Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [95]
“I say Nevada is no longer so desperate for mere existence that it has to accept and swallow with a smile poisonous, contaminated radio-active waste material more horrible than human excrement.”
More horrible than human excrement. For the anally-fixated, chronically constipated billionaire, this was the ultimate imprecation.
Even before the impending test was announced, Hughes had had a premonition of doom. A month earlier, five thousand sheep had been killed in neighboring Utah when an Army biological-warfare experiment had gone awry. The frightened recluse instantly identified with the martyred flock. He took their slaughter as an omen, a clear sign that he too was in danger.
“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