Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [98]
If he couldn’t get the test delayed for free, he would gladly pay for a postponement: “I am willing to supply any funds required for additional overtime or other expenses involved.”
Would the delay set back the ABM project? Hughes would also finance a rush job “to achieve a completion of any weapons program based upon this test at the original target date for completion.”
Finally, he had a true inspiration. He would simply cover whatever it might cost to move the bomb test elsewhere. Preferably to a new site then being built in Alaska.
“If cost is disturbing the AEC,” wrote Hughes, “I feel so intensely about this thing, I will even pay the cost of moving this test to one of the other sites, out of my own pocket.
“I dont even know what the cost would be, and I would be at the complete mercy of the AEC, who would probably charge in everything under the sun, including the last three year’s payroll. But I will still pay it to resolve this problem, which, if it is not solved, is going to change the entire course of the remainder of my life.
“They have plenty of time to set up the test in Alaska.”
Yes, Alaska was the perfect place to banish the bomb. Moving expenses be damned. Indeed, Hughes had long been pushing the frozen wastes of the far north as an alternative test site, and he had gained some powerful allies.
Two months earlier he had personally called Governor Laxalt to propose the deportation. It was only their second phone conversation, and it left Laxalt shaken. Hughes was in a state of near-hysteria. He had just heard that the AEC was drilling an emplacement hole—the first early warning of an impending blast—and he wanted it stopped. Immediately. Hughes had gone on at some length about the hidden dangers of nuclear tests, about the contamination of earth, air, and water—especially the water—and about the invisible rays, telling the governor in great detail all about the rays.
Laxalt had seen the light. No sooner had he got off the phone with Hughes than he called the top man at the test site. Reached him at home with an urgent question.
“Why can’t you move all your testing to Alaska?” demanded the governor, ready to drive his state’s biggest employer out of Nevada, just to please one man.
Laxalt wasn’t the only statesman suddenly seized by Klondike fever. Soon a United States senator would join him. That really caught the AEC by surprise. It was Mike Gravel, the senator from Alaska.
Flown to Las Vegas on a private Hughes jet, put up in style at a Hughes hotel, promised Hughes money for his next campaign, Gravel dropped in on the Nevada bomb range to suggest that the nation’s entire nuclear test program be shipped north to his own state, then appeared on Hughes’s TV station to make his surprise invitation public.
And still the AEC balked.
Hughes had done everything but provide the dog sleds, but the ungrateful bombers rejected out-of-hand his generous offer of an all-expense-paid trip to Alaska.
Rebuffed, the recluse issued an ultimatum.
Either the United States would negotiate a reasonable settlement with the Hughes empire or Hughes would force an end to the country’s entire nuclear testing program.
“The way this fight lines up,” he calculated, “the AEC will prevail and shoot ‘Boxcar,’ then given time, we will find a way to scuttle, but completely, their whole god-damned program.
“This is not what I want and not what they want. That is why I say they will deal.
“If they try to ride roughshod over me and go ahead with this explosion,” he warned, “I will have absolutely nothing to discuss with them. They could not even get an appointment to get in the office, all the horses and tractors in Nevada could not get them through the door.”
But Hughes was confident that the government, faced with his ultimatum, would capitulate. It was just a matter of arranging a face-saving compromise, one that would allow the test-site personnel to avoid a grim and ignominious exile.
“I am personally positive that the