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

by Barbara Moran

  Though Joe Ramirez probably couldn't tell a nuclear bomb from a hot water heater, he proved to be one of the Air Force's most useful men in Palomares. As a lawyer, he was used to gathering spotty information from witnesses. In addition, Ramirez was the only airman deployed to Palomares that day who spoke Spanish fluently.

  Ramirez had grown up in a small south Texas town, and his parents spoke both Spanish and English at home. His father was a tall, handsome man who had taught himself auto mechanics and eventually ran his own garage. Though Joe and his brother spent plenty of time working in the shop—the two of them could overhaul an engine in a day—their father pushed them to excel in school, telling them that education was the ticket to getting out of south Texas and seeing the world. Buoyed by his teachers and his close-knit family and encouraged by success in language arts and public speaking, Ramirez went to college and then law school, joining Air Force ROTC along the way.

  Ramirez loved the Air Force. Soon after he was commissioned, he and his young wife, Sylvia, were stationed at Homestead Air Force Base, a SAC base outside Miami. Homestead often hosted Latin American politicians and dignitaries, and Ramirez was regularly asked to deliver briefings to top Spanish-speaking officials. He and Sylvia were often invited to important formal dinners, seated between Latin American generals and governors, and asked to make conversation and translate. This was heady stuff for the young couple, who were almost always the lowest-ranking people in the room. Because they spoke Spanish—and because he and Sylvia were gracious, charming, and discreet—the couple were given an entrée into a different world.

  Ramirez enjoyed his work, but by 1965 he and Sylvia had two children, with another on the way. With college tuition looming ahead, he had been thinking about going into private practice. To entice him to stay, the Air Force offered him a plum posting at Torrejón Air Base. Joe and Sylvia, who had never been to Europe, decided to take them up on it.

  Joe, Sylvia, and the two kids arrived in Madrid in the summer of 1965 and had a dramatic welcome to Spain. They flew overnight and arrived, exhausted, in the early afternoon. The Air Force had arranged for them to stay in a hotel in the center of town, on the main avenue called, at the time, Avenida del Generalissimo. They arrived at the hotel, climbed up to their room, closed the blinds, and collapsed into bed.

  Shortly before 5 p.m., Ramirez woke up. Careful not to disturb his sleeping wife and children, he tiptoed to the windows and peeked through the shutters. He was on a high floor and could see the roof of the adjoining building. Looking in that direction, he was startled to see uniformed men in strange black hats, armed with machine guns, running around on the roof. He looked across the street and saw more men, also heavily armed, on rooftops across the way. “My God!” Ramirez remembers thinking. “We've landed in the middle of a coup!”

  He woke Sylvia, then called the reception desk and asked what was going on. They said not to worry, it was just a soccer game. This didn't make a lot of sense until the desk clerk explained further: Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the ruler of Spain, loved soccer and would be attending today's match at the nearby stadium. The armed men were members of the Guardia Civil, Franco's paramilitary police force. The guardias civiles on the rooftops were advance guards. If you look out the window, said the clerk, you'll see the generalissimo himself in a few minutes. And sure enough, a bit later came the motorcade, with motorcycles and an escort car and Franco himself, with all the pomp and clatter befitting a military dictator. And watching from a hotel window high above was a young American family, enjoying the spectacle below.

  About twenty minutes before 2 p.m. on the day of the accident, less than four hours after the bomber and tanker had exploded in the sky, the plane carrying Joe Ramirez and the rest of the disaster control team landed at a Spanish air base in San Javier, north of Cartegena. They were met there by General Delmar Wilson, who had flown down from Torrejón with his staff a bit earlier and had circled above the wreckage on the way.

  Wilson was the commander of the Sixteenth Air Force, the SAC wing that supervised Torrejón and the other Spanish bases. He was a steady, capable leader, with the expected look of an Air Force general: tall, silver-haired, trim, and distinguished. More than one person described him as “straight out of Central Casting.”

  Wilson also had a unique link to the nation's nuclear history. Late in World War II, the Air Force had created the 509th Composite Group, a special unit of B-29s on Tinian Island that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan. Wilson, then a young colonel, was Curtis LeMay's liaison to the Atom Bomb Project. But since the project was top secret, LeMay couldn't actually tell Wilson why he was sending him to Tinian. When Wilson arrived, the staff at Tinian wasn't thrilled to have him there. “They looked on me as a spy for LeMay,” he said. “They ignored me.” Eventually a Navy captain took pity and clued Wilson in, starting off by asking “Have you ever heard of an atom?”

  Now, two decades later, Wilson had a big atomic problem on his hands. He had seen the tail section from the B-52 slumped in a dry riverbed and other wreckage spread over a wide area of desert, farms, and hills. Somewhere among that debris were four hydrogen bombs. At San Javier, he learned that three of the injured airmen lay in hospital beds in a town called Aguilas. He decided that he and his close advisers would visit them first. Wilson briefed the assembled disaster control team and sent them to Palomares, with orders to assemble at the tail section later.

  Ramirez climbed into the lead car of the caravan. Until now, most of Ramirez's legal work at Torrejón had involved young American servicemen who had gotten themselves into trouble, usually involving large American cars, narrow Spanish roads, and cheap alcohol. He had never investigated an accident of this magnitude, and on the long drive to Palomares, he had plenty of time to fret. He knew that the tanker had been filled with fuel and the bomber loaded with weapons. Had the wreckage set a town on fire and killed hundreds? Would the ground be littered with charred bodies? Would the townspeople attack them in a furious mob? Ramirez looked out the window at the desert landscape and worried.

  After a couple of hours of driving, the caravan pulled into Vera to get gas and ask for directions to Palomares. Ramirez asked the locals for news from the village and was relieved to hear that there were no tales of widespread death and destruction. Still, he was anxious.

  The group finally pulled into Palomares about an hour and a half before sundown. Outside the village, Ramirez saw a dirt road leading up a hill past a whitewashed wall and a lot of activity in the area just beyond. With a handful of others, he approached the wall, which bordered a cemetery. He saw smoldering debris, burned branches, and a man's hand lying on the ground, severed at the wrist and swollen from the fire. A number of villagers approached, with Manolo's father, the Mayor of Palomares, among them. When they realized that Ramirez could speak Spanish, they clustered around him, excited and agitated.

  “What I noticed immediately,” said Ramirez, “was that there was no hostility.” Instead, there was a massive gush of sympathy and concern. The villagers wanted to help. They wanted to tell what they had seen. They wanted to know how the accident had happened, if the dead airmen had any children. They pointed out a row of simple wooden caskets on the dirt road by the cemetery and explained that they had collected charred remains and placed them inside.

  Ramirez questioned the assembled villagers: “Anybody killed or injured on the ground?” he asked. No, no, no, no. “Any animals?” No, no, no, no. “Any homes destroyed?” No, no, no, no. Ramirez was amazed. “You could see still smoldering debris in backyards, in alleys, in dirt roads, in a ditch, in a field, all around. But none on any structure.” January 17 was the feast day of Saint Anthony the Abbot, the patron saint of the village. Many said that the saint had sheltered Palomares from ruin. The local priest disagreed. “This miracle is too big for any one saint,” he said. “It was the work of God himself.”

  A member of the Guardia Civil approached and spoke to Ramirez. He had seen something odd in the nearby h
ills. “Parece un torpedo,” he said in Spanish—it looks like a torpedo. Ramirez, by now knowing that nuclear weapons had been aboard the B-52 but not sure what one looked like, asked the guardia, “Donde?” Where?

  Pulling himself away from the crowd, Ramirez found an Air Force colonel and told him about the torpedo. The colonel's ears perked up. Ramirez ran to find the guardia who had told him about it, and the three of them set off to search the hills.

  Night had fallen by then. The colonel and the guardia each had a tiny flashlight; Ramirez had none. The three men walked into a rocky, uninhabited area outside Palomares. As they stumbled through the hills, the two feeble flashlight beams barely pierced the darkness. They could see rocks and scrub a few yards ahead, but the rest of the world was black.

  The guardia led them toward the spot where he thought he had seen the torpedo. But all the dirt paths and beige rocks looked the same at night. The three men trudged through the hills for an hour or so, going over the same ground again and again—they thought—as the guardia grew steadily more embarrassed. Finally, the colonel called it quits for the night. The men headed back to the village.

  One of Ramirez's fellow servicemen had more luck that day. A sergeant named Raymond Howe spent the afternoon locating major pieces of aircraft debris and checking them for radioactivity, including a big piece of the tanker fuselage that had fallen near the cemetery, and the B-52's tail section, which had landed nearly upright in a dry riverbed that led to the sea. Both tested negative. As dusk fell, Sergeant Howe was still poking around, asking if anyone had seen other major pieces of debris. One of the guardias civiles motioned him back toward the dry riverbed, near the mangled tail section. There, on the bank of the riverbed, about two hundred yards from the sea, lay a bomb.

  The bomb was torpedo-shaped and dull silver in color, twelve feet long and twenty inches around. It had a nine-inch gash in its rounded nose, and three of its four tail fins had shorn away. The tail plate, a flat piece of metal that sealed the parachute compartment at the rear end of the bomb, had also torn away, and one of the parachutes lay spilled nearby. The ready/safe switch—part of the arming mechanism—was in the “safe” position. Except for the cosmetic damage, the bomb seemed intact. Howe checked for radiation and found none. He called some EOD—Explosive Ordnance Disposal—men, who also checked for radiation and rendered the bomb safe. Howe posted some Air Force guards around the weapon. It became known as bomb number one, because it was the first one the Americans found.

  The “H” in “H-bomb” stands for hydrogen, the smallest atom in the universe and the simplest of the elements. The hydrogen nucleus consists of one solitary proton, which is circled by one electron—its own tiny, whirring solar system. Hydrogen makes up most of the gas in the universe and most of the mass of stars, and is found in all living things on Earth.

  Hydrogen has an isotope—a sort of half sister—called deuterium. Though nearly identical to hydrogen, deuterium has a small but critical difference: its nucleus carries one proton and one neutron. For this reason, deuterium is often called “heavy hydrogen.” It is this tiny extra neutron that makes the hydrogen bomb possible.

  In 1934, a physicist named Ernest Rutherford and two of his colleagues were working in England and discovered something curious about deuterium. When Rutherford sped up two deuterium atoms and smashed them together, they fused and became a new element: helium. This surprised Rutherford, because the deuterium atoms, each with one positively charged proton in its nucleus, had an immense repulsive force and should have stayed apart. Yet accelerating or heating the atoms gave them enough extra energy to overcome their repulsion and fuse together. Because the reaction required acceleration or heat to fuse the nuclei, Rutherford called it a thermonuclear reaction. He called the whole process hydrogen fusion.

  Oddly, the fused helium nucleus weighed slightly less than the two separate deuterium nuclei. The missing mass, Rutherford discovered, had been converted into energy. A lot of energy. Theoretically, each gram of deuterium, when fused, would release energy equivalent to 150 tons of T.N.T. This is about 100 million times as much firepower as a gram of ordinary chemical explosive. To put this into perspective, the firepower of Curtis LeMay's biggest raid on Japan, involving hundreds of planes and thousands of bombs, would have required only 20 grams of deuterium, about the weight of a robin's egg. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima: just 100 grams, equivalent to two jumbo chicken eggs. The numbers scale up quickly as the analogy moves on to heavier forms of produce. Twenty-six pounds of deuterium—the weight of about half a sack of potatoes—would yield 1 million tons of T.N.T. That yield—one megaton—is about seventy times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It was also close to the yield of bomb number one, which Sergeant Howe had found on the soft bank of the dry Almanzora River.

  Back in the 1930s, when Rutherford discovered fusion, however, the idea of a fusion bomb seemed nearly impossible. Rutherford needed a massive amount of energy to fuse just two atoms. It seemed unlikely that humans could find a source of energy hot enough to trigger a large-scale thermonuclear reaction and fuse a few kilograms of heavy hydrogen. Then came the atom bomb.

  Atom bombs—the type of bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—work through fission, splitting the atom, rather than fusion. Every atom (except for hydrogen) has a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons, like a ball of marbles stuck together with glue. This nuclear glue has a name: binding energy. Because protons, with their positive charge, want to repel one another, it takes a lot of binding energy to hold a nucleus together, especially a big one. Nuclear fission splits the nucleus of an atom, breaking the marbles apart and releasing the nuclear energy in the form of heat, light, and radiation.

  Some elements, namely those with more than 209 protons and neutrons, are so big that no amount of glue can hold their nucleus together. These heavy elements are naturally unstable and regularly shed bits of themselves, or “decay,” to become smaller and more stable. Scientists call these unstable elements “radioactive.” Probably the two most famous radioactive elements are those used in the atomic bombs of World War II, uranium and plutonium (or, more specifically, their highly fissionable isotopes, uranium-235 and plutonium-239). Scientists found that they could speed the disintegration by bombarding the uranium and plutonium nuclei with neutrons. When they did this, the nuclei split and released two or three neutrons and more energy. If additional uranium or plutonium atoms were nearby, the neutrons could blast their nuclei apart as well, releasing more neutrons and causing more fission. This reaction will eventually peter out, unless there is enough radioactive material placed closely enough together to sustain the reaction. If a “critical mass” of uranium or plutonium—about 110 to 130 pounds of uranium-235 or 13 to 22 pounds of plutonium-239—can be piled together, the number of neutrons released will increase in each generation. This leads to a chain reaction of atom splitting and a nuclear explosion.

  Plutonium is more radioactive than uranium and more difficult to handle. But during World War II, uranium manufacturing moved slowly. The Manhattan Project scientists would have enough uranium-235 for only one weapon by 1945. If they wanted more bombs, they would have to build them from plutonium.

  To build the bomb, metallurgists took a mass of plutonium and cast it into a hollow sphere. Then engineers created a shell of high explosive around the plutonium. In theory, if they detonated the high explosive from many different points at the same time, it would implode, crushing the plutonium into a solid ball. Hopefully, the squeezed plutonium ball would achieve critical mass and lead to a nuclear explosion. Few Manhattan Project scientists believed this design could work. “No one had ever used explosives to assemble something before,” Richard Rhodes explained in Dark Sun, his history of the hydrogen bomb. “Their normal use was blowing things apart.” Such a precise, perfectly timed explosion seemed implausible. The Navy captain in charge of explosives research said that the task was like trying to implode a beer can “without splattering the beer.”


  But the implosion bomb did work, first at the Trinity test near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, and then over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The bomb over Nagasaki, “Fat Man,” reportedly used about 13.7 pounds of plutonium, for a yield of 23 kilotons. It was about 17.5 times as efficient as the Hiroshima bomb.

  Even before the Trinity test, at least one Manhattan Project physicist was already looking ahead. Edward Teller had taken charge of the implosion group in January 1944, but increasingly he turned his thoughts to fusion. Maybe, he thought, the immense heat of a fission bomb could ignite a lump of deuterium, making a fusion bomb possible.

  Teller, it turns out, was right. Finally, here was a source of energy powerful enough to trigger a fusion reaction. But the engineering problems were daunting, making an imploding beer can seem like child's play. Engineers had to design a bomb that could contain a fission explosion long enough to trigger fusion, then keep the fusion going long enough to get a good yield before the whole bomb assembly disintegrated. Yet by 1952 they had figured it out. On November 1 of that year, the United States exploded a hydrogen bomb on Eniwetok Atoll, about three thousand miles west of Hawaii. The test, code-named “Mike,” yielded 10.4 megatons, nearly seven hundred times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Mike vaporized the island of Elugelab and killed everything on the surrounding islands, leaving a crater more than a mile wide. If it had been dropped on New York City, it would have obliterated all five boroughs. For the physicist Herbert York and many others, the Mike test heralded the beginning of a more dangerous world: “Fission bombs, destructive as they might have been, were thought of [as] being limited in power. Now, it seemed we had learned how to brush even these limits aside and to build bombs whose power was boundless.”

  The hydrogen bomb lying in the riverbank outside Palomares was called a Mark 28. The Mark 28 could be assembled in five different variants for a range of configurations and yields. This particular Mark 28 was a torpedo-shaped cylinder that weighed about 2,320 pounds. The bomb had entered the arsenal in 1958, and by May 1966, the United States had produced 4,500 of them.