It had been nearly five years since Winston Churchill had declared that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” and plunged the West in a Cold War and a hot race for armament with the East.

Yet worlds away from Washington and Moscow, in a remote outpost 40 miles west of Idaho Falls, Idaho, a town would soon become home to America’s first nuclear accident.

On Jan. 3, 1961, operators from the U.S. Army’s Stationary Lower Power Reactor One, or SL-1, were returning from a 10-day holiday break.

Among them was Army Spc. John Arthur Byrnes, Navy Seabee Richard Carlton Legg and SP4 Richard McKinley.

SL-1 was designed to provide heat and electricity for remote Defense Early Warning system radar sites, established to provide early warning of attack by Soviet aircraft or ICBMs, supp

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