Monday, Sept. 15, 1997 | 9:25 a.m.
The federal government this week will make public many of the files it kept on Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire who developed into a persistent critic of nuclear testing after moving to Las Vegas in the mid-1960s.
The U.S. Department of Energy has completed a review of the files and will release them under President Clinton's three-year-old openness policy.
The once-secret letters, memos and notes will be made public Thursday. The unveiling takes place from from 6 to 9 p.m. at the DOE's Nevada Operations Office on Energy Drive, west of Losee Road.
Pat Bodin, declassification officer for the Nevada Operations Office, estimated that 98 percent of all DOE documents relating to Hughes and the Nevada Test Site will be released. Amounts and types of radioactive ingredients in the bombs are still secret.
When Hughes began building his Las Vegas resort empire in the mid-1960s, underground nuclear weapons experiments 65 miles away worried him.
In those days, the Atomic Energy Commission, now the DOE, ran the Test Site.
The documents to be released reveal a federal agency coping with constant demands for information from then-Gov. Paul Laxalt, Hughes' scientists and the billionaire himself. Among other things, they wanted to know about the size of the nuclear explosions and about possible air and water contamination.
James Reeves, former Test Site manager, learned from Hughes' top aide, Robert Maheu, that Hughes planned to build a research center in Las Vegas to study air and water pollution, including possible radioactive sources from nuclear testing. The center was never constructed.
Reeves feared that continued protests by Hughes could stir public and scientific opposition to the larger experiments the AEC planned.
In his dealings with the DOE, Hughes made it clear he was not against nuclear testing or national security, but worried about large explosions and their impact on the environment.
Hughes suggested the DOE move larger tests to central Nevada or Alaska.
The "Benham" blast, linked last week to plutonium discovered in groundwater, was a fusion explosion on Dec. 19, 1968, to test a weapon for the Spartan missile.
A story in the Feb. 8, 1968, Las Vegas SUN about a contract for digging a deep hole for an underground shot sent Hughes into a fury. He thought the AEC had agreed to quit testing so close to the growing city, where he had a penthouse suite at the Desert Inn.
Hughes called Laxalt, who then asked the AEC: "Why can't you move all your testing to Alaska?"
Not only did Hughes try to rid Nevada of nuclear experiments, he tried to delay them. An April 1968 experiment code named "Boxcar" prompted Hughes to demand a 90-day delay so his experts could conduct an independent safety analysis.
The AEC, in the thick of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, denied his request, saying "Any undue delay of the scheduled test would have a damaging effect on one of the nation's most important national defense programs."
One AEC memo describing Hughes' paranoia said that Maheu, a former FBI agent, believed his phone was bugged.
As the AEC continued its explosion schedule, Hughes said he delayed a $236 million renovation of the old Sands Hotel because ground shocks from the underground explosions might rock high-rise hotels in Las Vegas.
Later, the AEC told Hughes that the old Bank of Nevada building was one of the poorest in construction, the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel one of the best and that the Landmark and Sands Hotels, now demolished, were average. The AEC monitored high-rises in Las Vegas to measure ground motion from nuclear explosions.
The AEC prepared an information campaign with booklets and a film to calm public fears, especially Californians living on the quaking San Andreas fault.
While Boxcar exploded April 26, 1968, without damages to Las Vegas, the media scrutinized the AEC.
"After the test, the newspapers, including the strongly Hughes-oriented SUN, and the press associations made it very clear in their articles that Hughes' fears had proved unfounded," wrote AEC public affairs officer Henry Vermillion.
But Hughes marshaled support from Vice President Hubert Humphrey for an independent scientific committee to study nuclear testing in Nevada.
The AEC assured then-Sen. Howard Cannon, D-Nev., that the underground blasts did not cause earthquakes, although strong ground motion was often felt in Las Vegas.
"It is our belief, based on some factual information, that the protest from the Hughes organization was directed by Howard Hughes himself and was initiated because Hughes is fearful that radioactivity, in air or water, may reach him in some way," Reeves wrote to AEC headquarters in Washington, D.C.
But the Hughes scrutiny did not diminish.
By the end of 1968 the AEC prepared to meet with the governors of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, California, New Mexico and Idaho. Hughes wanted to fund a symposium through the Desert Research Institute, a research arm of the University of Nevada System, for independent investigation.
"My personal opinion," Reeves wrote to Maj. Gen. E.B. Giller in Washington, D.C., "is that if we follow a fairly open policy of release of information to the local public, the interest in such a symposium will diminish to point (sic) that Hughes organization will withdraw offer to finance cost thereof."
Hughes science adviser George Roth pressed for radioactive tritium testing of the water off the Test Site and probed how many underground blasts had vented or leaked.
Through the years after 1963, when an international treaty drove nuclear experiments underground, 161 experiments were officially announced. Of those, 18 released some radioactivity outside government boundaries, the AEC said.
Most released barely detectable radioactivity, but "Palanquin," a cratering experiment on April 14, 1965, resulted in "a significant release," the AEC documents said.
The "Pike" event on March 13, 1963, dropped nuclear debris over Southern Nevada. Some low levels of radioactivity were tracked to Cactus Springs and Indian Springs, less than an hour's drive north of Las Vegas.
The U.S. Interior Department tested the Colorado River down through Arizona for radioactivity, but did not find any amounts that posed a threat to public health.
Even "Pike," which sent a radioactive cloud over Las Vegas and Lake Mead, failed to leave "significant" contamination in the river or the lake, the AEC assured Hughes.
New Test Site Manager Robert Miller became impatient with Hughes' constant attention.
He believed "Hughes' own emotional concern with radioactivity and its possible effects" -- and not possible property damage to his Las Vegas holdings -- drove the billionaire's concerns.
Hughes excutive aide John Meier pursued inquiry into the 1-megaton blast "Faultless" on Jan. 19, 1968. An earthquake in Winnemucca and a magnitude 6 temblor in Salt Lake City followed the underground nuclear blast.
The AEC denied that quakes were caused by nuclear experiments.
And as to Hughes' worries about radiation in the air, "Schooner" on Dec. 8, 1968, packing about 35 kilotons of nuclear punch, "showed that only a very small amount of fission products entered the atmosphere, with the bulk of the radioactivity consisting of Tungsten 187."
And, the AEC wrote to Meier, the federal government was not concerned about uranium mill tailings strewn along rivers in the West, because the radioactivity did not pose a health threat.
But Meier shot back with more questions:
"Could a 3-megaton shot be fired in Pahute Mesa's volcanic tuff, its punch hidden from the public as well as the enemy?
"Why not drill deep wells along the Walker Lane fault to check for radioactive contamination?
"Is the AEC planning to conduct a 'programmed earthquake series' at the Nevada Test Site?"
The AEC answers to all these questions were no.
Hughes died in 1976.
President George Bush declared a nuclear testing moratorium at the Test Site in 1992. It is still in effect.
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