Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [110]
“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,