Howard Hughes and the atomic bomb

Los Angeles Times
June 28, 2009
Howard Hughes and the atomic bomb
Why the Central Nevada Test Area conducted only one nuclear test puzzles even the aficionados.
By Ralph Vartabedian

At the center of a desolate valley in the middle of Nevada, more than a dozen miles from the nearest paved road, one of the few signs of human activity is a rusty steel well casing that juts oddly out of the desert floor. Nobody lives here, but it has a name: the Central Nevada Test Area. It was once a hub of scientific activity. Today, it is an abandoned outpost of the Cold War. In the lore of the nuclear arms race, the Central Nevada Test Area has occupied a special place of mystery. Only one test was ever conducted there, and even for aficionados, the reasons have never been entirely clear...

Just why the government detonated a bomb here is even more puzzling given that the sprawling Nevada Test Site was already set up officially for nuclear testing about 100 miles south. Philip Coyle, the former test director of the Nevada Test Site, has rarely spoken about the issue, but he does know the answer. It involves a peculiar effort by the government to placate one of the wealthiest men in the world.

In the 1960s, the U.S. and Soviet Union were engaged in an all-out nuclear arms race to see who could build and then detonate the biggest weapons -- almost a nuclear war by proxy. But in this fight, each side bombed itself. Every time a big hydrogen bomb was detonated on the Nevada Test Site, the tremors would shake the penthouse suite atop the Desert Inn in Las Vegas about 75 miles away and the frayed nerves of its sole resident, multibillionaire Howard Hughes... At the time, Hughes not only controlled the Las Vegas Strip and part of the nation's oil-drilling industry, but also one of the nation's largest defense contractors, Los Angeles-based Hughes Aircraft Co.

Hughes wrote a rambling letter to President Johnson, asking him to stop nuclear testing. And he dispatched aides with envelopes each containing tens of thousands of dollars for many of the candidates for the 1968 presidency, according to the authoritative Hughes biography "Empire." It was long assumed that Hughes' efforts were ignored. But Coyle said in a recent interview that the Atomic Energy Commission was under so much heat from Hughes, as well as other hotel owners, that the agency ordered a test to see whether a big detonation farther from the Strip would reduce the shaking there. "Howard Hughes was unhappy with the situation and complained about it to the AEC," Coyle recalled. "That's why Faultless was done."

The Faultless test involved one of the biggest hydrogen bombs ever detonated in the Lower 48 states...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-hometown-nuke28-2009jun28,0,1389110.story

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http://www.rachel-nevada.com/places_faultless.html

Project Faultless was detonated 3,200 feet underground on January 19, 1968 at 10:15am. The force of the explosion caused the ground in a radius of several miles to collapse, and created several deep fault lines that despite some "restoration" efforts by the AEC are still visible today. A steel pipe with a diameter of 7.4 feet had been drilled into the ground to place the bomb. Its top end was level with the surface before the test. After the explosion the top 9 feet of the pipe were exposed, due to the ground collapsing. The blast also created a huge cylindrical underground cavity, a so-called nuclear rubble chimney. It is approximately 820 feet in diameter, and 2,460 feet in height. At its bottom lies over 500,000 metric tons of highly radioactive rubble, with radiation levels similar to the core of a nuclear reactor.

this is a map showing the fallout from the nuclear tests in the United States..1951-1962
I was born in 1951, and when I turned 12 yrs old, I had a massive goiter and was diagnosed with hypothyroidism.
I often wonder why. my county is one of the ones in the red.
I have to take synthroid now to offset my ;dead; thyroid gland.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout

Fallout contains I131 which does affect the thyroid.
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/i131/get-facts-about-exposure/page2

too bad we cant sue the bastards.

You're probably not the only one. Maybe you can find some good lawyers who'd file a class action suit on contingency. Think about how much you've spent on Synthroid over the years, not to mention the suffering a young boy went through.