John Wayne's Tragic End: The Chilling Truth About Government Lies and Coverups Before He Died From Stomach Cancer
John Wayne's tragic end has revealed chilling government lies before his death from stomach cancer.
May 12 2025, Published 8:00 a.m. ET
While starring in nearly 170 movies, tough guy John Wayne survived Wild West fights, cold-blooded gunslingers and Mob hit men, but he died a victim of America's obsession with developing nuclear bombs and the government's outrageous lies about the safety of testing, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
The Duke was doomed while shooting the 1956 Howard Hughes-produced Genghis Khan flop The Conqueror, along with dozens of cast and crew members.
The film was shot in Utah's Snow Canyon to replicate the arid Gobi Desert. Daytime temperatures reached a bubbling 120 degrees, and Wayne suffered tremendously in the scorching heat.
Most of the people working on the set of the movie didn't know the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had tested 11 nuclear weapons in nearby Nevada's Yucca Flat less than a year before.
After one of the blasts, thousands of sheep died. At the time, the AEC insisted the mass die-off was the result of "unprecedented cold weather."
Howard Hughes unknowingly sealed fates by filming 'The Conqueror' in a radioactive desert.
Billowing clouds of radioactive dust had wafted down into funnel shaped Snow Canyon, and for 13 weeks, Wayne inhaled radioactive dust and drank tainted water from local streams.
The actor and his teenage sons Patrick and Michael even brought a Geiger counter into the desert.
"It is said to have crackled so loudly, Wayne thought it was broken," reported a newspaper. "Moving it to different clumps of rocks and sand produced the same result. Officials said the canyons and dunes around St. George, a remote, dusty town where the film was shooting, was completely safe."
It wasn't.
Susan Hayward's tragic brain cancer death echoed the hidden dangers lurking on set.
By 1980, a staggering 91 cast and crew members out of 240 people from The Conqueror had been diagnosed with cancer, 46 died from it.
Director Dick Powell got cancer and died in 1963.
The same year, Pedro Armendáriz, a Mexican actor who played Khan's right-hand man, Jamuga, shot himself after being diagnosed with terminal neck cancer. Susan Hayward, who played a Tartar princess, died of brain cancer in 1975.
Co-star Agnes Moorehead was a health freak, yet died of uterine cancer in 1974.
Wayne's sons Michael and Patrick had visited the set often. Michael developed skin cancer, and Patrick had a benign tumor removed from his breast.
One researcher said the percentage of the production's workers who succumbed to cancer "qualifies as an epidemic."
John Wayne's legacy was scarred not just by cancer, but by the silence that followed the fallout.
Wayne beat lung cancer in 1964 but died from stomach cancer in 1979. After his death, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Nuclear Agency said, "Please, God, don't let us have killed John Wayne."
But the evidence speaks for itself. Beginning in 1951 and continuing over the next 11 years, the U.S. government set off more than 100 bombs in the Nevada desert.
Radioactive dust blew across wide, mostly uninhabited areas of Nevada, Utah and Arizona.
The feds didn't seem to think there was much to worry about at the time and even set up viewing areas for curious Americans to come out and watch the huge mushroom clouds rise into the sky.
"Your best action is not to be worried about fallout," said an AEC booklet.
Director Dick Powell was among the first to fall, dying of lymph cancer in 1963.
Families and lovers would drive to vantage points for the spectacle, then drive home as ash wafted down on their communities.
Las Vegas Strip cocktail waitresses, who clocked out in the early morning when the blasts would occur, wore sunscreen and sunglasses, believing it would protect them from whatever mysterious dangers followed the booms in the desert.
And the government never warned them otherwise. But a short time later, residents and then their descendants paid the price.
"It's gone into our DNA," said the late Michelle Thomas, a woman who lived in St. George and later became a global activist against nuclear testing.
"I've lost count of the friends I've buried. My government lied to me... I remember how they had scientists all dressed in HAZMAT suits stopping traffic out of Snow Canyon so they could run Geiger counters over the vehicles. People would ask if it was dangerous, and those scientists would lie and say, 'No ... these are just standard tests.'
"They knew better, they knew it was poison, but they let people go out there to be exposed so they could measure how much of it fell on them."
Wayne became the most famous casualty of a cover-up that buried the truth beneath desert sand.
For the movie's big battle scenes, giant fans threw up massive clouds of the radioactive grit, which enveloped the cast and crew.
Then Hughes carted 60 tons of the toxic sand back to Hollywood for scenes shot on a studio backlot.
Before filming, the AEC had reportedly given Hughes the A-OK to shoot in Snow Canyon, declaring the area free of contamination.
By 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services concluded that radioactive fallout from testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War had killed some 11,000 Americans, almost exclusively through cancer.
John Wayne was part of what a researcher called an "epidemic" of cancer deaths among those involved in the production of The Conqueror.
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Even in death, Wayne symbolized the silent toll of America's nuclear ambition and denial.
"It's a horrific legacy," University of Dundee medical school researcher Sue Roff told the magazine New Scientist in 2002. "The complacency of governments about acceptable levels of environmental radioactivity has been punctured by this authoritative report."
Since 1990, through the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, the U.S. government has paid out about $2.25 billion to 34,372 Americans who lost their lives or suffered from various cancers as a result of exposure to iodine 131, a dangerous isotope released during nuclear detonations.
While Wayne didn't live long enough to learn the truth, many say producer Hughes knew it all along, pointing to his guilty-looking behavior after The Conqueror was released.
When it flopped at the box office, Hughes shelled out $12 million in 1957 to buy every copy of the flick, bitterly calling it an "RKO Radioactive Production."
According to reports, he made himself watch the film once every day until his death in 1976 as punishment for the tragedies The Conqueror caused so many people.
