I just let the question, as Henry James would say, “hang in the air.”
A few days later I met one of the men who had helped build the road I saw running off through Gate 700, connecting the NTS to Dreamland. At noon one hot day I drove through a quiet suburb of Las Vegas. It was empty and silent, neat little houses on neat little lots. Modified ranch with a slight Mexican accent. Stucco. Lots of ironwork. Pastels. Neatly clipped lawns.
Joe Bacco was sitting on his porch. He had worked for years as a maintenance man, fixing roads and other facilities at the nuclear test site and in Area 51. He wore on his identification the number “8,” which allowed him to cross the border into Area 51. We talked in the dining room, under the eyes of a Madonna on the wall.
I met Bacco at a hearing on the future of the test site. After the high-pitched Greenpeacers and the Shoshone nation reps and the man who said he had worked with plutonium daily with no ill effects had spoken, Bacco got his turn.
Joe Bacco sweats constantly now. There is a perpetual thin sheen over his body, as if he were in a New Orleans August instead of the dry Nevada desert. His eyes, always partly closed, as if swollen, glisten like his body. Bacco takes showers every few hours.
In 1970 an underground explosion called Baneberry leaked, sending a towering cloud, mushroomlike in shape and size, above the flats and cracking the ground like an earthquake. The fissures were two or three feet wide in some places and made the roads into Area 12, site of the blast, impassable.
The camp at Area 12, where some nine hundred workers lived in trailers and, sometimes, tents, was swept with fallout. Three hundred were found to be contaminated with radiation. The NTS authorities panicked. The radiation release was a PR nightmare; sabotage was suspected. The authorities immediately sent Bacco and a crew of other workers to patch the road. The members of his crew are almost all dead now, he tells me. “It was hotter than a motherfucker,” he said, referring to radiation.
“The foreman was Herschel Baker, and there was Charlie Archulet, who’s dead now.” He lists the names of his other crewmates. “We had to put chains on the four-by-four.”
It was snowing heavily that day yet sparks flew from Bacco’s long johns. It was so hot, the workers’ safety badges were quickly overwhelmed with radiation. “There was electricity all over my body,” he told me. “Red and green sparks.
“Later I was paralyzed, and I was passing blood for six or seven months.”
It was an account full of primal fear, as much from what he had seen as experienced.
He talked of men who had fallen asleep in trailers before the blast and been killed. He had hauled out bodies. Beside the baseball diamond in Mercury, workers had burned dead cattle and drums of waste, incinerated the badges that recorded how much radiation the workers had received, “to hide the evidence.”
One of the men contaminated by Baneberry, the supervisor, Harley Roberts, fought the AEC and later DOE, and helped win rights and recognition for the workers. Baker and others in the crew developed leukemia within two years of the shot. In 1972 Roberts and a worker named William Nunamaker filed suit for some eight million dollars against the NTS, charging negligence. The case lingered on for ten years as the court kept postponing judgment. But by 1974, Harley Roberts was dead.
Bacco’s requests for benefits had been denied. Both his old employer REECO, Reynolds Electric, the largest contractor at the site, and the Department of Energy claimed to have no record of his employment, even though he had his work identification card. “They thought, This is a sucker, we use him,” Bacco said. “I was a guinea pig.”
Where had I heard stories before of employment records being made to disappear? In Lazar’s tale, of course.
At the hearing, Bacco told his story with a practiced rhythm. He explained how the Department of Energy had tried to settle with him.
“The lawyer offered me twenty thousand. I told him a big bad word. What I wanted was my job back. I talked to the doctor. All I said was, do me a favor, when I die give my body to research.
“ ‘Well, Joe,’ the doctor said, ‘you ought to feel lucky you’re still living. Just keep taking those showers.’ ”
The lady from DOE shook her head sadly. This sort of thing was all supposed to be in the past for the department. Yes, mistakes had been made, but a new page had been turned.
The original creators of the test site were motivated by nothing less than a desperate need to save the planet. A few thousand acres of land, a few hundred lives, were necessary casualties. They were driven with all the intensity of scientists in fifties sci-fi movies, rushing to come up with a weapon to defeat mutant giant ants or invading saucers. But that was in the past. The lady from DOE explained that with testing stopped, the department was looking for new uses for the test site: A solar energy farm was being considered.
The test site tours were at once part of the new attitude and a revival of the proud tradition of News Nob, where Walter Cronkite, Bob Considine, Dave Garroway, John Cameron Swayze, and others were courted as they reported on the Bomb. DOE was trumpeting its new openness, making available old records, pledging never again to expose soldiers and downwind civilians to radiation.
Derek and I did not discuss the way that the bombs exploded at the test site had affected Dreamland.
Among the newly opened records were documents showing that Dreamland itself had been a victim of fallout and of nuclear blasts, even after U-2 testing began there. Work on the U-2 and later the Blackbirds would be placed at the mercy of the needs of nuclear testing. Even the crews and pilots at Groom Lake were in danger. Kelly Johnson had been concerned from the beginning about the dangers of fallout and, sure enough, the work at Groom would frequently be interrupted with warnings or evacuations whenever testing took place. The authorities debated which tests at Groom Lake, if any, would justify delaying a nuclear test.
The first part of Operation Plumbob was called Project 57, conceived to ensure that a nuclear weapon damaged or dropped in an accident or otherwise broken open would not detonate — even if some of its conventional explosives went off.
The test took place just seven miles from the main base at Groom, in the Groom Lake Valley, near the mine. A ten-by-sixteen-mile block of land surrounding the planned location was added to the test site and designated Area 13.
No one involved with Project 57 seems to have had much of a contingency plan if the bomb wiped out the U-2 program already under way at the lake, not to mention the mine and its operators. Later it occurred to the people in charge that, with the base at Groom growing, this was not a good thing. So in the 1980s the government spent twenty-one million dollars to have the land scraped and the toxic portions removed, a process clearly visible in spy satellite shots.
In June 1957, training for the U-2 pilots was moved to Texas, probably because of the bomb tests. Soon afterward, Project 57 began with a huge blast called Hood detonated from a balloon fifteen hundred feet over Area 9, about fourteen miles southwest of Groom Lake. At seventy-four kilotons it was the most powerful airburst ever set off within the continental United States. There was no public announcement. Fallout descended on Groom Lake, and the concussion shattered windows in the mess hall and a barracks and buckled the doors of two metal buildings.
During the tests, the crews at the new base were regularly warned and evacuated. They were unaware that they were part of a long tradition and that other neighbors of the test site had not been so lucky.
During these years, a man named Bob Sheahan assembled a unique photo album of Dreamland. The mushroom clouds rising from the spots I had visited at Frenchman Flat and Yucca Flat were visible from his home at Groom Mine, on a ridge about forty miles from ground zero. He took dozens of pictures of the blasts, a whole catalog of mushrooms — twenty, thirty Hiroshimas, seen from the edge of what was to become Dreamland.