ABC v. the Reporters

Newsmen thought it was a tossup which was colder--the six-above-zero dawns on Nevada's frozen mountainsides or the Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC wouldn't even give reporters the time of day of an A-blast, or the day. So, for three weeks of icy daybreaks, almost 100 reporters clambered up the mountainsides and stood in five-inch snow, peering towards the test site at Frenchman's Flat, waiting for a blast. By last week, when the first big explosion finally came, one-third of the correspondents had given up in disgust. By week's end, all but a handful had gone.

When the newsmen first arrived, AEC men said coldly that "we didn't invite you . . . and don't expect any information from us." Quite a number of other people, however, had been invited: 8,000 construction workers, troops, civilian observers (including talkative Congressmen) and two AEC secretaries.

Reporters were thrown back on guesses, suspicions and plain washroom rumors. They cruised around picking up hitchhiking G.I.s ("the floating interview") or collaring construction workers in bars. Some crawled to the conclusion that the first blast was a fizzle, because of the facial expressions of scientists returning to Las Vegas' El Cortez Hotel. The few and scanty press releases given out by public-relations officers were virtually useless. One picture showed G.I.s in the area unloading cans of fruit cocktail.

After a group of Congressmen announced that they had seen one bomb dropped on animals, reporters asked AEC "What kind of animals?" AEC replied that it didn't know whether the Congressmen meant Army animals or AEC animals. If they were Army animals, it didn't know, if they were AEC animals, it couldn't say.

After the tests finally began, the Army officially permitted correspondents to interview only twelve G.I.s who took part, although the other thousands will soon be dispersed in camps throughout the U.S., and telling other soldiers what happened. Said the New York Times's Gladwin Hill: "All this uncertainty presumably has had the desired effect of confusing the Russians. . . it also promises equally to confuse the American public, on whose support the work depends."

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