To Kill the Duke (23 page)

Long before Stalin was coming up with film festivals and decadent viewers, Hughes was thinking about cornering the market in metal dinner trays; Powell was appeasing Oscar Millard; Mr. Zavert was gathering information on his opponents; Viznapu was standing in cold lines; Gila was learning to become a chef; Aleksandra was learning to kill; Wayne was thinking of playing a barbarian; the United States was actively detonating nuclear bombs at its top-secret Nevada test site.

A lot of bombs.

Sure, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was doing it as well. Somewhere between the time Stalin started his debauchery-filled film festivals at the end of World War II, right up to the present.

But there was a difference.

A big difference.

The Russians were not detonating their bombs near populated areas.

The Americans were.

St. George, Utah is exactly 137 miles northwest of the Nevada test site. This is the area where
The Conqueror
would be filmed.

The Cold War warriors, who came into prominence after World War II when the Iron Curtain fell across Eastern Europe, were now in charge of Washington, D.C. They were obsessed with destroying Communism. They went down many avenues to achieve this goal. Although ruining the reputations and careers of some Americans proved popular, the bigger goal of mass producing weapons to scare the shit out of the Communists proved more profitable. These Cold War warriors reached their nadir when the bully-pulpit investigative unit known as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) decided to ‘clean up’ America. While they were getting out their brooms and dust pans, they found a spy named Alger Hiss and even managed to execute two people named Rosenberg. They also succeeded in installing their ‘boys’ — Richard Nixon as a leader in the House of Representatives and Joe McCarthy in the Senate. These warriors were the bad asses of American domestic policy. Worse, they knew it. But worse of all, Americans of every stripe were very afraid of them.

Our weapons had to be bigger and more dangerous than anything the Communists could ever develop. Setting off nuclear explosions within our own country would prove to the Communists that Russia could well be next. These self-proclaimed defenders of Capitalism and America could only see with their blinders on. After all, if the Cold War warriors would allow radioactive bombs to be detonated over their own citizens, would bombing Russia be such a big deal?

Scaring the Communists and their allies was something that had to be maintained at all times. And what better scare tactics than detonating one nuclear device after another? Surely the Russians had spies watching every single move made by these cold warriors? Why not impress these spies by scaring the shit out of them with good old American know-how in the form of above-ground nuclear detonations? By being aggressive, they would drive home the point that America would not hesitate to strike
first. After all, America had already dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, and that was only a few years ago.

In order to maintain a more macho image, Americans involved in the planning of the Cold War had to know what types of nuclear bombs would produce what type of results. The only way to determine this would be tests — lots and lots of tests.

The Cold War movers and shakers decided upon air-dropped nuclear bombs. They started at the old Nevada test site, where Oppenheimer et al had created the first bomb, and gave the projects monikers to fit the times. Operation Ranger, Operation Buster-Jangle, and Operation Tumbler-Snapper were all aptly named for the cause known under the umbrella name of Operation Faust.

The generals, senators, representatives, contractors, scientists and all the others in charge of keeping America safe from Communism had left no stone untouched in showing off their nuclear arsenal.

A remote area in the sprawling Nevada test site, which is buffered from public access by vast, federally owned chunks of land totaling more than 1,300 square miles, was outfitted to look like a little town with mannequins set up to symbolize people. Cheap homes were built. Vehicles were parked around the town and on driveways. If you looked at the guinea pig community with binoculars, it could be any small town in any part of suburban America. They even dressed the mannequins in the American clothing style of the day and built the structures to look American with parked American cars all around the town! The militaristic marionettes in charge of building this phony town marveled at their attention to detail in order to view what the level of destruction would be like. They didn’t get the irony that it was a model
AMERICAN
town about to be blown up into a million little pieces.

They might have thought they were blowing up puppets, mothballed trucks and cheap buildings. They smiled when they viewed the images that the high-speed cameras, set up in and around the community at ground zero, gave them. Pictures of paint boiling off the buildings as the first shock wave came through and flattened their fictional town, made them jump up from their chairs and punch the air with clenched fists at the power they now held.

They didn’t pay attention to the fine print, which showed that I-131 radioiodine from the bombs would probably float through the air to places close by, and infect up to 2,300 people with thyroid problems — eventually killing at least 120!

Then again, they must have reasoned that their target was Russia, not communities in rural Nevada, Arizona, California and Utah.

What did these nuclear-weapon upstarts know about wind currents?

Nothing.

Furthermore, what did mannequins tell them?

Nothing.

So these big shots decided on graduating from dummies to real, live people. They called on their loyal troops — American GI’s, soldiers, dog faces — the real reason why America had won the last war, for help. Of course the big shots had been told that there was a real threat to people (and other living things) that lived near and around the fall-out. In their minds they reasoned that any fall-out would blow to places miles away, not telling them anything about what would happen close up. This wasn’t good enough. They wanted their soldiers as close to ground zero as they could put them. This was a sure way to prove to the Communists that America would go ‘all the way’ to win any war with them… after all, how many countries knowingly set up their own troops for the ultimate friendly fire?

Not only did the troops have to watch the bombs drop, they had to march to view the destruction, because once again the American Cold War warriors sprinkled vehicles and structures near the blast site.

The troops were in awe of the mushroom clouds and the total destruction of the items that had been placed in harm’s way. They were not protected from anything other than a ‘fizzle.’

A ‘fizzle’ was something the big shots hated.

Another word for a ‘fizzle’ was dud. There were a lot of duds in the beginning of the program. A dud meant nothing. No blast. No fallout. No scaring the Communists. In order to show the Communists which was the more macho country, the bomb to be detonated after the dud had to be larger than the previous dud in terms of blasting size.

Size was everything.

Because of a previous dud, it now became ‘Operation Tumbler-Snappers’ turn to wow everyone. The code name of the big bomb to be dropped was ‘Harry.’ It was 32 kilotons of massive firepower. It was 32 kilotons of a mushroom cloud that went up, stabilized and drifted over an area where a movie was going to be filmed. The big shots named ‘Harry’ after President Harry Truman.

While ‘Operation Tumbler-Snappers’ handlers were gift wrapping ‘Harry,’ Howard Hughes was growing impatient… something he loathed in others. This was making him mad at himself.

I hate impatient people
, he thought to himself as he looked at his watch and checked if it was showing the correct time against the clock on the wall in the outer office of the Pentagon big brass who had requested a meeting with him.

I have been waiting for three minutes already
he thought as he squirmed in the chair.
These chairs aren’t fit for people in jail
he thought as he pondered who the hell made the decisions about buying furniture in the government. Just as he noticed that it was going on his fourth minute of waiting, the doors to the inner office of the big shots flew open and all sorts of uniforms with brass buttons came out to greet him. The uniforms hurried him into the big room with men in different uniforms — the pinstripes of the politicians were joined at the hip to the men in uniforms when it came to wanting something from Howard Hughes.

As they always do at this level, the introductions started to turn into mini speeches. Hughes quickly started to bore and pulled out a legal pad and his engineer’s pencil. The big shots couldn’t see what he was writing, but grew louder and longer in speech for whatever it was they were trying to sell him. He was just doodling. Not surprisingly, most of his doodles were pictures of women with big breasts, airplanes with big wingspans and metal dinner trays with big meals on them. Every once in a while he made eye contact with whomever was talking and then he smiled. Sometimes he nodded. Most of the time he doodled, until he heard the word ‘fizzle.’

Howard Hughes had great contacts inside the government, as well as on the outside.

“What billionaire doesn’t?” he asked Dick Powell once.

Powell expected such things from Hughes. Hughes didn’t know people expected such things of him, so he was always confiding little tid-bits of information to the few people he trusted.

One of the men he trusted was a scientist who used to work for him at one of Howard’s many companies. On direct orders from Hughes, the scientist went to work for the Pentagon. Hughes kept the man on his payroll, and the man told Howard anything and everything. One of the items he had discussed with his former boss was the number of bombs that were ‘fizzling.’

“You mean duds,” Hughes said.

“Yes,” replied the scientist.

“Then why don’t they call it a dud? Why does the government insist on renaming everything?” Hughes asked.

“‘Fizzle’ for dud is the only one I know of,” replied the scientist.

“In dealing with government, up means down. Good means bad. Free means slavery,” Hughes said.

“I guess that is why they can’t run government like a business,” sighed the scientist.

“Government was never intended to be run like a business. You can’t run a business like the government. Know why?” Hughes asked.

The scientist wasn’t a philosopher; he was a scientist, so he shook his head no.

“Because that business would be
OUT
of business within days,” a beaming Hughes said.

“I think the only part of government that functions is the military,” the scientist said.

“Probably because it’s all about taking orders,” said Hughes. “However, don’t bet your life on that,” he added.

Hughes was brought out of this remembrance, because the current politician yapping in the meeting was severally misusing the English
language. Although HH loved to doodle during meetings, he always kept one ear open for dialogue that might interest him. After all, he was interested in dialogue; he owned a movie studio. Hughes always boasted that he could multi-task better than anyone else.

“This guy was so full of double-talk, I stopped drawing pictures of big boobs,” Hughes later told Dick Powell when they were discussing who Powell wanted Hughes to hire as the Tartar princess in
The Conqueror.