Friday, April 3, 1998 | 10:23 a.m.
The men who witnessed U.S. atomic bomb blasts in Nevada are telling their secrets in a new spirit of openness sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.
One nuclear pioneer recalls a pilot flying a military jet carrying a nuclear weapon targeted for the tiny town of Beatty instead of the neighboring Nevada Test Site.
Another remembers crouching in a foxhole about a mile from where nuclear weapons were exploding into Nevada's desert air.
Benjamin Cody Benjamin and Jack Roeder will tell their stories along with 23 others Friday and Saturday at the University of New Mexico during a special public forum at the annual International Arms Conference in Albuquerque, N.M. Both men live in New Mexico.
Benjamin, 75, photographed the first nuclear blast named "Trinity" that brought the world into the atomic age at Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945.
Then he came to the Nevada Test Site to film the first above-ground nuclear experiments on the U.S. continent in 1951.
Benjamin used an optical photo device that could track a plane on its flight from Albuquerque to the Nevada Test Site and record the atomic weapon it dropped for the 35 seconds between sky and ground zero.
The scientists attached landing lights to the falling bombs, so the photographers could spot and track them, he said.
"We tracked it all the way down," Benjamin said of the jets targeting Frenchman Flat at the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Once in the pre-dawn darkness, a pilot radioed the Atomic Energy Commission (now the DOE) at Camp Desert Rock, Benjamin said. "He said he was coming in, but nobody could see the landing lights," he said.
Instead of the Test Site, the pilot had honed in on nearby Beatty. "Can you imagine what would have happened to that little town?" Benjamin asked.
Working with Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, Benjamin and the crew from New Mexico stayed at the El Cortez hotel-casino in downtown Las Vegas.
"We heard they were making book at one of the casinos downtown about what time the bomb was supposed to drop," he said about one of the 1950s above-ground nuclear tests. "And we thought we knew the schedule, since we photographed many of them."
But weather conditions, especially shifting winds, delayed and changed many a test, he said.
Roeder, 69, came to the Test Site as an Army private from the Presidio in San Francisco. He was assigned to set up equipment so the Department of Defense could test radiation from nuclear explosions on everything from jet planes to ammunition. Then he crouched in a foxhole to witness two atomic tests.
"We asked what would happen if the bomber missed the target," Roeder said. Officials said an errant bomb would be tracked down by radar and destroyed. "So we believed that," he said.
Until 20 years later while working as the DOE's safety director in Albuquerque, Roeder met George Trimble, a former jet pilot who dropped nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. Roeder explained what his superiors had said about destroying stray bombs.
"'Bullshit,' Trimble said. 'Those bombs were fully armed when they left the plane.' Little did we know we were at the mercy of the pilot," Roeder said.
In addition to revealing such well-kept secrets, the DOE plans to display a list of 32 nuclear weapons accidents, called "broken arrows," said Charles Demos, classification officer for the DOE's Albuquerque Operations Office.
After 50 years of the former Soviet Union and the United States pointing thousands of nuclear weapons at each other, Demos said it finally struck him how such overwhelming power kept the peace.
"Yet these guys have never been celebrated," he said of the nuclear weapons workers. "These guys lived their whole lives in secrecy, never telling their families what they did.
"Now it's time to open this up."
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