The nuclear accidents did not stop there. Two years and four days later there was another airplane
crash involving a Strategic Air Command bomber and four nuclear bombs. On January 21, 1968, an
uncontrollable fire started on board a B-52G bomber during a secret mission over Greenland. Six of the
seven crew members bailed out of the burning airplane, which crested over the rooftops of the
American air base at Thule and slammed into the frozen surface of North Star Bay. The impact
detonated the high explosives in at least three of the four thermonuclear bombs — similar to exploding
multiple dirty bombs — spreading radioactive plutonium, uranium, and tritium over a large swath of
ice. A second fire started at the crash site, consuming bomb debris, wreckage from the airplane, and
fuel. After the inferno burned for twenty minutes the ice began to melt. One of the bombs fell into the
bay and disappeared beneath the frozen sea. In November of 2008, a BBC News investigation found that
the Pentagon ultimately abandoned that fourth nuclear weapon after it became lost.
Once again, an ad hoc emergency group was put together; there was still no permanent disaster
cleanup group. This time five hundred people were involved. The conditions were almost as dangerous
as the nuclear material. Temperatures fell to −70 degrees Fahrenheit, and winds blew at ninety miles
per hour. Equipment froze. In a secret SAC document, made public by a Freedom of Information Act
request in 1989, the Air Force declared their efforts would be nominal, “a cleanup undertaken as good
housekeeping measures,” with officials anticipating the removal of radioactive debris “to equal not less
than 50 %” of the total of what was there. For eight months, a crew calling themselves the Dr.
Freezelove Team worked around the clock. When they were done, 10,500 tons of radioactive ice, snow,
and crash debris was airlifted out of Greenland and flown to South Carolina for disposal.
Back at the Nevada Test Site, a new industry had been born in nuclear accident cleanup. But before
anything can get cleaned up, an assessment must be made regarding how much lethal radiation is
present, where exactly, and in what form. All across the desert floor, new proof-of-concept, or
prototypes, of radiation-detection instruments appeared. Before the nuclear bomb accidents in Spain and
Greenland, individual radiation-detection machines were limited to handheld devices like Geiger
counters, used to examine workers’ hands and feet and to search for radiation in limited local areas.
Finally, gadgets and gizmos flooded the Nevada Test Site for fieldtesting in a post-nuclear accident
world. After the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, testing had moved underground, but often these
underground tests “vented,” releasing huge plumes of radiation from fissures in the earth. The test site
was the perfect place to test equipment because there was an abundance of plutonium, americium,
cesium, cobalt, europium, strontium, and tritium in the topsoil, and no shortage of radiation in the air.
First came new handheld devices, like a briefcase called the Neutron Detector Suitcase, a prototype
designed by EG&G, which was followed by more advanced means of detecting radiation, including
ground vehicles. The Sky Scanner, developed by the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore,
roamed down the test site’s dirt roads measuring radioactivity escaping from atomic vents. The Sky
Scanner looked like a news van with a satellite dish, but inside it was full of equipment that could
determine how much fallout was in the air. Next came fixed-wing aircraft that could patrol the air over
an accident site. Used to detect fallout since Operation Crossroads, they were now equipped with state-
of-the-art, stillclassified radiation-detection devices. This marked the birth of a burgeoning new military
technology that would become one of the most important and most secret businesses of the twenty-first
century. Called remote sensing, it is the ability to recognize levels of radioactivity from a distance using
ultraviolet radiation, infrared, and other means of detection.
Within a decade of the disastrous nuclear accidents at Palomares and Thule, EG&G would so
dominate the radiation-detection market that the laboratory built at the Nevada Test Site for this
purpose was initially called the EG&G Remote Sensing Laboratory. After 9/11, the sister laboratory, at
Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, was called the Remote Sensing Laboratory and included sensing-
detection mechanisms for all types of WMD. This facility would become absolutely critical to national
security, so much so that by 2011, T. D. Barnes says that “only two people at Nellis are cleared with a
need-toknow regarding classified briefings about the Remote Sensing Lab.” Barnes is a member of the
Nellis/Creech Air Force Base support team and its civilian military council. But in the 1960s, three
nuclear facilities — Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia — and one private corporation —
EG&G — were the organizations uniquely positioned to see the writing on the wall. If nuclear accidents
were going to continue to happen, then these four entities were going to secure the government
contracts to clean things up.ترجم للغة العربية ترجمة تحريرية