But what drove the last nail into Pluto's coffin was a question so deceptively simple that the wizards at the lab might be excused for deliberately overlooking it: Where do you flight-test a nuclear reactor? "How are you going to convince people that it is not going to get away and run at low level through Las Vegas -- or even Los Angeles?" asks Jim Hadley, a Livermore physicist and Pluto alumnus who now works on detecting foreign nuclear tests for the lab's hush-hush Z Division. There was, admits Hadley, no way of guaranteeing that Pluto would not become a nuclear-powered juggernaut beyond its inventors' control -- a kind of airborne Frankenstein, a flying Chernobyl.
One proposed solution was to tie Pluto to a long tether in Nevada. ("That would have been some tether," Hadley observes dryly.) A more realistic alternative was to fly Pluto in figure eights near Wake Island, a U.S. territory in the Pacific, then bury the "hot" missile in 20,000 feet of ocean. Even at a time when the AEC was trying to get the public to think of radiation in terms of "sunshine units," the proposed dumping of scores of contaminated missiles in the Pacific was enough to give people pause.
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