“Now, nobody in the free world would consider exploding a nuclear bomb in the air or in the sea.
“Who is to say that, in the future, contaminating the earth upon which we live may not be frowned upon just as much.”
Eventually a presidential panel would agree that the underground blasts posed grave risks. And ten years later, the forced release of suppressed documents would reveal an appalling truth: for a quarter-century the government had known its test program would condemn thousands of American citizens to disease and even slow death.
Ahead of his time, even prophetic in recognizing the dangers of nuclear experimentation, Hughes, however, was not opposed to nuclear weapons, nor was he really opposed to nuclear tests. He was opposed only to testing those weapons in his own neighborhood.
Indeed, the bomb was merely a focus for all his diffused fears. Nightmare visions of nuclear annihilation exploded in his mind. Time and time again Hughes would return to the “gaunt, ghastly horrors and tragedies of nuclear warfare with all its ghastly residue of burned, maimed, mutilated and scarred human flesh.” Life in the penthouse became a never-ending scene from On the Beach.
And under that strain, Howard Hughes became a mad prophet of doom. He already looked the part, and had he been a man of equal madness, lesser means, and greater moral fervor, he might have taken to the streets, become a sidewalk savior, waving a placard, carrying to the masses his message of impending devastation.
Instead, he remained in hiding and scrawled his apocalyptic visions on his bedside legal pads.
“If the gigantic nuclear explosion is detonated,” he warned, “then in the fraction of a second following the pressing of that fateful button, thousands and thousands, and hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of good potentially fertile Nevada soil and underlying water and minerals and other substances are forever poisoned beyond the most ghastly nightmare. A gigantic abyss too horrible to imagine filled with poisonous gases and debris will have been created just beneath the surface in terrain that may one day be the site of a city like Las Vegas.
“I say Nevada is no longer so desperate for mere existence that it has to accept and swallow with a smile poisonous, contaminated radio-active waste material more horrible than human excrement.”
More horrible than human excrement. For the anally-fixated, chronically constipated billionaire, this was the ultimate imprecation.
Even before the impending test was announced, Hughes had had a premonition of doom. A month earlier, five thousand sheep had been killed in neighboring Utah when an Army biological-warfare experiment had gone awry. The frightened recluse instantly identified with the martyred flock. He took their slaughter as an omen, a clear sign that he too was in danger.
“I am sure that some expert somewhere must have pronounced as safe the bomb test in Utah,” he reflected, “but that doesn’t help the sheep lying there on the prairie.”
Now, with the Sheep Omen revealed as a true prophecy, the fear-crazed seer, certain of his clairvoyance, conjured up images of future generations vindicating his judgment:
“Some day,” he wrote, “guides will take tourists from here to Reno, and when they pass [the test site], the guide will say: ‘And on your right is the ghastly grave-yard of atomic poison and polution, that is so dreadful no tourists are allowed to go near it for fear some child may wander away from its parents and step within the contaminated area.’
“Rome proudly displays its battlefields of historic fame, but this misserable blemish on God’s creation, the earth, is such a tragedy nobody points to it or boasts about it, it means only one thing: ‘Shame!’”
Lost for a moment in his vision, Hughes suddenly remembered the impending blast only ten days distant and abruptly shifted his focus.
“Well,” he concluded, once again the cold-eyed realist, “none of this is getting us any closer to stopping this shameful program. Now, how do we go about it?
“We must find a way to close them down.”
From his penthouse command post, the naked general now prepared for Armageddon.
Firing off memo after memo to his field marshal Maheu, Hughes ordered him “to bring to bear on the AEC the very strongest, all-out concerted effort you can organize, in a final fight to the very last ditch.
“I want you to burn up all of your blue chip stamps, all the favors you have coming, and every other last little bit of pressure you can bring together in one intense, extreme, final drive,” he continued.
“Bob, I want you to go all the way on this and spare no expense,” Hughes stressed. “You know what we want to accomplish, and you know our resources are unlimited.”
Meanwhile, one hundred miles to the north, on a barren desert flat called Pahute Mesa, enemy forces lowered a six-foot red-tipped cylinder into a 3,800-foot-deep shaft, unaware that the operation they code-named “Boxcar” was about to run into stiff opposition.
Nevada, with its vast stretches of arid terrain, had long been the nation’s nuclear proving grounds. For almost two decades, the AEC had detonated its bombs on the 1,350-square-mile test site without significant protest.
But now the battle lines were drawn. It was Howard Hughes versus the United States. The richest man in America, the sole owner of one of the country’s leading defense contractors, with almost a billion dollars a year in top-secret military work, ready to take on the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Defense, and, if necessary, the White House and the rest of the federal government in an all-out battle over the bomb.
Then, on the eve of war, came an unexpected breakthrough. Just one day after the “Boxcar” blast was announced, Maheu reported that peace was at hand. A cease-fire, at least a temporary truce, seemed imminent.
“We have gotten word to the Vice President and he will attempt to accomplish a 90 day delay,” Maheu told his boss. Hubert Humphrey, soon to announce his candidacy for president and, as usual, short of funds, was only too happy to be of service. Moreover, Governor Laxalt was prepared to join Humphrey in calling for the moratorium.
“I have just completed an hour’s conference here with the Governor,” the field marshal explained. “He agrees with us 100%—particularly since you have made it clear that all the study and research could still continue in Nevada—with the exception of the blasts per se.”
The peace terms were generous. All that Hughes would have to do was fund an independent team of scientists to determine the safety of the planned test during the cooling-off period.
“Bob, I leave this whole campaign in your hands,” replied Hughes, already looking ahead to total victory. “I am sure you should personally go to the White House after we have obtained the 90-day delay and endeavor to sell the President on a permanent policy.
“I am sure H.H.H.,” he continued, with a chummy reference to the cooperative vice-president, “would be glad to go with you and set up the appointment. You have gotten a lot of publicity as my sole representative in important matters and I definitely feel you would be more willingly accepted at the White House than anyone else I know of.”
Yet even as he plotted an Oval Office parley, Hughes was shaken anew by visions of doom.
“The late TV news was startling,” reported the recluse in a post-midnight memo that roused his would-be White House emissary. “They announced that while prior explosions may have been noticable in the top floors of tall buildings, this explosion will be far more powerful (more powerful in fact than any prior explosion in the United States).
“They went on to say that this explosion will be accompanied by violent and prolonged and heavy longitudinal movement of the ground at the street level, that it may result in earth cracks and particularly in fractures and cracks in the pavement of city streets and highways.