At first light, a two-man team entered the red shack on ground zero, arming the thermonuclear device buried 3,800 feet below in a steel-lined, cement-filled shaft.
Alone in his bedroom, Hughes scrawled a final fevered memo in a desperate bid to reach the president and escape the impending holocaust.
“It is vital that somehow you prevail upon Mr. Johnson that this is an emergency and persuade him to read my letter,” he begged. “There is about 20 minutes left.”
Johnson, of course, had seen the letter almost as soon as it arrived at the White House, and was right now in his own bedroom, weighing the needs of national security against the words of Howard Hughes. Still undecided, he received a final bomb report from his top science adviser, Donald Hornig.
“There is still time to act in the next 15 or 20 minutes,” Hornig informed the president. But, joining Rostow and Seaborg, he urged Johnson not to halt the scheduled blast.
“A complete cancellation seems inadvisable,” his message read. “The test will furnish a calibration point for the ABM warhead, and is needed for that purpose and as a proof test for a Polaris warhead. I recommend that we do not change the test plans.”
That made it unanimous. The president could not, against the strongly worded advice of all his experts—against the entire national-defense establishment—cancel a major nuclear weapons test at the demand of one private citizen, even Hughes.
Johnson decided to detonate the bomb.
At precisely seven o’clock on Friday morning, April 26, 1968, a 1.2 megaton explosion roared through the Nevada desert and set the ground trembling in four states. It blew a gigantic dust cloud high above Pahute Mesa and vaporized the bedrock below, carving out a seven-hundred-foot-wide subterranean cavern with so much force that the shock waves registered on seismographs from New York to Alaska. At ground zero the earth bulged ominously, then slowly settled back until it finally collapsed, leaving another huge crater in the arid moonscape. One hundred miles away, hotels along the Las Vegas Strip shuddered, water splashed out of the swimming pools, and the carpeted floors of the gambling casinos vibrated, but the dice continued to roll without interruption.
Up in his penthouse, Howard Hughes gripped the sides of his suddenly unstable bed, bracing his wasted body against the blast.
A Mormon aide kept watch in the next room. “The motion I experienced lasted well over one minute,” he reported to his shaken boss. “The first tremor was followed a few seconds later by a substantially stronger tremor, then gradually started to dampen out. The chandelier swayed well over four minutes.”
Hughes himself waited half an hour for the aftershocks to subside, then reached for his yellow legal pad.
“You can take my word for it that this blast produced more than twice the yield [anticipated],” he wrote in a hand that still showed the full effects of the bombing. “They deliberately deceived us and everyone else about the size of the blast. This would explain Johnson’s refusal and the terrific importance placed on this one shot.”
Hughes’s bedroom had actually swayed only a few centimeters, but for him the explosion itself was the shattering climax of a ten-day trauma. The countdown alone had left him in ruins.
“I just know I was physically very ill and emotionally reduced to a nervous wreck by the end of the week, and life is too short for that,” he told Maheu, bleakly assessing the damage. “Now, Bob, I dont know how you reacted to the last week. You seem to be one hell of a lot better conditioned than I am, and you probably survived in much better shape than I did. All I can say to you, Bob, is that if I ever have to go thru another week like the last one, I simply will not take it, and this will mean an awful lot of work and planning shot down the drain. I am sorry, but that is the way I am.
“I would not repeat last week for all the money in the world.”
Right down to the final minutes Hughes had hoped that his personal appeal to Johnson would save the day, but now it seemed clear that summit diplomacy had failed. The president had not even bothered to answer his letter.
Finally, two weeks later a double envelope, the inner one marked “Personal & Confidential to Mr. Hughes,” arrived at the Desert Inn. Inside was a two-page message from Lyndon Johnson. It was hardly a welcome surprise.
“I received the letter from the President,” Hughes noted bitterly, “and was it ever a disappointment!!
“He gloats over the fact that the explosion did not vent, there was no significant damage, and, in fact, the blast bore out the most minute forecasts of the AEC scientists, and satisfied the President, beyond any most microscopic doubts he might have had, that the AEC scientists have the atom under such complete control that they can make it turn a sommersault, jump thru a hoop, and say: ‘Uncle!’ any time they are of a mind to do so.
“Further, the AEC, with his complete support, is going right ahead full-steam to conduct their major high-yield explosions at Pahute Mesa in the N.T.S. [Nevada Test Site].
“Why would the President have gone out of his way to rub it in?” wondered Hughes, nearly as shaken by Johnson’s reply as he had been by the blast. “I did not expect anything with a hint of future assistance. I realize this would have been too much to expect, but Jesus! he did not have to spend two full pages of deliberately hostile provocation.”
In fact, the president’s response, while formal and a bit distant, was hardly hostile. “I personally considered your letter and discussed it with my advisers, before coming to a final decision,” it read in part. “I approved execution of this test only after considering its importance to our national security—and only after receiving the Atomic Energy Commission’s assurances that extensive safety checks had clearly demonstrated that there was no cause for concern.”
The entire tone was respectful and reassuring. And if Johnson also let Hughes know who was president, still he had gone to extraordinary lengths to deal with the billionaire’s protest. Certainly few other private citizens, if any, could have caused the commander in chief to withhold until the last minute approval of a nuclear test deemed vital to national defense.
To Hughes, however, the president’s letter was a deliberate slap in the face. Not only had Johnson failed to stop “Boxcar,” not only had he refused to move all future blasts elsewhere, but he had kept Hughes waiting two weeks for a reply.
Perplexed and indignant, Hughes studied Johnson’s response, reading and rereading it to find hidden meanings, his outrage mounting. By the next day he was certain his original interpretation had been correct.
“There was nothing in the President’s letter to suggest any decision beyond the one taken when they went ahead with the last explosion,” pronounced the frustrated exegete. “I read the letter with microscopic care. I looked minutely for some in-between-the-lines meaning. I could find none at all. Everything he said seemed to be an elaborate, over emphatic defense of his position….
“Now, Bob, this entire affair is becoming more puzzling every day….
“When I say ‘puzzling’ I mean this:
“He did not answer my letter until 2 weeks after he received it.
“This, above, coupled with the strange tone of his letter, suggests two things to me—Either (a.) that he waited the two weeks for me to contact him and work out a straight-forward ‘deal’ on this problem, and then became angry when I failed to respond and let me have the hostile letter, or (B.) that during the two week period he was negotiating with representatives of R.E.E.Co. or E. G. & G. [the test site’s two private contractors] and finally made a deal with them….”
Of course. It was all so obvious. How could he have missed it? The president had been expecting a bribe, and when the billionaire failed to come through, turned instead to the opposition for his graft.