For decades, Darwin Morgan has been the gatekeeper of those secrets
MYSTERY WIRE — Area 51 might be the world’s best known ‘secret’ base but there is another, much larger facility in the Nevada desert that has been host to highly classified programs and testing.
For more than 30 years, one man has worked as a gatekeeper for those secrets.
Darwin Morgan is the Director of the NNSS public affairs office. He has spent 31 years as a portal through which secrets were shared and rumors were quashed.
“I get journalists who think that they have to come out here and think they have to have anti-seize on, that every square inch of the site is contaminated when in fact that we’ve only impacted about 10% of the site, the rest of the site is pristine,” Morgan said in a recent interview. “You get people coming out here who honestly are journalists coming out who honestly believe that they’re going to see five legged rabbits and giant toads and things like that.”
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The crater-scarred landscape of the Nevada Test Site. Most subsidences leave saucer-shaped craters are varying in diameter. 1995. This is the north end of Yucca Flat. Most tests have been conducted in this valley. From 1951 until 1958 119 atmospheric tests were conducted and from 1962 until 1992 more than 1,000 underground tests. Nye County, Nevada, USA. (PHoto by Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images) -
NEVADA TEST SITE, USA – JULY 15, 2016: DigitalGlobe via Getty Images satellite overview imagery of the Nevada Test site Northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. -
Only two colonial style homes are left standing in Doom Town. Located inside the Nevada nuclear test site is an area named Doom Town, a small 1950’s style community. Several open air nuclear test were deployed on Doom Town to test the effectiveness of nukes on American communities. The furnished homes were inhabited by mannequins posed at dinner tables with fresh food, and with kids playing in their rooms. (Photo by Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images) -
(Original Caption) 5/6/1955-Atomic Test Site, NV: A mannequin “family” of a survival town located 4,700 feet from ground zero of Operation Cue’s Atomic Blast is inspected by Mrs. Betsy Woodward, a Civilian Defense Observer from Coffeyville, Kansas. -
Much of Doom Town is still highly radioactive. Located inside the Nevada nuclear test site is an area named Doom Town, a small 1950’s style community. Several open air nuclear test were deployed on Doom Town to test the effectiveness of nukes on American communities. The furnished homes were inhabited by mannequins posed at dinner tables with fresh food, and with kids playing in their rooms. (Photo by Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images) -
The ruins of a concrete bunker on the dry lake bed of the Mercury, Nevada nuclear test site. | Location: Mercury, Nevada, USA. (Photo by © Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) -
A sign stands on Frenchman’s Flat where nuclear weapons tests took place in Mercury, Nevada. | Location: Mercury, Nevada, USA. (Photo by © Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) -
A mushroom cloud rises from the desert floor at the Nevada Test Site. The nuclear test, named De Baca, was a balloon burst fired in October 1958. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) -
(Original Caption) 9/19/1958-Las Vegas, NV: Ten miles away from ground zero, newsmen at the Nevada Test Site photograph the first atomic detonation of the 1958 series. Detonated from a ballon 500 feet in the air, the small detonation, equal to less than a kiloton, starts the series which must be concluded by Oct. 31. Blast was set off at 7 a.m. Sept. 19. The next detonation is scheduled for Sept. 25. -
View of a row of mannikins situated 7000 feet from a blast site during one of the nucelar bomb test detonations held as part of Operation Teapot (known in the media at the time as Operation Cue) at the Nevada Test Site (formerly Nevada Proving Grounds), Nevada, between February and May, 1955. These mannikins, though some were toppled, were not burned. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images) -
Military personnel and scientists preparing a site for atomic bomb testing. (Photo by J. R. Eyerman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images) -
NEVADA, UNITED STATES – DECEMBER 18: Baneberry underground nuclear test being conducted 900 feet beneath Yucca Flat surface, sending cloud of radioactive dust above surface in radiation release (prompting new containment procedures to prevent future incidents), at NV Test Site. (Photo by DOE/DOE/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images) -
Man sitting near a Nevada Test Site sign, Nevada, United States, 1955 (Photo by Loomis Dean/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)
The Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) has been nuked more than any place on earth, but the atomic tests conducted above and below ground for decades are only a slice of the sensitive programs and technology that were developed at the site.
The site is riddled with hundreds of miles of tunnels, secret labs underground, buildings where home-made bioweapons kits were built and robotic technology was tested.
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Operation Storax – Sedan -
The Sedan Crater, more than the length of three football fields wide and one football field deep, was produced by a 100-kiloton thermonuclear detonation at the AEC’s (Atomic Energy Commission) Nevada Test Site in July, 1962. The experiment is part of the AEC’s Plowshare program to develop peaceful uses for nuclear explosives, such as canal and harbor building. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) -
MAR 8 1973, Sedan Crater (Nevada Test Site).; (Photo By Bill Wunsch/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
Morgan has made almost 400 visits to the test site, showing not only journalists around the site, but also elected officials and other dignitaries. He shows people locations like the Sedan crater. “To watch people when they walk up there and see the sheer magnitude and enormity of that crater, and how it was formed from 104 kiloton thermonuclear weapons. It leaves people in awe,” Morgan said.
There is much at the site that leaves people in awe. It is a gigantic canvas of secrecy, pockmarked by programs once heavily classified.
For three decades, Morgan has been sharing those secrets with the public. For example, in the days leading up to the Afghanistan war, the pentagon tested bunker buster missiles in test site tunnels. A secret lab was also created at Area 12, using over the counter equipment, to identify bioweapons. “That Defense Threat Reduction agency was trying to understand how do you detect the signals that are coming from the places that are making those,” Morgan told Mystery Wire.
Another location he has shown to visitors is where John F. Kennedy inspected atomic rocket engines built for space travel. This is known as the NERVA site, also known as the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application, and it remains standing on the NNSS.
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President John F. Kennedy visited the ETS1 tower on his trip to Nevada to check on the NERVA program — which had been working on a nuclear rocket since the 1950s. (KLAS-TV) -
Equipment used on the nuclear rocket program was moved to the National Atomic Testing Museum. (KLAS-TV) -
John F. Kennedy meets workers at the Nevada Test Site during his visit. (KLAS-TV)
A few years ago, Morgan showed Mystery Wire the gun turret from the U.S.S. Louisville warship. It’s sitting alone in the middle of the desert on the site because it was used to hold sensor equipment during atomic tests.
Then there was the time Morgan helped arrange a first-ever look at the training center for the OST. This little-known government office can easily be considered the real men in black.
The OST is the Office of Secure Transportation. These men and women are responsible for transporting nuclear weapons across the nation.
After 31 years of shining a light on dark programs and projects that were otherwise shrouded in mystery, Darwin Morgan is set to retire from the Department of Energy. He hopes he can still visit from time to time and plans to write about more of the untold history. “It’s just, it’s amazing, the amount of things I’ve been able to see in my career out there.”