The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

by Barbara Moran

  The Office of Naval Research, which owned Alvin, had called Mac’s group on January 22, asking them to join the search in Spain. By that point, the Navy knew that the fourth bomb might have fallen into the Mediterranean. The water at Simó’s sighting was just over 2,000 feet deep, unreachable to divers. Minesweepers had scored plenty of sonar hits in the area but couldn’t identify them further. The Navy hoped that Alvin could dive deep and investigate the sonar contacts.

  At the time of the call, the Alvin crew had been finishing its annual “teardown,” taking every last bit of the little sub apart, checking and cleaning every component, and screwing it all back together.

  The group was based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, called WHOI (pronounced “who-ee”) for short. But that winter, they worked in an empty airplane hangar at nearby Otis Air Force Base, which offered more space than WHOI. They had been tearing Alvin apart since November, freezing their tails off in the cavernous hangar. An adjoining building, which housed the bathrooms, had the only running water. The Alvin crew ran hoses from that building, across the frozen ground, to get water into the hangar. Often the hoses would split and leak, the spurting water freezing into fantastic ice formations. The crew kept warm, or tried to, with sweaters and space heaters.

  Earl Hays, the senior scientist of the Alvin group, called the crew together and told them about the situation in Palomares. The Navy wanted Alvin in Spain, he said, but this was strictly a volunteer mission. Anyone could back out if he wished.

  This was not an idle question. Alvin was an experimental sub. It had first submerged to its test depth — 6,000 feet — the previous summer, under the critical watch of Navy observers. On that dive, all three of Alvin’s propellers had failed, leaving the sub deep in the ocean with no propulsion. But Alvin could float even if she couldn’t be steered, and she had made it to the surface safely. Prior to the test, Earl Hays had wisely created a set of code words so he and the pilots could discuss mechanical problems without the Navy brass understanding. The Alvin crew had played it cool, and the Navy was impressed. The next month, the sub had had her first (and only) real mission, inspecting a secret array of Navy hydrophones near Bermuda. But Hurricane Betsey had stormed through, allowing Alvin to make only three dives. When she had actually managed to get below 3,000 feet, her propellers had stopped without warning, then inexplicably started, then stopped again. Before heading home, the crew had managed one additional dive, to 6,000 feet. This time, the propellers had worked but the underwater telephone had not. The sub was a work in progress.

  Diving in Alvin was a risky endeavor, and now Earl Hays was asking the group to fly to Spain, to find — of all things — a hydrogen bomb. He asked if anyone wanted to back out. Nobody did.

  “We knew the country had a big problem and had to clean it up,” said McCamis. “Alvin had never done a project like this before. And we had no idea what we was getting into, but we was willing to try.” McCamis also hoped the mission would all ow Alvin to strut her stuff in front of skeptics. “It hadn’t proven itself to the scientific parties or the military,” he said. “No one was really paying any attention to it.” Art Bartlett, another electronics engineer on Alvin, agreed. He thought, “This is it. If we can go pull this off, we’re in good shape.”

  Bartlett had another reason to volunteer for the trip to Spain — he wanted to get off Cape Cod and out of the freezing airplane hangar. The crew scrambled to prepare Alvin and pack their gear. On February 1, a cargo plane carrying seven Alvin crew members and 35,346 pounds of gear took off from cold, windy Otis Air Force Base and headed toward Spain. The next day, the plane carrying McCamis, Wilson, and Alvin followed. Bartlett stepped off the plane at Rota and smiled up at the blue, 70-degree sky and the shining sun. Woods Hole had given him $500 spending money, and the young engineer felt as if he had hit the lottery. His colleague Chuck Porembski had brought a half bottle of scotch along for the mission. He said later that he should have brought more.

  When the Navy created Task Force 65, it shouldered the responsibility of finding bomb number four if it had fallen into the water. This was no small burden, and the Navy threw everything it had into the effort. On the day it established the task force, it also formed a small committee in Washington called the Technical Advisory Group (TAG). The five men on the TAG, each with expertise in salvage, oceanography, or deep-ocean work, were supposed to find technology, people, and resources that might be useful to Admiral Guest and then swipe them from other missions and send them to Spain.

  Looking around for deepwater gear, the TAG found that there wasn’t much on offer. The Navy, along with civilian scientists, had long struggled to explore the deep ocean. But its work, never well funded, had always lurched forward in fits and starts. By the time of the Palomares accident, Alvin, the experimental, temperamental minisubmarine, represented some of the most advanced deep-ocean technology in the world.

  The idea of Alvin had been born years before, in the mind of a geo-physicist named Allyn Vine.

  When the United States dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vine, perhaps alone in the world, saw underwater implications. Someday, he thought, submarines might carry nuclear weapons. And someday, one of these submarines might become marooned or lose one of those deadly weapons on the ocean floor. If that happened, the Navy would need a deep-diving ship for rescue and salvage.

  After the war, while Vine worked on underwater acoustics for the Navy at WHOI, the idea of a maneuverable, deep-diving submersible continued to grow in his mind. Vine thought that such a vessel could complement oceanographic research. And soon he saw another military justification for such a sub. By the 1950s, the Navy had built a secret underwater listening system called SOSUS

  (Sound Surveillance System) to detect Soviet submarines. During the Cold War, SOSUS involved a network of underwater hydrophones, positioned on continental slopes and seamounts, listening for enemy subs. Miles of undersea cable connected the hydrophones to listening stations on land. With all those hydrophones and snaking cables, Vine saw an opportunity. A deep-diving minisub would be perfect for inspecting and repairing the system. “Manned submersibles are badly needed,” Vine wrote in 1960, “to carry out on the job survey, supervision of equipment, and trouble shooting.” The Office of Naval Research, swayed by Vine’s arguments, signed a contract in 1962 for the sub that would become Alvin. Alvin’s curious name caused some consternation. Many suspected it was named for the irksome Alvin and the Chipmunks and considered it too frivolous for such a technological wonder. But the truth is that “Alvin” was a contraction of “Allyn Vine,” the name of the man who had first imagined the sub and had had the persistence to bring it to life. A year later, a national tragedy — one with direct bearing on the events in Spain — would prove him prescient.

  On the morning of April 9, 1963, the USS Thresher slipped from its berth at Portsmouth Naval Yard and sailed into the Atlantic. The Thresher rendezvoused with the USS Skylark, a submarine rescue ship, and together they sailed toward an operating area off the coast of Boston. The Thresher was the lead ship in a new class of nuclear submarines that would dive deeper, faster, and more quietly than any before and carry a more formidable payload. The ship had completed various sea trials in 1961 and 1962, and then spent nearly nine months in Portsmouth for inspection, repairs, and alterations.

  Now she was ready for a round of deep-diving trials.

  On the morning of April 10, the Thresher, sailing about 220 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, dove to four hundred feet and reported to Skylark that it was proceeding to test depth. (A nuclear submarine’s “test depth” is the depth at which she is designed to operate and fight; in this case, 1,300 feet.) The sea was calm; no other ships sailed nearby. Ten minutes later, at 9:13 a.m., the Thresher sent another message: “Experiencing minor difficulties, have positive up angle, attempting to blow.” At 9:17 a.m., Skylark received a garbled message, which seemed to include the words “test depth.” One minute
later, Skylark heard the words “nine hundred north.” That was the last message Skylark received from Thresher.

  By that evening, rescue ships had discovered an oil slick, as well as floating cork and heavy yellow plastic, all common materials on nuclear submarines. Searchers knew that the Thresher couldn’t survive much below her test depth, and the floating debris signaled a catastrophic failure. Within a day, the Navy knew the grim truth: Thresher was gone and all 129 men aboard had died, the worst death toll for a submarine accident in history. The Navy couldn’t save the men, but it had to find the wreckage. The Thresher was the first in a new class of sub, and three more like it were already sailing at sea. The Navy had to learn why the Thresher had sunk, to keep the other ships out of danger. They also wanted to ensure that the Thresher’s nuclear reactor hadn’t leaked and contaminated the ocean and to dispel Soviet propaganda on the subject.

  The Navy quickly organized a task force to find the wreckage, and put Captain Frank Andrews in charge. During the search, Captain Andrews had several Navy ships and submarines at his disposal, including a deep-diving vessel called the Trieste, purchased from the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard several years before. But because few tools existed for deep-ocean work, the search was slow, frustrating, and improvised. (At one point, the crew of the Atlantis II, a WHOI vessel helping with the search, built a small dredge from baling wire and coat hangers and dragged it from their underwater camera rig.) It took two summers for the task force to locate the debris, photograph it, and bring back a definitive piece of the sub. “One of the many lessons learned from this tragedy,” Andrews wrote later, “was the U.S. Navy’s inability to locate and study any object which was bottomed in the deep ocean.”

  Frank Andrews was not the only person to come to this conclusion. In April 1963, soon after the accident, the secretary of the Navy formed a committee called the Deep Submergence Systems Review Group. The group’s mission was to examine the Navy’s capabilities for deep-ocean search and rescue and recommend changes. The group, chaired by Rear Admiral Edward C. Stephan, the oceanographer of the Navy, became known as the Stephan Committee.

  The Stephan Committee released its report in 1964, advising the Navy to focus research in several key areas. The Navy should be able to locate and recover both large objects, such as a nuclear submarine, and small objects, such as a missile nose cone. It should train divers to assist in salvage and recovery operations anywhere on the continental shelf. Finally and most urgently, concluded the Stephan Committee, the Navy must develop a Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle (DSRV) to rescue submariners trapped in sunken ships. To make the Stephan Committee’s recommendations a reality, the Navy created a group called the Deep Submergence Systems Project, or DSSP.

  The Deep Submergence Systems Project landed on the desk of John Craven, chief scientist of the Navy’s Special Projects Office, which had overseen the development of the Polaris nuclear submarine. Craven knew that the DSSP was supposed to advance ocean search and recovery operations, not military intelligence or combat. But according to Craven, the intelligence community soon saw a role for the DSSP far beyond what the Stephan Committee had envisioned. Instead of just search, rescue, and recovery, the new technology created for DSSP could be used to gather information on the Soviets, investigating their lost submarines and missiles. Craven considered this a fine idea, though it ran counter to the original spirit of the mission.

  To staff the DSSP, Craven inherited a jumble of existing projects, such as SEALAB, a Navy program to build an underwater habitat where divers could live and work for months. Craven also inherited the Trieste and its crew. Because of the DSSP’s newfound intelligence-gathering role, much of its work was quickly classified, so that money seemed to disappear down a black hole.

  Senator William Proxmire awarded the project a “Golden Fleece” award for its monumental cost overruns, most of which, according to Craven, were simply being diverted to secret projects.

  Nearly three years after the Thresher disaster, on January 11 and 12, 1966, a conference called “Man’s Extension into the Sea” convened in Washington, D.C., to review the progress of the DSSP.

  In his keynote address, Under Secretary of the Navy Robert H. B. Baldwin said that this program, while chiefly serving the needs of the Navy, would also advance civilian science, engineering, and shipbuilding, and the general understanding of the ocean. Furthermore, he emphasized, DSSP was not just another money-sinking bureaucracy. Rather, it stood ready for action: I want to stress that we have no intention of building a paper organization with empty boxes and unfilled billets. Over 2,000 years ago, Petronius Arbiter stated:

  “I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”

  The Deep Submergence Systems Program is a viable organization. It is here — today — to serve both the Navy and the national interest.

  Less than a week after Baldwin’s speech, two planes crashed over Spain and four bombs fell toward Palomares. In contrast to Baldwin’s rousing speech, the DSSP was not exactly ready to leap in with both feet. The DSSP had moved forward in some areas but had postponed or neglected others. The program called Object Location and Small Object Recovery, which could have come in quite handy in Spain, was scheduled for “accomplishment” in 1968 and later estimated for completion in 1970.

  The Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle, which could have swum down to search for the bomb, had not yet been built. The DSSP did have the Trieste, but at the time of the accident, it was undergoing a major overhaul, sitting in bits and pieces in San Diego, and couldn’t be readied for a mission.

  The DSSP, created in 1964 for something exactly like the Palomares accident, simply was not ready.

  We had “almost nothing,” said Craven. “No assignments had gone on, nothing,” said Brad Mooney, a thirty-five-year-old Navy lieutenant who had piloted the Trieste during the exploration of the Thresher wreckage and remained with the Trieste group afterward. “Then, before DSSP really gets its act together, the bomb goes down. So all that they could do was get a pickup team to go over there. And it was a ragtag pickup team.” Brad Mooney and other veterans of the Thresher search were sent to Spain, along with a handful of SEALAB divers. But if people expected the DSSP to provide a detailed recovery plan, a crack team of searchers, and lots of shiny new gear, they would be sorely disappointed. “The Navy had achieved no interim readiness for search and recovery,” said the Navy’s final report on Palomares. “The entire operation, from its initial inception to its termination, was improvised.”

  9. The Fisherman’s Clue

  Back on dry land, the Air Force continued its tedious search for bomb number four. Joe Ramirez spent his days talking to locals, collecting data for damage claims, and listening for clues about the bomb. Conflicting information, possible leads, and various complaints whizzed around the young lawyer with dizzying speed. To keep track, he started jotting notes in a narrow notebook.

  Other pages held more interesting notes. One page read, “Antonio Alarcon Alarcon — House is next one over to south of La Torre. Have been moved out. Pig with litter of pigs — litter has to be fed.

  Why can’t they move the pigs?” Another page listed two names already well known to many searchers: Roldán Martínez and Simó Orts.

  One person who hadn’t yet heard of the two fishermen was Randy Maydew, the Sandia engineer who had overseen the computer calculations suggesting that bomb number four might have landed in the sea. At the request of General Wilson, Maydew had flown to Spain to help narrow down the search area. He was surprised by how much the Almería desert resembled Albuquerque, “except for that blue, blue Mediterranean out there.” But when he walked into Camp Wilson, he found that Air Force staffers didn’t have much regard for eggheads like him. This changed when General Wilson discovered that Maydew had also served in the Pacific during World War II. As a navigator in a B
-29 bomber, Maydew had flown thirty bombing missions, including LeMay’s famous firebombing of Tokyo. The missions did more to establish Maydew’s credibility with General Wilson than his engineering degrees or his years of research on bombs and parachutes.

  Though Maydew had won over General Wilson, by early February he was little closer to pinpointing bomb number four. Then, one morning, Joe Ramirez stopped by Maydew’s tent and told him about his interview with the Spanish fishermen. Ramirez knew that Roldán and Simó had seen something significant. Perhaps Maydew, with his engineering expertise, could put the pieces together. The engineer agreed to talk to Simó.

  On the evening of February 2, Maydew and Ramirez drove to Aguilas and interviewed Simó in the mayor’s office. Simó told the men his story. He told them about the small parachute carrying a half man with his insides trailing. And he told them about the dead man, floating from a bigger chute, who had sunk before he could reach him. Maydew asked the fisherman how much the objects hanging from the chutes had swung in the sky. Moving his hand in the air, Simó indicated that the “half man” below the small chute hadn’t swung much, maybe about 10 degrees. But the “dead man” under the larger chute had oscillated about 30 degrees.

  The information made sense: Maydew knew that the big sixty-four-foot chute would oscillate about 30 degrees as it fell, while the sixteen-foot chute would hardly sway at all. The engineer picked up a sheet of paper and roughly sketched the two parachutes, then asked Simó if they looked right. Simó examined the drawings and shook his head. Then he grabbed the pen and sketched his own, with greater detail. The engineer was astonished.