“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.
“The news announcer went on to say that there was no doubt whatsoever but that this explosion will far exceed anything ever set off around here.
“Bob, I think this is just disgraceful! Please let me hear from you if you are not too sleepy.”
The awakened Maheu, accustomed to his commander’s night fears and less awed by pronouncements from the video oracle, remained unruffled.
“We are quite confident that we will be successful in obtaining a 90 day delay,” he reassured his boss, pledging eternal vigilance. “This whole situation is so damned important that I beg of you not to hesitate to call upon me further this morning. We can rest at a later date. As a matter of fact, Howard, please, and I sincerely mean it, never consider me as a guy who wants to sack out when there is business to be conducted. Fortunately the good Lord has blessed me with an unusual constitution.”
Ready to stand watch in the night, Maheu was also busy by day, rounding up political allies while he assigned the resourceful John Meier to line up scientific support.
Meier, an inspired con artist who claimed two Ph.D.s but never actually got past high school, proved as adept at recruiting antibomb scientists as he was at swindling Hughes out of millions in bogus mining claims.
Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling soon joined the “Boxcar” protest, as did longtime nuclear foe Barry Commoner, whom Meier flew to Las Vegas to man the barricades from the comfort of a complimentary suite at a Hughes-owned hotel.
“We’re making a lot of progress,” Maheu reported to the penthouse. “Today the Vice-President requested data which is already on its way to his office. We have the State of Utah up in arms and their effects will be felt in Washington starting tomorrow. We are beginning to receive the data (wires from scientists) which Governor Laxalt requested. He now wants Governor Reagan to join in our efforts.”
Hubert Humphrey, Ronald Reagan, Paul Laxalt. Linus Pauling and Barry Commoner. Progress indeed.
The sense of triumph, however, was short-lived.
Maheu, having gathered the support of thirty “prominent scientists,” publicly announced his peace plan the next week. It drew an immediate and complete rebuff from the AEC.
“Boxcar,” the government agency declared, was a “weapons-related experiment, designed to improve the nation’s nuclear armament capacity”—specifically, to develop a warhead for the then-envisioned antiballistic missile system. A moratorium was out of the question.
“Any delay of the scheduled test,” the AEC maintained, “would have an adverse effect on national defense.”
Hughes was enraged. Not only had the peace been broken but his patriotism had been called into question.
“Where do they come off waving the American flag in my face and implying that I am some kind of bumbling idiot who, in his ignorance, might sabotage a one billion dollar defense installation?” he demanded.
“Me, who has done more for defense than the N.T.S. [Nevada Test Site] ever dreamed of. After all, only
two nuclear weapons have ever been used, and the N.T.S. did not exist at that time. My equipment has been used extensively in World War #2 and in Korea and in Vietnam.”
Moreover, Hughes was convinced that the AEC had lied. As an arsenal of democracy, he was not only privy to classified information but had actually helped develop the ABM.
“I am right on top of the entire anti-missile program for this country,” he explained. “We have actively bid on these projects since the first one about seven years ago. Actually, we had a large part of the first system that proved at all successful.”
The claim of national defense was, to his mind, entirely without foundation.
“Of course, we must be careful not to place ourselves in the position of disclosing military secrets,” cautioned the billionaire. “But I can tell you, based on actual Defense Dept. technical information legally in my hands, that this last AEC statement is pure 99 proof unadulterated shit.
“If you want to know the plain blunt truth, it is that these explosions are not needed for anything,” Hughes continued, now certain of his foe’s malevolence. “The AEC is only making an issue out of this because, if they do not, and if they stop blasting, then it will be demonstrated for all to see that all of this destruction and damage and all of these violations of ordinary decent conduct were totally without purpose.
“You take it from me that these tests have no valid military purpose! This is not conjecture or supposition, this is fact! I can even prove it!”
At commission headquarters in Washington, AEC officials were equally suspicious about, but considerably less certain of the hidden Hughes motives. Rumors that he was plotting to block the “Boxcar” test had been filtering in for days, including one report that the mysterious recluse had readied “a fleet of aircraft to follow the radioactive cloud” if the bomb was detonated.
Already the agency had received an unprecedented rash of letters and telegrams inspired by the Hughes protest, and officials worried about moves he might make in the political arena. In a constant flow of confidential cables between Las Vegas and Washington, they traded tidbits of fact and speculative theories concerning their strange adversary.
One “eyes-only” report claimed that his agents had offered bribes to several scientists in return for antibomb statements, another lamented that “Hughes’s fears concerning contamination and ground shock remain unpredictable,” while a third suggested that Hughes might be “kept in an agitated state by people connected with the Hughes Biomedical Foundation in Florida, with the hope that Hughes would abandon his Las Vegas interests and consider moving to Miami.”
All the while, the countdown at Pahute Mesa continued, as test-site workers began to cork the bomb shaft in final preparation for the big blast.
And now, after a week of illusory peace, with only four days left until the scheduled detonation, the battle of the bomb was finally joined in earnest.
Badly shaken by the rejection of his moratorium, Hughes resumed direct command of the campaign, forsaking sleep for the duration, ready to make any alliance, try any strategy, pay any price in his desperate bid to stave off nuclear attack.
His first instinct was to buy his way out of trouble. Despite his anger at the AEC, he would offer the agency a straightforward business deal.
If he couldn’t get the test delayed for free, he would gladly pay for a postponement: “I am willing to supply any funds required for additional overtime or other expenses involved.”
Would the delay set back the ABM project? Hughes would also finance a rush job “to achieve a completion of any weapons program based upon this test at the original target date for completion.”
Finally, he had a true inspiration. He would simply cover whatever it might cost to move the bomb test elsewhere. Preferably to a new site then being built in Alaska.
“If cost is disturbing the AEC,” wrote Hughes, “I feel so intensely about this thing, I will even pay the cost of moving this test to one of the other sites, out of my own pocket.
“I dont even know what the cost would be, and I would be at the complete mercy of the AEC, who would probably charge in everything under the sun, including the last three year’s payroll. But I will still pay it to resolve this problem, which, if it is not solved, is going to change the entire course of the remainder of my life.
“They have plenty of time to set up the test in Alaska.”
Yes, Alaska was the perfect place to banish the bomb. Moving expenses be damned. Indeed, Hughes had long been pushing the frozen wastes of the far north as an alternative test site, and he had gained some powerful allies.
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 t
he 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.
Citizen Hughes Page 22