Hughes almost got nuke bomb designs

Friday, Sept. 19, 1997 | 10:05 a.m.

The biggest bombshell in a stack of once-secret documents detailing what worried Howard Hughes about giant nuclear experiments at the Nevada Test Site was a memo indicating the brilliant billionaire would get bomb designs.

"They proposed to give Howard Hughes actual bomb design information," said Pat Bodin, the Department of Energy person in charge of shedding light on a mountain of secret documents concerning nuclear weapons experiments.

That document, released Thursday night at a DOE briefing in Las Vegas, promised to reveal one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union: nuclear bomb blueprints. Bodin said the revealing memo amazed her. "It surprised me," she said.

Of course, Hughes never received those renderings from the Atomic Energy Commission, forerunner of the Department of Energy. But the government felt plenty of heat from his organization about large underground nuclear shots fired 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Hughes approached then Vice President Hubert Humphrey in an effort to launch research into possible air and water contamination from the nuclear blasts. He also expressed concerns about developing any more resorts in Las Vegas, fearing a bomb explosion might trigger an earthquake.

Bruce Church worked with the AEC at that time and said the earth's shaking during nuclear tests seemed to bother Hughes.

"Remember, that was the era of large underground tests," Church said. In the late 1960s, when Hughes built his Las Vegas casino empire, the AEC ignited nuclear weapons equal to a million tons of TNT.

A shot named Benham exploded Dec. 19, 1968, with the force of 1.15 million tons of TNT. It released plutonium and other radioactive material almost a mile away from its crater on Pahute Mesa in the northwest corner of the Test Site.

"It was very easy to feel the ground shaking," Church said.

It's a changed world at the Nevada Test site today. President George Bush declared a nuclear testing moratorium in 1992. The moratorium remains in effect.

The Test Site hosted its second subcritical experiment Thursday, designed to tell scientists unknown information about plutonium shocked by chemical explosives. The test, more than 900 feet underground, didn't send even a slight shiver to the surface.