The Day We Lost the H-Bomb: Cold War, Hot Nukes, and the Worst Nuclear Weapons Disaster in History

by Barbara Moran

  Floating out over the sea, Wendorf saw several small fishing boats below. When he got closer to the sea, he tried to steer for one of them. But as he pulled the riser, he accidentally collapsed his chute and plummeted into the cold water. He swam to the surface, buoyed by the rectangular survival kit that was somehow tucked under his right arm. He inflated his life preserver and floated in the water, waiting for help. Like Rooney, he had landed about three miles out from shore. The two men had hit the water astonishingly close to each other but didn't know it. The waves rolled too high for them to see very far. Within ten minutes, the fishing boat Dorita was chugging toward Wendorf. The crew threw him a life ring and pulled him on board. Wet and shivering uncontrollably, Wendorf was stripped of his clothes and wrapped in blankets. As he lay on the deck, he glimpsed Rooney, bobbing on the waves as the boat approached. Rooney had been in the water for about an hour, growing increasingly frustrated that he had survived a plane crash but was now going to die of hypothermia. The fishermen pulled Rooney aboard; he was bleeding badly from a gash in his leg. As they wrapped him in blankets and gave him hot coffee, Francisco Simó—the fisherman who had tried and failed to rescue the unconscious man—approached in the Manuela Orts. The captains agreed that the Dorita should hustle the injured men back to shore while Simó looked for more survivors. Simó headed toward his brother, who was steering the Agustín y Rosa toward a floating parachute some five miles distant. The Dorita headed to Aguilas.

  As they motored toward shore, Rooney and Wendorf lay on the deck, shivering under a pile of blankets. Wendorf turned to Rooney and tried to make a joke. “The only thing that could complete this day,” he said, “is if this was a Russian trawler.” Rooney doesn't remember laughing.

  The shore was crowded with curious onlookers. In his excitement, the Dorita's captain crashed into the dock, giving the passengers a good knock and badly damaging the boat. Two bread trucks were waiting nearby to take the injured airmen to the local infirmary. Rooney remembers lying on a wooden bench in the back as the truck struggled up a windy mountain road. “Every time I looked up, the driver's looking back at me to see how I'm doing,” Rooney said. “And I'm turning to him saying ‘Look at the goddam road!’ I've already been in a plane crash and a boat wreck, and if they get me in a car wreck, that's going to be three strikes and I'm out.”

  Larry Messinger had a longer journey to safety. As he ejected from the exploding B-52, he knocked his head hard enough to make him woozy. Disoriented, he pulled his rip cord immediately, opening his parachute at 31,000 feet. “I shouldn't have done that,” Messinger recalled. “I should have free-falled and the parachute would open automatically at fourteen thousand feet. But I opened mine anyway, because of the fact that I got hit in the head, I imagine.”

  Messinger, fighting the strong wind, drifted out to sea. Helplessly, he watched the coastline dwindle as he sailed farther and farther over the Mediterranean, miles past the spot where Wendorf and Rooney landed. Finally he splashed into the sea, about eight miles from land. Messinger inflated his life raft and climbed in. He floated for about forty-five minutes, riding huge swells and shivering from the cold. Eventually two fishing boats approached. Simó's brother, in the Agustín y Rosa, got to him first. The crew pulled him aboard, stripped off his soaking wet clothes, and wrapped him in a blanket. Then they gave him a shot of brandy and headed to shore.

  When Air Force officials visited his bed in the Aguilas infirmary, Messinger remembered something important. Drifting over the ocean below his parachute, he had seen something odd in the water below, off to the side. It was a huge ripple on the surface of the sea, “like when you drop something in the water and it makes a big circle,” he said. Messinger told the officials about the huge circle in the water. As far as he knows, they never did a thing about it.

  That evening, a helicopter took the survivors to nearby San Javier. There they boarded a plane for the U.S. air base in Torrejón, near Madrid. The next day, the accident board convened at the air base. The investigators questioned the men separately and told them not to discuss the accident among themselves. Wendorf recalls no one asking him about the four nuclear bombs missing from his plane, and he didn't venture any guesses. The interrogation continued for two days. Then the investigators took the survivors' statements and left.

  The survivors stayed at Torrejón Air Base for two weeks to recuperate. One day, a week or so after the accident, Wendorf, Messinger, and some other Air Force personnel were shooting the bull. They started talking about the accident, trying to remember how many parachutes they had seen after ejecting from the plane. As Wendorf replayed the scene in his mind, he recalled seeing a couple of survival chutes and then remembered something else. Survival chutes, which carry people, are orange and white, so they can be easily found. Bomb chutes are more of an off white or dirty yellow. Wendorf had seen an off white chute. Suddenly he realized that it must have been one of the bombs falling to the ocean. Messinger, startled, told him about the giant circle he had seen on the water.

  The two men looked at each other. Each one went into a separate room. Someone ran and got a couple of maps of the Spanish coastline. Separately, each man marked the map where he thought a bomb might have hit the water. When they compared marks, they were about a mile apart.

  An Air Force aide took the maps and “ran off like he discovered gold,” said Wendorf. A couple of days later, the survivors boarded a plane home to North Carolina. Rooney had bought a new copy of Thy Tears Might Cease but decided not to read it in the air.

  At 7:05 a.m. Washington time on January 17, just about the time that Spanish fishermen were plucking Wendorf, Messinger, and Rooney from the cold Spanish sea, Lyndon Johnson sat in his bedroom eating a breakfast of melon, chipped beef, and hot tea. A messenger from the White House Situation Room walked in and handed the president his daily security briefing. The first page of the memo offered dismal news from Vietnam: a series of Viet Cong attacks against government installations; a mine explosion under a bus that had killed twenty-six civilians; a deadly raid on an infantry school. The second page held only one item: an early report of the accident, peppered with inaccuracies. It read:

  B-52 CRASH

  A B-52 and a KC-135 Tanker collided while conducting a refueling operation 180 miles from Gibraltar. The B-52 crashed on the shore in Spain and the Tanker went down in the sea. Four survivors have been picked up, and three additional life rafts have been sighted. The B-52 was carrying four Mark 28 thermonuclear bombs. The 16th Nuclear Disaster team has been dispatched to the area.

  President Johnson picked up the phone and asked for Bob McNamara.

  3.

  The First Twenty-four Hours

  Manolo González Navarro believed in fate. He believed in visions. As a boy, he had sometimes seen a plane flying far overhead—a strange and wonderful sight. Since that time he had experienced a specific, recurring premonition. In it, he saw an airplane crash and went to look at the wreckage. Over the years, the thought came again and again, until it seared into his mind's eye with the permanence of memory.

  González did not find the premonition disturbing; he simply accepted it. But even he would have to admit that the vision was an odd one, given that he had grown up in the tiny farming village of Palomares, far from any airport or air base. In recent years, however, he had had a daily, fleeting encounter with the U.S. Air Force. Each morning, just after 10 a.m., a set of American jets passed high over his town. They had not inspired his vision, but they would certainly fulfill it.

  At 10:22 a.m. on January 17, 1966, González was sitting on his motorcycle talking to his father. The white contrails marking the paths of the American planes appeared overhead, just as they did every morning, and the two men looked up. They saw the contrails in the sky and then an explosion.

  Fiery debris rained onto Palomares. A section of landing gear smashed through a transformer in the center of town, cutting off electricity to a handful of homes. The B-52's right wing crashed into a tomato field,
the fuel inside igniting and blazing orange. The tanker's jet engines, filled with fuel, screamed down to earth, thudded into the dry hills, and burst into flame. Black smoke hung in the air; twisted shards of metal lay everywhere.

  González and his father watched in horror. Immediately Manolo's thoughts turned to his young wife, Dolores. Five months pregnant with their first child, she was teaching at a local school that morning. Worried that debris would hit the school, he sped to his wife on his motorcycle.

  Dolores had just opened the school doors when the windows started to rattle. At first she thought a small earthquake was shaking the building. Then one of the students shouted that fire was falling from the sky. Everyone ran to the windows, watching the fire and smoke. Soon the storm passed, leaving the school unscathed. A passel of worried mothers arrived to collect their children, and Manolo roared up on his motorcycle. He made sure that his wife wasn't hurt, then rode off to see if anyone else needed help.

  González dropped off his motorcycle, climbed into his Citroën pickup truck, and rumbled off to the hills surrounding the town. The village had no paved roads, making travel slow and dusty. Even the main road into town was hard-packed dirt. Not that it mattered—usually nobody was rushing to get in or out. Palomares was just a tiny farming village in the back of beyond. It didn't even appear on most maps of Spain.

  Palomares sat on the southeastern coast of Spain, about forty miles south of Cartagena. To the south lay the Costa del Sol, booming with foreign tourists and high-rise hotels. To the north stretched the Costa Blanca, also popular with European travelers. Between them lay a Costa without a catchy name and the town of Palomares. Palomares had a beach, the Playa de Quitapellejos, but its sand was hard-packed and windswept, unattractive to both tourists and townspeople. The town itself rested on a gentle rise about a half mile inland.

  Despite their proximity to the Mediterranean, the villagers of Palomares worked the land, rather than the sea. Around the town lay the evidence of their labor—flat plains furrowed with farmers' fields. On either side of the fields, mountain ranges ran down toward the sea. The “mountains” were actually large hills, deep brown from a distance and desert tan up close, thick with scrubby gray-green bushes, prickly pear cactus, and tall, spiky agave. The landscape looked remarkably like the American Southwest—so much so, in fact, that areas nearby had served as sets for spaghetti westerns. A few years earlier, Clint Eastwood had graced the desert to film his hit movie Per un Pugno di Dollari, better known to American audiences as A Fistful of Dollars.

  For the most part, the 250 or so families living in Palomares farmed the land or raised sheep. In ancient times, people had mined and smelted ore from the nearby hills. But the mines had been tapped out long ago, and farming now seemed the only real option. But it was not an easy one. The town lay in the Almería desert, the most arid region of Europe. The region is so parched that when people speak of a “river,” they actually mean a dry riverbed. In the rare cases where a river runs with water, locals call it a río agua. At the time of the accident, the last measurable rain had fallen in Palomares on October 18, 1965, about three months earlier.

  Faced with these tough conditions, forward-thinking farmers had formed an irrigation cooperative about a decade before. With money borrowed from local banks, the men had sunk nearly a hundred wells and created a pumping and irrigation system to water the dusty fields. They also started using chemical fertilizers. These upgrades allowed the farmers of Palomares to scrape together some respectable crops, including wheat, beans, alfalfa, and, most important, tomatoes. In Palomares, tomatoes ruled the roost. They were the town's crown jewels, its salvation. Under the relentless desert sun, they grew into magnificent, succulent red orbs, prized throughout Europe. In 1965, the town sold 6 million pounds of tomatoes to cities in Spain, Germany, and England.

  Tomatoes had given the tiny, isolated town a measure of prosperity. Though most villagers still lived in small, low houses attached to animal pens, they kept the outside walls neatly whitewashed and the inside rooms brightened with electric lights. The townspeople had enough money to support seven general stores and three taverns. Some villagers still rode donkeys, but others had made the leap to motorized transport. All told, the residents owned fourteen cars and trucks, a handful of tractors, and a lot of scooters. Exactly eight television sets flickered their blue glow in Palomares. Most homes had radios. Few, however, had indoor plumbing. The nearest phone, in the town of Vera, was fifteen miles away.

  Manolo González was more privileged than most of his fellow townspeople. His father, a prosperous landowner, was known as the “Mayor of Palomares.” Palomares didn't actually have a mayor, but the elder González worked for the post office in Cuevas de Almanzora, about fifteen miles away. Since Cuevas was the seat of local government and González was the senior civil servant in town, any local administrative duties naturally fell to him. His son Manolo had inherited some of this status. A cheerful, outgoing man, Manolo trained as an electrician and never had to work the fields. He and Dolores were good-looking and youthful, more middle-class than peasant farmer. They lived in a house adjoining the school. The house had a bathroom with a small sink and toilet but no running water. Like almost everybody else in Palomares, Dolores had to carry water from a nearby well.

  González drove his little Citroën down rutted tracks past fields of ripening tomatoes and headed to the nearby hills. He had seen an orange-and white parachute falling to earth and wanted to investigate. When he arrived at the chute, he saw an ejection seat nearby, with a man still strapped to it. The seat had toppled forward and arched over the limp body. Another villager had already reached the man and started to cut the straps with a pocketknife. Together, González and the other man tipped the seat back and looked at the man. It was Ivens Buchanan, the B-52 radar operator who had ejected from the bomber and pulled his parachute out by hand. Still alive but barely conscious, Buchanan shivered violently. He said nothing except “I'm cold, I'm cold.”

  González drove the injured man to the medical clinic in nearby Vera. Then he sped back to Palomares to see what else he could do.

  Wendorf's bomber had not been alone in the sky at the time of the crash. It had flown the entire route in tandem with another B-52 from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. For the first third of the flight, Wendorf's plane had taken the lead. The two planes had planned to switch places after their turn around the Mediterranean. But after the first refueling, because of a minor radar malfunction in Wendorf's plane, he had relinquished the lead to the other bomber.

  When Wendorf's plane exploded, the other bomber, with its own companion tanker plane, was a couple of miles ahead, completing its own midair refueling. This gave the boom operator—the only man with a backward-facing window—a view of the explosion. The boomer shouted the news to the cockpit, and the tanker crew radioed the news to their base in Morón. At 10:27 a.m., the Morón Command Post radioed the Sixteenth Air Force headquarters at Torrejón Air Base near Madrid with the first news of the crash. The call sign for the undamaged tanker was “Troubador One Two”:

  Morón: We just received a call from Troubador One Two. He reports smoke and flames aircraft behind him, and he has no contact with aircraft. We're getting coordinates now.

  Torrejón: Roger, thank you very much.

  Torrejón: (Two minutes later) Was that in his aircraft or in the aircraft behind him?

  Morón: That was the aircraft behind him. Troubador One Two says they have not made contact with the number two bomber. Reported sighted smoke and flames behind their refueling formation.

  The tanker, after finishing the refueling, wheeled back to survey the scene. Flying at 4,000 feet, the crew reported what appeared to be the tail section of the B-52 in a dry riverbed, burning wreckage about a mile inland, and still more aircraft debris farther toward the hills. Meanwhile, Morón reported the incident to SAC:

  Morón: Believe possible mid-air collision KC-135 and airborne alert B-52. It is not confirmed at this time. Wa
s reported from Troubador One Two. The boomer sighted a burning aircraft spinning behind him in the formation. They have been unable to contact either the bomber or the tanker. The KC-135 from Morón Tanker Task Force … The B-52 from Seymour. Of course, weapons aboard.

  As the news crisscrossed Spain and the Atlantic, the phone rang on the desk of a twenty-nine-year-old Air Force lawyer named Joe Ramirez. Ramirez worked in the staff judge advocate's office at the U.S. Air Force base at Torrejón. The person on the phone told Ramirez to get over to headquarters on the double.

  Ramirez grabbed a notebook, told his boss about the call, and hustled across the street to headquarters. In the war room, things were humming. “The general was there, and people were running around back and forth,” said Ramirez. “We had sketchy information at the time, but I did learn that there had been a crash between a B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker.” Ramirez knew that those were big planes and that the tanker had been full of fuel. A crash between them could be catastrophic.

  Ramirez had never heard of Chrome Dome and had never seen a nuclear weapon. He worried more about damage from falling aircraft debris. He learned that the crash had happened over a remote part of Spain and was told to be ready to fly down there soon, probably within an hour, to help assess the damage on the ground. Ramirez went back to his office, grabbed a “claims kit” full of forms, and called his wife. He told her that there had been a crash and he had to go somewhere in southern Spain but would probably be back that evening or the next day. Around 12:30 p.m., he boarded a cargo plane with thirty-five other members of the disaster control team and headed for a town that nobody had ever heard of. He still had the keys to the family car in his pocket.