Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [94]
In fact, Hughes was so afraid of the insidious atomic rays that he worried about aides he never saw or even spoke to becoming likewise contaminated.
“Please issue instructions to all of our people not to go anywhere near that test site,” he ordered. “And, to the extent possible, to stay away from the AEC meetings and briefings.”
A feared threat and a hated rival, the bomb was also bad for business. Hughes was certain it imperiled his entire two-hundred-million-dollar investment in Las Vegas.
“Who can possibly contest the fact that thousands upon thousands of tourists will be lost to Nevada if the testing continues and if Nevada becomes identified with the ghastly spectre of nuclear devastation?” he demanded.
“I have insisted from the start that any damage would be in the form of destruction to the attraction of this community as a peaceful paradise-like resort, at which people could get away from, and not be reminded of the gruesome, ever-present, over hanging threat of the ghastly image of the scarred and mutilated bodies which remained after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
“As I say, the future image of this area should, hopefully, represent a vacation resort of the very ultimate quality—not a military experimental testing ground for exterminating devices.”
While Hughes spoke of scaring off tourists, it was the billionaire himself who saw Las Vegas as Hiroshima. Although he often expressed his fears in terms of profit and loss, the lurid language of his memos and the shakiness of his scrawl betrayed a very real, very personal terror.
The fears were, in one sense, more than reasonable. Others may have learned to live with the bomb, or at least to ignore it after a 1963 treaty banned atmospheric explosions, the mushroom clouds disappeared, and the tests went underground. But Hughes, who well understood the potency of hidden power, was not beguiled.
“Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere were once considered entirely safe, and those who opposed them were laughed at,” he argued.
“Now, nobody in the free world would consider exploding a nuclear bomb in the air or in the sea.
“Who is to say that, in the future, contaminating the earth upon which we live may not be frowned upon just as much.”
Eventually a presidential panel would agree that the underground blasts posed grave risks. And ten years later, the forced release of suppressed documents would reveal an appalling truth: for a quarter-century the government had known its test program would condemn thousands of American citizens to disease and even slow death.
Ahead of his time, even prophetic in recognizing the dangers of nuclear experimentation, Hughes, however, was not opposed to nuclear weapons, nor was he really opposed to nuclear tests. He was opposed only to testing those weapons in his own neighborhood.
Indeed, the bomb was merely a focus for all his diffused fears. Nightmare visions of nuclear annihilation exploded in his mind. Time and time again Hughes would return to the “gaunt, ghastly horrors and tragedies of nuclear warfare with all its ghastly residue of burned, maimed, mutilated and scarred human flesh.” Life in the penthouse became a never-ending scene from On the Beach.
And under that strain, Howard Hughes became a mad prophet of doom. He already looked the part, and had he been a man of equal madness, lesser means, and greater moral fervor, he might have taken to the streets, become a sidewalk savior, waving a placard, carrying to the masses his message of impending devastation.
Instead, he remained in hiding and scrawled his apocalyptic visions on his bedside legal pads.
“If the gigantic nuclear explosion is detonated,” he warned, “then in the fraction of a second following the pressing of that fateful button, thousands and thousands, and hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of good potentially fertile Nevada soil and underlying water and minerals and other substances are forever poisoned beyond the most ghastly nightmare. A gigantic abyss too horrible