6
Armageddon
It was already well into the evening of a very bad day when Howard Hughes finally reached for his afternoon newspaper, carefully extracting the middle copy from a pile of three, thus avoiding contamination from the two exposed editions.
Peering through his “peepstone,” a battery-powered magnifying glass that lit up the page, Hughes prepared to scrutinize the paper, his deep-sunk eyes narrowed to catch every threatening nuance hidden in the small print.
The headline hit him without warning: “HISTORY’S MIGHTIEST A BLAST NEAR VEGAS.” It leaped into focus through his lens, the screaming mass of thirty-six-point type absurdly enlarged, and struck the stunned recluse with full megaton force.
“This is the last straw,” he scribbled in a rush of fear and anger. “I just this minute read that they are going to shoot off the largest nuclear explosion ever detonated in the U.S. And right here at the Vegas Test Site.
“I want you to call the Gov. at once and the Senators and Congressman,” Hughes ordered Maheu. “If they do not cancel this one extra large explosion, I am going direct to the President in a personal appeal and demand that the entire test program be moved….”
It was war.
A massive hydrogen bomb with an explosive force greater than 1.2 million tons of TNT had been buried deep beneath the Nevada desert, just one hundred miles from Howard Hughes’s bedroom. One hundred times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, big enough to shake four states, and practically right next door.
It was Tuesday, April 16, 1968. The bomb was set to be detonated in ten days. This was the moment Hughes had been dreading for more than a year, ever since the Atomic Energy Commission, with a malevolent sense of timing, launched a new series of major underground weapons tests just one month after he arrived in Las Vegas. The first, a megaton blast shortly before Christmas 1966, rattled the Desert Inn and left Hughes shaken. Since then, however, only low-yield devices had been fired, and the mollified recluse thought he had the AEC’s promise that no future ground-shaking explosions would be conducted at the nearby Nevada Test Site.
Now, suddenly, this sneak attack.
In horrified disbelief, Hughes picked up his newspaper and reread the government’s bland announcement: “Persons up to about 250 miles from the detonation may feel a slight earth tremor immediately following the explosion, particularly if they are on upper stories of high buildings or other tall structures.”
A message of doom clearly directed right at the penthouse. Ten days to zero and counting.
In his own kingdom, Howard Hughes was no longer the most powerful invisible force. The bomb was. Atomic fission—the ultimate in out-of-control power—was the ultimate terror to Hughes, who above all needed to be in absolute control.
He was determined, at all costs, to stop what he called “the bombing.” It became his greatest obsession. He would carry his battle through every level of government and finally into the White House, offering bribes to presidents and presidential candidates, trying, in fact, to buy the government of the United States, all in a desperate effort to stave off nuclear devastation.
Hughes had finally found a menace worthy of his madness. He had spent years casting about for a danger to justify his dread, drifting from germs to blacks to impure water, and now his paranoia had become so finely tuned that it focused on the central horror of our age. A full decade ahead of the rest of the nation, he recognized the infinite threat of nuclear power, and seeing it alone was, of course, in mortal terror.
The bomb was not hidden to Hughes. Indeed, the nuclear tests were the only happenings in the world outside that he could actually feel, the only external force from which he could not hide. His ninth-floor aerie vibrated from the explosions, the entire building swayed, the chandelier in his attendants’ office swung like a pendulum, the windowpanes in his own blacked-out room rattled behind the blinds, and the shock waves left him trembling in his suddenly unstable bed. All else beyond the penthouse was merely a TV show. This actually reached directly into his seclusion.
“When we came here, you will remember, it was a close decision between this area and one other,” Hughes wrote, reminding Maheu that he had almost instead gone to the Bahamas. “I finally chose this one, oddly enough, to avoid the hurricanes. Well I promise you I did not come here to avoid hurricanes only to be molested by some stupid ass-holes making like earthquakes.”
More threatening still was the unfelt, unseen, silent enemy—atomic radiation. Yet another form of contamination, it was all the more terrifying because, like the long-dreaded bacteria, invisible. There was no way to ward off the deadly rays, no possible “insulation.” Kleenex and paper towels could protect him from germs. Isolation, armed guards, and loyal Mormons could protect him from people. But nothing could protect him from the radiation.
That same radiation, he was certain, was seeping through the underground strata, poisoning the earth beneath Las Vegas and polluting the water whose purity so obsessed him.
“The whole operation just makes me want to vomit,” wrote Hughes, sickened by the thought. “I cannot for the life of me understand Laxalt permitting these bastards to dessicrate and lay forever waste, poisoned, and contaminated all of those miles and miles of beautiful virgin Nevada soil.
“I am not saying the bomb is unsafe in terms of leaving a crack in the middle of Fremont Street into which somebody might fall. I have said from the start that the real damage from these explosions was in the contamination of underground substances and the pollution of the very bowels of the earth on which we live.”
In fact, Hughes was so afraid of the insidious atomic rays that he worried about aides he never saw or even spoke to becoming likewise contaminated.
“Please issue instructions to all of our people not to go anywhere near that test site,” he ordered. “And, to the extent possible, to stay away from the AEC meetings and briefings.”
A feared threat and a hated rival, the bomb was also bad for business. Hughes was certain it imperiled his entire two-hundred-million-dollar investment in Las Vegas.
“Who can possibly contest the fact that thousands upon thousands of tourists will be lost to Nevada if the testing continues and if Nevada becomes identified with the ghastly spectre of nuclear devastation?” he demanded.
“I have insisted from the start that any damage would be in the form of destruction to the attraction of this community as a peaceful paradise-like resort, at which people could get away from, and not be reminded of the gruesome, ever-present, over hanging threat of the ghastly image of the scarred and mutilated bodies which remained after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
“As I say, the future image of this area should, hopefully, represent a vacation resort of the very ultimate quality—not a military experimental testing ground for exterminating devices.”
While Hughes spoke of scaring off tourists, it was the billionaire himself who saw Las Vegas as Hiroshima. Although he often expressed his fears in terms of profit and loss, the lurid language of his memos and the shakiness of his scrawl betrayed a very real, very personal terror.
The fears were, in one sense, more than reasonable. Others may have learned to live with the bomb, or at least to ignore it after a 1963 treaty banned atmospheric explosions, the mushroom clouds disappeared, and the tests went underground. But Hughes, who well understood the potency of hidden power, was not beguiled.
“Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere were once considered entirely safe, and those who opposed them were laughed at,” he argued.