But the flying wing was a doomed dream. Northrop tried to modify the prop version with jets, but it lost out to the B-36. Northrop lost his company in 1952, sacrificed on the altar of the flying wing. As the B-2, the flying wing seemed doomed again. Costs rose, and by the end of the Cold War the vision of the B-2 as the successor to the B-52, the B-1, and other SAC bombers seemed absurd. Too expensive and too precious to fly, it sat out the Gulf War.
The Bush administration killed the Navy’s A-12 Stealth carrier aircraft before it was ever unveiled to the public. Two billion dollars had been spent — the budget, one journalist noted, for the whole National Park Service. I thought of that every time I saw a photo of the A-12, thought of the lodge at Yellowstone and rangers in little Smokey the Bear hats.
Trader’s work impressed some of the public-interest muckrakers in Washington who had been looking at the black budget for years. One of Trader’s admirers was Steve Aftergood, John Pike’s colleague at the Federation of American Scientists. Aftergood wrote the FAS’s Secrecy and Government Bulletin, which tracked the progress of those battling excessive secrecy and, in the process, charted the follies of the classification system. It was only a slight exaggeration to say that what Ralph Nader was to Detroit, Aftergood had been to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.
Keeping too many secrets is not only undemocratic, he wrote, it is expensive. It requires guards, vaults, background checks. Think of it as servicing the national information debt. A GAO study placed the figure at $2.2 billion, but pointedly noted that its calculations had been hampered by the CIA’s refusal to cooperate. Private industry spends an estimated $13 billion more adhering to government security standards.
“The more secrecy you have,” Aftergood states, “the thinner your security resources are spread, and there is a loss of respect for the system. That promotes leaks.”
Out of incompetence, exhaustion, or spite, leaks had been increasing. The leaks were a sign of institutional decadence, Aftergood explained: “The government has found it easier to let the classification system disintegrate than to establish new standards that command respect and loyalty. If current trends are taken to the limit everything may eventually be classified — but nothing will be secret.”
Aftergood described a secrecy structure that might well collapse of its own weight. I got the picture of a crumbling empire with a capital city too poor to keep its walls repaired. The strange, distant civilization of the Pentagon appeared a decaying fortress — Rome with the Huns outside, and the black marketeers inside, trading through gaps in the crumbling walls. In fact, it sounded a lot like the Soviet Union in its final years.
We parked under blue skies and continued toward the center of the universe on foot. We climbed into a lovely canyon, its soaring rock walls neatly decorated with green. A few other visitors had clambered up one of the walls and, in triumph, taken off their shirts at the top. The canyon narrowed and twisted and the plants at its base grew larger and more verdant. There was more water deep in the canyon, as well as little beds of dirt where the grass grew almost like a marsh, in contrast to the wide delta of desert into which the canyon opened.
We stopped at a cave where painted bighorns loped across the walls among spirals and concentric circles. The walls were as liberally covered with drawings as a New York subway station. Zigs and zags, circles and slashes, and romping mountains goats and deer. These were homes, and I felt almost like an intruder. They were comfortable little ledges where earlier peoples had slept and eaten and laughed, their ceilings blackened by campfires.
Trader took pictures with his digital camera. He would post them on his Web page, where there was a link to a compilation of Native American petroglyphs in Nevada. I liked the idea that these ancient drawings would be burbling across this most advanced medium as soon as he got home.
He had recently discovered a program for rapidly building makeshift runways and hangars — a program that could turn all kinds of distant spaces into little Dreamlands on short notice. He was looking at something called Timberwind, a project for building nuclear rockets — an idea most people thought had been scotched long ago. Of the Star Wars programs—“directed energy” weapons — there was even less to be found.
The next night we went together to a Department of Energy public hearing in Las Vegas. A formal solicitation of democratic sentiment on what the DOE should do with the NTS now that the Cold War was over, it had brought Trader to town. He had studied the eight lilac-covered volumes of the DOE’s environmental impact statement, which considered the effects of different courses of action. What would happen if the place was closed? What would happen if it was used for other kinds of testing? But Trader wanted to know why Area 51, which had some of worst known environmental problems of the whole test site, was not discussed. The only mention of Area 51 in the document was this: “Under Public Land Order 1662 (June 20, 1958), approximately 38,400 acres were reserved for the use of the Atomic Energy Commission in connection with the NTS. Management of this land has since been delegated to the U.S. Air Force.” This was the old game of shifting responsibility for the place between the Air Force and the DOE.
A hearing such as this is a winning process in many ways, a bizarre and rare membrane in which the public in all its diversity touched the bureaucracy. It made me proud to be an American in a way a flyover by Thunderbirds, for all their powerful engines, high speeds, and amazing precision of flying, did not necessarily do.
These hearings brought out local color. At an earlier one a man had stood up and said, “In the name of God, my name is Moe. I’m a permanent resident who has been living in Las Vegas for over six years. Believe in your God!” With that, he raised his green Koran in his hand and began to speak. The number of the area where the secret base was located was 51, he said, so he would read chapter 51 of the Koran: “Believe in your God. Promise in the winds which blow in holy directions. Promise in the clouds that carry heavy rains. Promise to the angels who perform the orders of God. Promise to all corners that whatever you say is true.”
He came to another passage: “Abraham said, ‘What is your duty here?’ to the aliens, ‘What is your duty here?’ The answer, ‘We are here to destroy the bad crime!’ ” The man pointed to officials from the Bureau of Land Management and continued: “All aliens! All aliens! We want to see the freedom of those captured aliens, because we are here to save the good from the bad one more time.”
This evening was much calmer. There were the usual Greenpeace spokespeople and, in counterpoint, a former Air Force officer who said he had eaten plutonium day and night, and bragged that he “pissed plutonium.” He had cleaned up after SAC when the B-52 bumped the tanker over Palomares, Spain, back in the sixties, accidentally scattering plutonium the way the AEC scattered it intentionally in Area 51 as part of Project 57, back in the fifties.
Trader got his chance. He read his formal statement and showed a couple of the gemlike documentary artifacts he had picked up: one, a press release from October 17, 1955, relating to the construction of the Watertown Strip by REECO; the other a letter written on AEC stationery stating that a small private plane had landed on the strip in 1957.