Flies, Sage, Tourists Bring Life Back to Atomic Desert

It was a perfect morning for an airdrop. No clouds, no wind--nothing stirring in the big sky except the B-50 bomber circling the desert like a buzzard.

Bob Freiter crouched in the roaring bird’s belly. He was 24, an Air Force tail-gunner on a secret mission: Operation Upshot-Knothole. Beside him sat Dixie, an atomic bomb as big as a Studebaker.

From his seat four miles up in the sky, Freiter couldn’t see the dry lake bed. He couldn’t see the army Jeeps around it, nor the life-size plaster dummies outfitted in marine camouflage. He couldn’t see the butterflies, the ravens, the tortoises or the snakes that slithered beneath tufts of sage and cactus.

The bomb-bay doors opened. The B-50 shuddered, then lurched upward. Dixie was gone.

Freiter could hardly hold a thought. The radioman shouted:

“Bob! We’re making history here! Take a look!”

The 10 airmen had orders not to remove their goggles. Freiter yanked his off. He saw an 11-kiloton bomb shrink to a pinhead. Sweat beaded on his upper lip.

Sweet Jesus, he thought.

It was like a million flashbulbs popping in his face. Searing white-blue light.

“Sonofabitch! I can’t see!”

The pilot took the bomber once around the churning column of pink, salmon, blue, violet, black and white smoke and got them out of there.

It was April 6, 1953. The desert died that day.

*

A fly buzzes around Derek Scammell’s neck. He swipes. The fly persists. Scammell swipes again. “See?” he says. “There is life after the bomb.”

For decades, there was no place for life. Not on Frenchman Flat, where America once practiced for doomsday. Where scientists and soldiers tested how efficiently their nuclear devices could destroy and kill.

In all, they blew up 928 nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. After 1963, all were underground tests. But for the first 12 years, scientists detonated 100 atomic devices in Nevada’s open air--14 of them above this dry lake bed shaped like a teardrop.

Some were set off atop towers. A few were detonated from balloons. One was fired from a cannon. Others were pitched from planes.

Big Shot. Dog. Dirty Harry. Shamrock. Screamer. Wasp. Zucchini.

And Dixie.

The moment that bomb exploded, its core burned hotter than the sun. A milky white flash washed across the desert, followed by a wall of heat.

With everything around them burning and smoking, Marines, sheltered in a bunker 2,000 yards from ground zero, were ordered out of their foxholes and began a mechanical march toward the fireball.

The fallout drifted far and wide, all the way to New York, contaminating milk, wheat, soil and fish, killing sheep, horses and cattle. Every American in the Lower 48 was exposed to iodine-131, a radioactive form of iodine. The National Cancer Institute says the releases were at least 10 times larger than those from the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl. As many as 75,000 people exposed during that period could develop thyroid cancer, the institute says.

Today life is back. There are flies, sage--even tourists.

Scammell squints from the glare off the hard, white earth split by millions of cracks. Nothing moves but the shadows of flies trying to hide from the sun.

He says: “There it is. Ground zero. If you’d been standing here that morning in 1953, you’d have been vaporized.”

He grins.

“Makes you feel like an atomic molecule, doesn’t it?”

When the site was carved out of the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range in 1951, Scammell was an ocean away, a teenager growing up in London. He is 62 now, a decorated Vietnam veteran, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, which oversees the test site--an expanse of basins and ranges slightly larger than Rhode Island.

Like the ex-CIA and Green Berets in fatigues and mirror sunglasses who guard the entrance gate, Scammell is a keeper of the flame, a quasi-curator of these 1,350 square miles where the United States carried out 90% of its nuclear trials.

This site was born at a time when Americans did not question their government, when Las Vegas hairdressers promoted “atomic hairdos,” when Nevadans stood on porches and saluted the giant pink plumes as signs of strength and protection.

To many Americans, this wasteland is now little more than a Cold War artifact, an environmental menace that causes cancer, a reminder of the dark side of the human spirit and the terrible damage a cracked atom can do.

The shafts have been quiet since 1992, when President Bush declared a moratorium on nuclear testing. They are maintained, though, and, by law, must be ready to resume tests within two years of a presidential order.

Last week the U.S. Senate rejected the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty after opponents argued that the ban would allow other countries--India, Pakistan, China, Russia--to overtake the United States in modernizing their arsenals. President Clinton had pressed for ratification, saying tests can be simulated with powerful computers; regardless of the Senate action, he pledged the United States would continue its moratorium on tests.

Like many places that tied their fortunes to the arms race, this one is looking for a new role in new times. Staff has dropped from a Cold War peak of 11,000 to fewer than 2,500, the annual budget from $1 billion to $400 million.

So the government is considering another idea: to open this top-secret area to tour operators, who would guide visitors from around the world through this surreal moonscape.

A prototype tour already exists. Once a month, the Energy Department takes a busload of visitors through the site at no charge. It’s no Disney World: Visitors need security clearances. They must bring their own lunches. Cameras, binoculars, tape recorders, cell phones are not allowed.

Nevertheless, it could be lucrative. Americans like historical sites of tragedy and pain. They flock to the Sixth Floor Museum of the School Book Depository in Dallas. They gather in Gettysburg’s fields. They visit the Birmingham, Ala., church where four black Sunday school pupils died in a bombing.

Why not an A-bomb crater?

*

At Frenchman Flat, the debris of 14 atmospheric blasts marks a horrific trail.

There are the “Butler” bunkers, two long chains of square concrete shelters that resemble a roadside motel. The bunkers were built in the late 1950s to see what could withstand a nuclear shock wave.

On May 8, 1953, scientists detonated Encore, a 27-kiloton bomb, a mile away. Butler’s 2-inch-thick front walls collapsed.

“That,” Scammell says, “is what 20-pounds-per-square-inch pressure does.” (At 20 pounds per square inch, the full length of each wall was subjected to 288,000 pounds of pressure. The shock wave hit the wall at a wind speed of 500 mph--three times the force of winds generated by the strongest hurricane.)

Behind the bunkers sits an M-48 tank, a late 1970s model. It’s been roped off. There hangs a sign, yellow with black lettering:

CAUTION

RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL

“Don’t touch the tank!” Scammell shouts. A photographer, crouched near the tank, jumps back. Scammell blows on his glasses, wipes them, smiles. “That thing used to fire uranium-tipped shells. The barrel and firing mechanism are contaminated.

“Beta radiation. Tricky stuff.”

From the thirsty plain rises a bridge to nowhere.

In the mid-1950s, engineers built the imitation train trestle for Priscilla. Priscilla was a 37-kiloton nuclear bomb. The men wanted to see what Priscilla could do to a bridge of inch-thick iron. So they suspended Priscilla by a helium balloon 700 feet above the ground, about four football fields away from the trestle, and on June 24, 1957, hit the button.

Today the bridge is a 30-foot boomerang.

Nearby sits a row of bomb shelters. They look like concrete igloos. The first dome held up against the nuclear shock wave; its concrete is 8 inches thick. The second, 6 inches thick, shows several cracks. The third is sheared in half. Its shell was only 2 inches thick.

There are three other shelters, each of 1-inch-thick aluminum. They look as if they were stepped on by giants.

Everything was exposed: Jeeps, armored personnel carriers, airplanes, a 55-ton diesel locomotive, a glass house, a man-made pine forest planted in concrete blocks, an underground garage full of cars.

Even the Mogler Safe Co. of San Francisco volunteered its best product--a 12-by-15-foot walk-in vault with 1-foot-thick concrete walls and a 10-inch-thick steel door. “They weren’t sure real money would withstand the blasts,” he says. “So they filled the vault with stacks of paper.”

The concrete and iron reinforcing bars on the outer shell are peeled back like a banana skin. And the paper? “It was a little burned around the edges.”

The paper fared better than the animals.

Cattle were fed radioactive hay. Dogs, donkeys and rabbits were penned inside the experimental bomb shelters. Cheshire pigs--whose skin resembles human skin--were drugged and tied to circular cages a few thousand yards from ground zero. Some of the pigs were dressed up in fabrics worn by Americans in the 1950s, such as cotton, rayon and silk.

The pig cages are empty now. Their metal bars are black from rust. From them dangle fraying ropes. They sway, dully, when the wind stirs.

*

RADIATION HAZARD:

TOUCHING OR REMOVING

SCRAP OBJECTS IS

PROHIBITED. THIS INCLUDES

BLASTED DEBRIS, FUSED

SILICA, METAL

FRAGMENTS, ETC.

Whisking past the sign, Scammell says: “Radiation tends to glue itself to metal. That’s why there’s all the fuss about touching metal around here.”

The white Jeep Cherokee rumbles down Mercury Highway, a two-lane blacktop. There are 700 miles of roads in the test site. This one slices north toward the more secretive areas.

NO ACCESS

BEYOND THIS FENCE

“Nothing to worry about,” Scammell says. “The radiation levels that keep you out of the ground zero area dissipate pretty quickly. You probably get more rad exposure from the lights on the Las Vegas strip.”

Some underground aquifers are tainted. Twice a year they are tested for tritium, a radioactive substance. Earlier this year, two sectors, including the supersecret Area 51, made famous in the movie “Independence Day,” shut down because plutonium from underground test sites was migrating in subterranean channels.

And in August, a scientific panel found what it called “serious flaws” in computer models designed to predict when radioactivity might leak from holes left by below-ground nuclear tests.

NO DIGGING

AROUND THIS SITE

“Beta contamination is sealed in the dirt,” Scammell explains. “You don’t want to loosen any of that up.”

Yucca Flat spreads out into dull, brown emptiness. In the distance, Joshua trees reach toward the sky. A tumbleweed skitters across the highway.

Hundreds of craters from underground blasts pock the landscape like giant thumbprints in a pie.

POTENTIAL CRATER AREA

KEEP OUT

Scammell points to a few nuggets of nuclear history: See that light-colored spot on that hill? Smokey was detonated there to see how hills would deflect a blast. (It blew away the topsoil, all the way down to the volcanic rock.) See that building? That’s where they test the ages of the plutonium in our nuclear warheads. See that white silo? That’s Icecap.

Icecap is a 120-foot tower designed to shelter workers preparing for a blast. It was all ready for a “nuclear event” in spring 1993, but then came the moratorium. A crane that would lower a bomb down the shaft looms over an empty hole.

*

Jeffrey Cruser can hardly sit still. The 17-year-old and his dad, Alan, a schoolteacher, have come all the way from Beachwood, N.J., to see the crater--the Sedan Crater. And now the tour bus they’re riding is approaching it.

Sedan was a nuclear bomb the size of a volleyball with the force of 104,000 tons of TNT. It was detonated 635 feet underground on July 6, 1962, an attempt at finding peaceful uses for atomic explosives. Scientists had hoped to use nuclear devices to excavate harbors, reservoirs, even a new Panama canal.

Sedan released seismic energy equivalent to an earthquake of magnitude 4.75. It displaced 12 million tons of earth, leaving a cone-shaped pit 1,280 feet in diameter and 320 feet deep.

Some of that earth became radioactive dust that floated over Utah. Several years later, irregularly high numbers of children there developed leukemia. A statewide study by the University of Utah, published in 1990, said there is an association between radioactive fallout and leukemia risk.

Jeffrey loves the science part. “It’s really cool how such a small little bomb can create such a huge explosion.”

On this tour are 24 female passengers, 13 male. They are from different corners of America, different generations. But as the bus rolls along, they all murmur, oooh and aaah, cover their mouths, get that glazed look in their eyes.

“Are those solar panels?”

“See? I told you Kennedy was the only president who came here.”

“It looks like a meteor landed there.”

“God, I feel like Jessica Lange in the movie where she rides out in the field on a horse to stop that nuclear test.”

“Oooh! Was that a roadrunner?”

Celia Owens, 50, an artist and writer who lives in New York City, gazes out the window at the desert scruff. Her father was a foreman for seven years at a nuclear weapons assembly plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn. He died in January 1961 of a rare blood disorder that Owens attributes to radiation exposure.

“I guess I needed to see this for myself,” she says, “to see where profit and greed can lead people.”

Beside her sits Lew Thompson, 78, from Santa Fe, N.M. In July 1945, Thompson was an army lieutenant in the 40th U.S. division on Panay Island in the Philippines, waiting for the final assault on Japan.

“We would pass by the colonel’s tent on the way to get chow,” he says, “and every night we’d see him sitting on the end of his bunk with his head in his hands.”

His eyes glisten. “A month later, after they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the colonel came and told us that our division had been chosen for a suicide mission on Tokyo. Today, the thought of dropping H-bombs on people makes me sick to my stomach. But I am alive only because of one thing--the bomb.”

The bus clambers up a rise. Down a gravel slope, beyond a fence and a white and yellow platform, Sedan awaits.

The visitors huddle near the railing, side by side, shoulders touching. The sage rustles at the lip of the crater.

“Oh, my.”

“Wow.”

“Good Lord.”

No one returns to the bus smiling.

*

“Every time I come here, it seems as if it crumbles just a little more.”

Scammell regards the house. It’s a two-story, three-bedroom, wooden A-frame with a brick chimney and a cinder-block basement. Typically suburban, American, 1950s style. It juts out of Yucca Flat, surrounded by tumbleweeds and all the space in the world.

“Go on in,” he says. “Just watch where you step.”

It needs some paint, to cover up the scorch marks around the window frames. It could use some siding, a front door, shingles on the roof.

Nobody has ever lived here.

This is one of two houses left in Survival Town. That was a cluster of 14 houses, propane station, radio station, electric grid, transformer station and supply store erected in the fall of 1954 to see how middle-class America would fare against nuclear fire.

J.C. Penney provided couches, drapes, rugs, tableware, appliances, TVs, bedspreads, toiletries, towels, radios, lamps. Fresh food was flown in and placed on dining-room tables. Canned food was stocked in cupboards.

Life-size mannequins in suits, skirts, bathrobes and plaid pajamas were set up in poses--cooking, knitting, watching television. And then, on the morning of May 5, 1955, Apple-2 was detonated atop a 500-foot tower, 6,000 feet away. . . .

The floorboards in the empty rooms feel as if they’re about to give. Plywood dangles from the ceilings; a charred door sags against a living room wall. Everything else was taken away years ago. Buried.

In the upstairs bedroom, drops of rain slant through gaps in the roof and make tiny dots on the floor.

Buzzing. The wings of mayflies.

Moaning. The wind bringing the smell of rain through a missing window.

On the horizon, black clouds boil. Bolts of lightning slash the sky. A lone bird, a raven, spreads its wings.

It’s nature’s turn now.