Two months earlier he had personally called Governor Laxalt to propose the deportation. It was only their second phone conversation, and it left Laxalt shaken. Hughes was in a state of near-hysteria. He had just heard that the AEC was drilling an emplacement hole—the first early warning of an impending blast—and he wanted it stopped. Immediately. Hughes had gone on at some length about the hidden dangers of nuclear tests, about the contamination of earth, air, and water—especially the water—and about the invisible rays, telling the governor in great detail all about the rays.
Laxalt had seen the light. No sooner had he got off the phone with Hughes than he called the top man at the test site. Reached him at home with an urgent question.
“Why can’t you move all your testing to Alaska?” demanded the governor, ready to drive his state’s biggest employer out of Nevada, just to please one man.
Laxalt wasn’t the only statesman suddenly seized by Klondike fever. Soon a United States senator would join him. That really caught the AEC by surprise. It was Mike Gravel, the senator from Alaska.
Flown to Las Vegas on a private Hughes jet, put up in style at a Hughes hotel, promised Hughes money for his next campaign, Gravel dropped in on the Nevada bomb range to suggest that the nation’s entire nuclear test program be shipped north to his own state, then appeared on Hughes’s TV station to make his surprise invitation public.
And still the AEC balked.
Hughes had done everything but provide the dog sleds, but the ungrateful bombers rejected out-of-hand his generous offer of an all-expense-paid trip to Alaska.
Rebuffed, the recluse issued an ultimatum.
Either the United States would negotiate a reasonable settlement with the Hughes empire or Hughes would force an end to the country’s entire nuclear testing program.
“The way this fight lines up,” he calculated, “the AEC will prevail and shoot ‘Boxcar,’ then given time, we will find a way to scuttle, but completely, their whole god-damned program.
“This is not what I want and not what they want. That is why I say they will deal.
“If they try to ride roughshod over me and go ahead with this explosion,” he warned, “I will have absolutely nothing to discuss with them. They could not even get an appointment to get in the office, all the horses and tractors in Nevada could not get them through the door.”
But Hughes was confident that the government, faced with his ultimatum, would capitulate. It was just a matter of arranging a face-saving compromise, one that would allow the test-site personnel to avoid a grim and ignominious exile.
“I am personally positive that the AEC by now is seeking only a graceful exit without getting their clothes torn off or worse,” he explained. “They figure they will wind up on some god-forsaken Pacific island, and after becoming used to Las Vegas living, they are not about to swap it for some desert island.”
Hughes, however, was not vindictive. He did not wish to impose a Carthaginian peace. Quite the opposite.
“Somebody should start negotiating with the AEC,” he wrote, spelling out his strategy. “Just like buying a hotel. I want somebody to wheel and deal with the AEC and offer them a deal whereby they can continue to enjoy the pleasures of living in Las Vegas and more than ever offer them a graceful way they can give us the 90 day extension without injuring their position, without admitting defeat, without admitting by inference that the bomb they want to detonate would have endangered everyone in the community, and without embarassing themselves.”
Should the peace talks fail, however, Hughes threatened to lead “a real lifetime crusade to stop all bomb explosions large or small anywhere in the U.S. or its possessions or mandates.”
He was even willing to join the “peaceniks.”
“If the AEC does not grant the extension and goes ahead with this blast,” he declared, “I definitely will be forced to line up with the total anti-bomb faction throughout the U.S. This group has only been waiting for a strong leader and I am ready to dedicate the rest of my life and every cent I possess in a complete no quarter fight to outlaw all nuclear testing of every kind and everywhere.
“I prefer that we not be classified as Peaceniks, that is why I am reluctant to go the anti-war, anti-bomb route in the conventional sense.
“However, if that is the only way we can gather support for our cause, I will go to bed with the Devil himself.”
Hughes had, indeed, already picked up some strange bedfellows. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom joined the campaign and, in an unprecedented alliance of labor and capital, so did the maverick liberal United Auto Workers union chief Walter Reuther.
Reuther’s enlistment inspired Hughes to open yet another front, quite literally to strike the enemy in its own camp.
“I understand the union that is striking the Bell Telephone System (200,000 men out) has jurisdiction over the Test Site,” he wrote. “Maybe Reuther can persuade the head of the Communication Workers to strike that test site operation and I am informed all our troubles will be over. The phone operation, unhampered by a strike, is absolutely necessary.”
Yet even as he conspired to cut the enemy’s communication lines, his own campaign began to run into trouble. The AEC’s national-defense claim had hurt Hughes with his more traditional allies, and only days before the scheduled blast vital political support disappeared.
First Nevada’s two United States senators, Howard Cannon and Alan Bible, deserted. Finally, even Governor Laxalt announced his neutrality.
Nothing enraged Hughes quite so much as politicians who refused to stay bought. “I want you to meet with Laxalt, Bible and Cannon,” he instructed Maheu. “They are going to have to make a difficult choice. They are going to have to support our stand in Washington or we will be forced to find someone else to represent us. And that is final.
“I want you to bear down on them immediately demanding that they take a position without another moments delay.
“Bob, when the time comes, and they begin crying on your shoulder for support, and you come to me, and I say OK, as I have in the past, then once more, it will be the same story all over again: Unlimited support, and not one God Damned thing in return for it!”
It was an outrage. Still, perhaps they could be brought around. For the two wayward senators, the usual inducement might do: “Bob, cant you make a promise of support to Cannon and Bible—I mean real support beyond anything to date, and thereby obtain their absolutely undiluted sponsorship?”
As for the normally obliging Laxalt, “if we can truly convince the Governor that his future destiny lies with me,” wrote Hughes, “then I am positive that, with a little coaching from me, he will have no difficulty in accomplishing our AEC objective.”
In fact, Hughes had already worked out a bold scheme for the governor. A plot to have Laxalt seize control of all federal land in Nevada, of course including the nuclear test site.
“Do you realize how much of this state is so-called ‘owned’ by the Fed. Gov.?” wrote Hughes. “Well, I think it requires only the slightest little effort by Laxalt to have all or nearly all of that land returned to the State.
“If we could persuade Laxalt to make such a request, it would not have to be linked by Laxalt to the bomb testing. We could get somebody else to focus attention on the Test Site, if we could only persuade Laxalt to ask the return of all land taken from the state by the Federal Gov.
“Now, Bob, lets face it, Laxalt is not going to do even this meager act of assistance unless we motivate him. I urge that, since he is not running for office this year, we ask him to designate a candidate he would like us to support in a big way—Nixon, or Senate or Congressional candidates.”