Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [93]
Now, suddenly, this sneak attack.
In horrified disbelief, Hughes picked up his newspaper and reread the government’s bland announcement: “Persons up to about 250 miles from the detonation may feel a slight earth tremor immediately following the explosion, particularly if they are on upper stories of high buildings or other tall structures.”
A message of doom clearly directed right at the penthouse. Ten days to zero and counting.
In his own kingdom, Howard Hughes was no longer the most powerful invisible force. The bomb was. Atomic fission—the ultimate in out-of-control power—was the ultimate terror to Hughes, who above all needed to be in absolute control.
He was determined, at all costs, to stop what he called “the bombing.” It became his greatest obsession. He would carry his battle through every level of government and finally into the White House, offering bribes to presidents and presidential candidates, trying, in fact, to buy the government of the United States, all in a desperate effort to stave off nuclear devastation.
Hughes had finally found a menace worthy of his madness. He had spent years casting about for a danger to justify his dread, drifting from germs to blacks to impure water, and now his paranoia had become so finely tuned that it focused on the central horror of our age. A full decade ahead of the rest of the nation, he recognized the infinite threat of nuclear power, and seeing it alone was, of course, in mortal terror.
The bomb was not hidden to Hughes. Indeed, the nuclear tests were the only happenings in the world outside that he could actually feel, the only external force from which he could not hide. His ninth-floor aerie vibrated from the explosions, the entire building swayed, the chandelier in his attendants’ office swung like a pendulum, the windowpanes in his own blacked-out room rattled behind the blinds, and the shock waves left him trembling in his suddenly unstable bed. All else beyond the penthouse was merely a TV show. This actually reached directly into his seclusion.
“When we came here, you will remember, it was a close decision between this area and one other,” Hughes wrote, reminding Maheu that he had almost instead gone to the Bahamas. “I finally chose this one, oddly enough, to avoid the hurricanes. Well I promise you I did not come here to avoid hurricanes only to be molested by some stupid ass-holes making like earthquakes.”
More threatening still was the unfelt, unseen, silent enemy—atomic radiation. Yet another form of contamination, it was all the more terrifying because, like the long-dreaded bacteria, invisible. There was no way to ward off the deadly rays, no possible “insulation.” Kleenex and paper towels could protect him from germs. Isolation, armed guards, and loyal Mormons could protect him from people. But nothing could protect him from the radiation.
That same radiation, he was certain, was seeping through the underground strata, poisoning the earth beneath Las Vegas and polluting the water whose purity so obsessed him.
“The whole operation just makes me want to vomit,” wrote Hughes, sickened by the thought. “I cannot for the life of me understand Laxalt permitting these bastards to dessicrate and lay forever waste, poisoned, and contaminated all of those miles and miles of beautiful virgin Nevada soil.
“I am not saying the bomb is unsafe in terms of leaving a crack in the middle of Fremont Street into which somebody might fall. I have said from the start that the real damage from these explosions was in the contamination of underground