Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [235]
My account of the October 1969 Las Vegas race riot was drawn from local and national press reports.
Sammy Davis, Jr., could not be reached for comment on Maheu’s claim that he promised Hughes “no damage would ever come to you from ‘his people.’ ”
6 Armageddon
The scene of Hughes discovering the impending bomb blast was recounted by an aide who was on duty in the next room. “I had seen the headline, and was watching to see how he would react,” said the Mormon. “We were all waiting for the explosion—not from the bomb, but from the boss.”
The AEC announcement of the “Boxcar” blast is quoted from local press reports. Emphasis was added to the final lines to reflect Hughes’s reaction to the warning that the impact would be greater on “upper stories of high buildings.”
In interviews two of the Mormons who were in the penthouse during a major nuclear test described the impact, and in memos to Hughes several of the aides filed after-action reports.
There is now no doubt that Hughes was right about the dangers of nuclear testing. A presidential panel reported in November 1968 that megaton-level underground blasts might trigger major earthquakes (see chapter 8, this page), and in December 1970 a huge radioactive leak from an underground test forced the AEC to admit that at least sixteen other blasts had spewed radiation beyond the test site, and that the Nevada Test Site itself was “unfit for public use for the forseeable future” due to extensive ground contamination.
Moreover, the forced release of suppressed government records recently revealed that as early as 1953 the AEC knew that above-ground nuclear tests exposed large parts of Nevada and Utah to lethal fall-out, yet continued the tests for ten years and publicly claimed they were entirely safe. In May 1984, in the first of several hundred lawsuits filed on behalf of 375 victims of the test program, a federal judge ruled that the fall-out caused ten cancer deaths.
Hughes was even right about the sheep. Not only had the Utah flock been killed by a March 1968 biological weapons test, but fifteen years earlier, in 1953, more than four thousand Nevada sheep died downwind of the nuclear test site, having absorbed a thousand times the radiation thought safe for humans. It was the first clear evidence of the danger, but the government lied, claimed the sheep had died of natural causes, and continued the blasts.
Accounts of the “Boxcar” operation, of all the other nuclear tests, and of the Nevada Test Site are based on AEC documents, government films of the explosions, interviews with AEC officials, and contemporaneous press reports.
The account of the AEC’s fears about Hughes and his impact on the test program is based on records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The government’s concern about Hughes was so great that his ban-the-bomb campaign generated almost a thousand AEC reports during his four years in Las Vegas.
Hughes’s call to Laxalt and the governor’s call to the AEC demanding that the tests be moved to Alaska are recounted in AEC reports dated February 8 and 9, 1968. AEC records reveal that Laxalt intervened on Hughes’s behalf on at least two other occasions, June 13, 1967, and January 11, 1969.
Senator Gravel’s suggestion that the nuclear tests be moved to Alaska is noted in an April 15, 1969, AEC report, as is his appearance on KLAS-TV. In an interview, Gravel admitted that Hughes flew him to Las Vegas and that he had a complimentary suite at a Hughes hotel; while he denied receiving Hughes money, he said he did expect a campaign contribution.
The subpoena threat came from Congressman Craig Hosmer, a member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy who later became a lobbyist for the nuclear power industry. Maheu said he killed the subpoena through committee chairman Senator Chet Hollifield: “You will be happy to know that we have been in touch with Holifield.… He guarantees that