to head to the test site for work. Gloria was finally pregnant again, and it had been a celebratory Fourth of July. Now Mingus prepared himself for what he knew was going to be an exceedingly long day. The shot was going to be big; so big, the commission had already evacuated every last person from Area 51. Only the caretakers were left. Richard Mingus kissed Gloria good-bye and climbed into his new 1957 DeSoto. How Mingus loved his car, with its four doors and long fins, a luxury made affordable by long overtime hours at the test site. The morning of the Hood bomb, Mingus drove the sixty-five miles to the main gate at Camp Mercury, located at the southernmost end of the test site, off Highway 95. It was somewhere around 1:30 a.m. Hood was scheduled for detonation early that morning, in Area 9. On the seat beside him, Mingus carried his lunch, always lovingly packed by Gloria in a small, wooden lunch box. Inside there was a sandwich, a can opener, and a can of Mingus’s favorite: Dinty Moore stew. Once inside the gates of the test site, Mingus parked his DeSoto and transferred his belongings into an Atomic Energy Commission truck. Then he drove the familiar route from Camp Mercury to the control point. First he made sure to stop by the ice house, where he could fill up a five-gallon can with water, making sure to put a big block of ice inside. “The size of the Hood bomb was classified but everyone knew it was going to be really big,” Mingus explains.