Project 57

With all the testing and flying of nuclear weapons that the US had been doing throughout the Cold War, the DoD was fully aware that at some point a plane carrying an atomic bomb was going to crash. In order to be prepared for such a dirty bomb the Pentagon issued a test of such a scenario. The test was to be done in a controlled environment away from any urban masses, and in total secrecy.

It was originally decided that the perfect place for such a test would be Area 51, as secrecy was all but guaranteed. However the land would have to not only be “relinquished for 20,000 years”, but also it had to be untainted by pre existing contamination. As well as it would have to be outside the legal boundaries of the Nevada Test Site in order for it to be classified as a military option and therefore shielded from any official Atomic Energy Commision disclosures. A plot northwest of Area 51 was chosen, and was later given the name Area 13.

Scientists predicted that the warhead would release plutonium particles, but since nothing like this had been done before, there was no real consensus. Workers first began to set up four thousand fallout collectors around a 10x16 mile land plot. These devices were galvanized steel pans that had been sprayed with tacky resin, which was meant to capture plutonium particles that would be released into the air. Sixty-eight air-sampler stations were set up over a seventy square mile area. In order to find exactly how city structures would react to plutonium 1,400 blocks of highway asphalt and wood float finish concrete was set up. Cars and Trucks were also parked around the desert. Gas sampling balloons were set up at various elevations, ranging from a few feet to thousands of feet off the ground. 9 donkeys, 109 beagles, 10 sheep, and 31 albino rats were set up throughout the desert in order to gauge the impact of such a dirty bomb.

On April 24 the nuclear warhead in Area 13 was set off by hand, in order to simulate a plane crash without needing to actually crash a plane. When the dust from the radioactive cloud finally settled the plutonium had spread out over 894 square miles. Plutonium when inhaled is one of the most deadly elements. One-millionth of a gram of plutonium is all that's needed to kill a person if it gets in their lungs. Because of the 20,000 year half-life of plutonium there is no outliving its influences either. Most of the knowledge concerning the effects of plutonium was a result of the tests performed on the dead animals that he'd been exposed to the bomb.

While it would be thought that after such a test the focus would be on how to clean up if such an accident occurred, almost nothing of the sort was done. A year after the test when scientists were satisfied with their preliminary data, Area 13 was simply fenced off with barbed wire. Contaminated vehicles and cloths were then simply labeled “contaminated materials” and buried or burned, and abandoned.