In 1956 Howard Hughes brought to fruition his passion for the story of Ghengis Khan: Through RKO he produced the film The Conqueror. By now, its failure and the fate of its cast and crew members is common knowledge, so I’d like to share with you some of the details about it, picked up through perusing the net.

Apparently the unlikely John Wayne as Kahn was the result of Twentieth Century Fox’s refusal to loan Marlon Brando to RKO for the part. Wayne didn’t want it, but Hughes recalled an unfulfilled contract Wayne had signed in 1939 so Wayne had no choice.  As a result, the unlikely giant found himself draped in flowing mustache and, in his usual paced and laconic manner, delivering the already wooden lines of the poorly scripted marauding vandal, Kahn. Cinema graphically, the film was doomed from the start while the story of its cast has become epic.

The film was shot in the 120 degree heat of the Yucca Flats, Nevada, 137 miles south of the United States Testing Site, Operation Upshot-Knothole. There, three years earlier, eleven atomic tests had been conducted, two of which were of exceptional size and resulted in a radioactive cloud covering the Flats for days and poisoning the area with its ash in the form of radioactive fallout. So we find photos of Wayne in the middle of the desert walking around with a Geiger counter. Unlike today’s dosimeters which can measure radioactivity as it accumulates over time, a Geiger counter measures radiation levels only at a point in time. So while Wayne was on the right track he was ill-equipped to make the point. Instead, time would do it for him.

Among a typical population some estimates suggest that before the age of sixty-four, about one in two hundred or a half of one per cent of the population is likely to die of cancer. Then there's a big jump in incidence between the ages of 60 and 70 with an end result that eventually as many as some twenty per cent of the population may die of cancer.  But the cast and crew of The Conqueror were by and large well younger than sixty years of age. Nonetheless, of the 220 persons among them by 1981, twenty-five years after the filming,  already 91 had developed cancer and 46 had died of it.  Estimates suggest that these rates were at least three times the expected rates. When compared to certain reports of average incidence, however, the percentage is much higher.

Among those taken by cancer were John Wayne (lung cancer), Susan Hayward (brain cancer), Agnes Moorehead, and Director Dick Powell. Today, some fifty years hence, their cautionary tale lives on with that of the rest of the cast and crew, a tragic reminder of the need to carefully tend our fragile environment.

RMR

It takes a cowboy to know one. Still, the better cowboy wears his gun in view and employs it only to end the suffering of an injured animal or when threatened by snakes or gun carrying rustlers.

So whatever the response of North Korea and Iran, there remains the option on the table that neither to my knowledge have yet discussed: Join Russia and the USA in ratifying and upholding the START agreement. And take steps to adopt a plan similar to Barack Obama's more civilized graded options one. The purpose? The world needs to move as quickly as possible toward reducing nuclear proliferation to the extent that nuclear weapons become obsolete. 

Bad enough that on the way we'll be drilling for oil now off the coast of Virginia. Bad enough that a humanist like Obama rightfully sees the notion of the use of graded options among potentially devastating conventional military choices as a move toward a safer world. Bad enough that we even need to consider how we might respond in the event of an invasion.

Cheers for a United States of America willing to point its Intercontinental Balistic Missiles (ICBMs) away from Europe and toward the open ocean . . . in case of accidental firing . . . and by so doing to move them from the category of constant direct accidental threat to that of constant ready-to-respond defense mechanisms. Cheers for a President advocating further negotiations with Russia even after the signing of the START treaty today.

But the next thing is to trust the US Senate to ratify the new START treaty. From what I've read it's somewhat iffy that they will. But it becomes much less iffy if we all contact our Senators and remind them that we really want it passed. Not only for ourselves, but for our sons and daughters. And for future generations.

RMR in Po-Town