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

by Barbara Moran

  Muñoz Grandes's decree meant little for the Chrome Dome route over Spain. Though some reports claimed that SAC dropped the route, U.S. Embassy staffers say the flights continued but started refueling over water. But the decree also had another implication: no more nuclear logistics flights either. The United States couldn't fly nuclear bombs over Spain just to get them somewhere else, such as to storage depots in Germany, for instance. Most viewed these curbs as simply an inconvenience: planes could be rerouted over oceans or other countries. But others saw clouds gathering on the horizon. What if other European countries—Britain, France, Germany—fearing a Palomares accident of their own, started asking questions? What if they demanded that the United States remove nuclear bombs from their bases, nuclear subs from their waters, nuclear-armed planes from their skies? If Spain's decision caused a domino effect, the United States' nuclear strategy could be curtailed. Everything in Spain had to be patched up as quickly as possible. Over the next few months, Ambassador Duke constantly received a question from Defense: When can we get the overflights reinstated?

  Duke foresaw other troubles ahead, and not just from the Spanish government. The story had broken open, and hordes of international journalists were massing on Spain's southern shore. Despite Duke's best efforts, Palomares was swelling into an international news event. He braced himself for a long struggle, concluding his January 22 dispatch to Washington with a warning and a plea:

  Believe we must be prepared for continued and possibly increased media treatment of accident until fourth bomb located and removed. If much more time elapses without success in search, we may be faced with practical necessity admitting officially one bomb still missing. This in turn carries obvious dangers including potentially triggering off further GOS [government of Spain] official statements possibly including public reference to Spanish demand that refueling and/or overflights nuclear-armed aircraft be stopped. It therefore clearly of utmost urgency that no effort be spared locate fourth bomb with minimum delay. Urge all necessary US resources be provided for search.

  5.

  Parachutes

  Joe Ramirez pushed aside the ropes of plastic beads that dangled in place of a door and stepped into the tavern. The small room was dominated by an L-shaped bar. In late afternoon, the tavern was not crowded. Ramirez ordered a drink and stood at the counter near the door. Soon he spied the man he had come looking for: the mayor of Herrerias—also the owner of the bar. The mayor walked over and joined him for a drink. They began to talk.

  Ramirez had spent the last few days in Palomares translating, answering questions, and following leads. He had come to this small tavern in the tiny mountain town of Herrerias to track down an especially promising story. A local man had approached Ramirez in the Air Force camp and said, “I understand you're looking for un artefacto.” Artefacto, Spanish for “artifact” or “device,” had somehow become the favored euphemism for “missing nuclear bomb.” The man pointed to a tiny village perched high in the mountains. “The mayor of that little village has a brother who's a shepherd,” he said, “and he grazes his flock on this mountain, the one between us and the sea.” The shepherd, he continued, had seen the planes explode and the debris fall; he might have some important information to share.

  Ramirez got permission to check it out. He commandeered a vehicle and, with an Air Force lieutenant colonel, drove the narrow, unpaved road to Herrerias. They arrived just before dark, tracked down the mayor in the tavern, and asked if the story was true. The mayor, a gregarious man, said that he did have a brother, a shepherd who lived on the mountain and had seen the accident. Ramirez asked to speak with him, but the mayor replied that this would be difficult: his brother was deaf and dumb. To complete the picture, the mayor added, “Le llaman Tarzan.” They call him Tarzan.

  As the men continued to talk, word spread through town that two Americans had holed up in the bar, and curious villagers began to fill the room. Then an unexpected visitor loomed in the tavern doorway: Tarzan himself. The mayor grabbed his brother's arm and dragged him over to the two Air Force officers. Using sign language, he explained why the Americans had come. Tarzan hulked over the men but was shy and offered little information. Painstakingly, they dragged his story out. The lieutenant colonel, who spoke only English, asked a question; Ramirez translated it into Spanish for the mayor, who then asked his brother in sign language. Tarzan's answer traveled back through the same slow route. Over several hours, the officers learned that the shepherd had seen, among the falling debris, a large white double parachute with an object dangling underneath. This sounded promising. At the end of the interview, the lieutenant colonel had one final question: “Ask him if he'll go with us in a helicopter tomorrow.”

  They didn't need a translator to understand the shepherd's reply. Tarzan was emphatic: No! No way was he getting into some flying contraption with these Americans! The mayor signed to his brother some more, cajoling and convincing, and told the officers not to worry. They should show up in the helicopter tomorrow morning; Tarzan would be ready.

  The next morning around 10 a.m., Ramirez sat in a helicopter hovering above Herrerias, looking down at the village square. The villagers had gathered in a circle to watch the whirring machine, and the chopper's wash swirled them with dust. As the helicopter set down, Ramirez saw the mayor tugging his brother forward. Hopping out amid the churning dust, Ramirez handed the mayor a helmet fitted with a radio and microphone. The mayor beamed with pleasure, trying on the helmet and strutting for his constituents. Then Ramirez, the mayor, and the reluctant shepherd piled in the chopper and lifted into the sky.

  Once airborne, the lieutenant colonel asked where the shepherd had been working at the time of the accident. By the time the question and answer traveled back and forth, the group had overshot the point by several miles. This would never do. The lieutenant colonel ordered the pilot to hover until they established where the shepherd had been standing and where he had seen the parachute and object fall. Information in hand, they headed back to the village. Pleased with the whole adventure, the mayor leapt out of the chopper with a flourish. His brother just looked relieved to be back on solid ground.

  Returning to camp, Ramirez gave the new information to his superiors, who dispatched a search team to the shepherd's hills. Less than a week into the search, the Air Force was still chasing every lead. Searchers, scouring the area, had found the combat mission folder. The heat of the explosion had melted the folder's plastic coverings together, sealing the top secret codes securely inside. Searchers also found the box containing additional classified documents, still locked tight. These finds gave the Air Force some measure of relief. But there was still no sign of bomb number four. Some people began to suspect that the bomb might have exploded in the air, buried itself underground, or fallen into the sea. But it had been only a few days, and the chances remained high that bomb number four had fallen on land near the other three. Perhaps Tarzan's clue marked the spot. A team headed to the mountains to search the area. They returned without the bomb.

  By January 20—the Thursday after the accident—General Wilson realized that finding the bomb and cleaning up the mess would take longer than he originally thought, and he relayed the news to SAC headquarters in Omaha. General John D. Ryan, who had succeeded Tommy Power as SAC's commander in chief, directed Wilson to use all available resources to find the missing bomb. “Until every avenue of search is exhausted,” he said, “we do not have much of a leg to stand on.”

  Hundreds of searchers had arrived from Morón and Torrejón the day after the accident and were camping in the dry riverbed near the B-52's tail section. The first night, the men slept in the open air or under the buses. The next day, as tents and gear arrived, the men set up a rudimentary camp. They called the area “Camp Wilson.” Conditions were rough. Phil Durbin, an airman who arrived from Torrejón, remembers the desert nights as cold and damp. He and his friends, seeing a small wooden bridge in the nearby hills, tore it down and burned it for warmth. Rober
t Finkel, a squadron commander, slept under a bus with his head in a cardboard box to keep the sand out of his face. The men ate cold C-rations out of metal cans. There were no bathrooms or showers except the Mediterranean Sea.

  After a few days of searching with no maps or strategic plan, Wilson's men got organized. Bombs numbers one, two, and three had fallen in a jagged line along the doomed planes' flight path, with bomb number one near the water, bomb number three about a mile inland, and bomb number two a mile or so inland from that. Wilson assumed—or at least hoped—that they would find bomb number four somewhere along the same path. Each day, coordinators—soon supplied with photomosaic maps from U.S. Air Force reconnaissance planes—mapped out areas to search. At daybreak, the searchers rumbled out in buses to their assigned patch of desert scrub or tomato farm. The men spread out in a line and walked shoulder to shoulder, eyes glued to the ground, looking for any sign of the bomb. After a certain amount of trudging under the merciless desert sun, the men “ wheeled” the line and walked back to their starting point.

  If the searchers saw anything of interest, they marked it with a flag on a pole, a piece of string, or a bit of colored toilet paper. If they found small bits of metal, they placed them in bags for inspection back at camp. Durbin found a chunk of the boom nozzle nearly as long as his arm. Nobody knew which piece of scrap might lead them to bomb number four. Those who thought the bomb had disintegrated in midair found some evidence for their theory: a reservoir—a piece of a bomb mechanism—lying 1,500 feet from bomb number three. Perhaps it was a remnant of the missing weapon. The Air Force sent the scrap to Los Alamos for identification. The verdict: the reservoir was just another piece of bomb number three.

  More clues appeared. That first week, a searcher found a round metal plate with two sides squared off. Experts identified it as a tail closing plate—the part that fits on the end of a bomb and holds the parachutes in place. They also discovered that it had come from bomb number four—the first identifiable bit of the weapon that anyone had found. But the plate was found about a hundred yards from the B-52's tail section, an area that the Air Force had already searched exhaustively Surely it should have been seen earlier. Had someone put it there? For days, the Air Force asked around. Finally they found the local man who had had originally discovered the tail plate. He had been away at his mother's funeral. He said he had seen the plate fall on the day of the accident, picked it up, and given it to a member of the Guardia Civil, who had dropped it near the tail section. New information in hand, the Air Force stepped up the search in an area closer to the shoreline and shipped the tail plate back to the United States for examination.

  Only a handful of people in the United States knew the full significance of this particular piece of metal, and they worked in a jumble of drab government buildings at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The engineers at Sandia didn't design nuclear warheads; that job belonged to the physicists at Los Alamos. However, they engineered just about every other part of America's nuclear bombs: the casing, the fusing mechanism, the arming and safing devices, and the parachutes. They knew the Mark 28 inside and out.

  Sandia in the 1960s was a secret paradise for the slide rule set. Every engineer who worked there had graduated in the top of his or her college class. They had cutting-edge equipment, seemingly endless funding, and a fairly loose rein. They also worked with a deep sense of mission. Nuclear weapons, most of them believed, kept their country safe from the Soviets. Sandia engineers considered themselves to be not only the elite of Albuquerque but indispensable to the defense of the United States.

  On this mission, Sandia's marching orders trickled down from the top. As soon as President Johnson heard news of the crash, he called Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He first asked McNamara if the bombs might explode. When McNamara assured him that they would not, the president told him to “do everything possible to find them.” Word was passed to Jack Howard, McNamara's assistant secretary of defense for atomic energy. A few days later, Howard dialed his friend Alan Pope, the director of Aero Projects at Sandia. He told Pope that bomb number four remained at large and asked for help in finding it. Right away, Pope called Randy Maydew, the manager of Sandia's Aerodynamics Department. Maydew put down the phone, scrambled into the office, and got to work.

  High-energy and hyperactive, Maydew, like many engineers, was a man of compulsive habits. Every morning, he sweated through a half-hour regimen of floor exercises; every Saturday, he wrote in his journal; every Sunday, he attended church. He liked to move fast and get things done quickly, and when he got the call about Palomares, he headed straight to Sandia and gathered a small team. They sat down to crunch some numbers and see if they could pinpoint the location of the missing bomb, or at least make an educated guess. The engineers knew the altitude, heading, and speed of the planes at the time of collision and had their own data on the aerodynamics of the bomb. They also had a state-of-the-art supercomputer, the IBM 7090, at their disposal. But they weren't sure exactly where the accident had taken place and had only sketchy, conflicting meteorological data. Furthermore, they didn't know if the bomb was intact or broken to bits or which, if any, of the bomb's parachutes had deployed.

  The parachute question was critical. Stuffed into its back end, the Mark 28 carried a complicated multiparachute system that allowed pilots to drop nuclear bombs from a variety of altitudes. Pilots could, for instance, speed into enemy territory under the radar, drop bombs at an extremely low altitude—below 500 feet—and still clear out before the bomb exploded.

  Sandia had developed this “laydown system” in the 1950s to help American planes evade Soviet air defenses, which had been specifically designed to shoot down small numbers of aircraft carrying nuclear weapons. According to intelligence experts, the Soviet defense missiles could hit planes flying as high as 60,000, maybe 80,000, feet. But the system could not hit very-low-flying planes, especially if they whizzed by faster than the speed of sound. However, a pilot dropping a nuclear bomb from a low altitude would surely be caught in the deadly blast—unless there was a way to delay the explosion. The Air Force called Sandia.

  In 1953, Randy Maydew's boss asked him to work on the project. The Air Force, at that time, wanted to drop nuclear bombs from 2,000 feet, at speeds greater than Mach 1. (Later, they requested drops under 200 feet.) The only way to do this and give the pilot time to escape, Maydew figured, was to slow the bomb down with parachutes. Knowing nothing about parachutes, he surveyed the literature and found that no parachute in the world could withstand the stress of being blown open at the speed of sound. So the Sandia engineers set out to design one that could. Along the way, they came up with other ways a weapon could survive a low-altitude drop: a bomb with a spike on its nose that stuck in the ground like a dart; a bomb with a metal honeycomb tip that could endure a bruising dent in the nose. In a couple of years, Sandia gave the Air Force plans for a laydown weapon. Maydew, meanwhile, became an expert on high-performance parachutes.

  The Mark 28 bomb missing in Palomares packed an elaborate four-parachute system into its hind end. In a low-altitude drop, when the system worked correctly, three nylon parachutes would open in sequence—an elegant bit of fancy footwork in the sky. Soon after a bomb fell from the belly of a plane, a ring of explosive bolts fired on the back of the bomb, knocking the tail plate off. The inside of the tail plate had an eyebolt in the center, tied to a lanyard. The lanyard attached to a four-foot-diameter guide parachute. When the tail plate fell, it pulled the small chute out behind it. The pilot chute, in turn, heaved out a sixteen-foot-diameter ribbon parachute. This sixteen-foot chute slowed the bomb for two to three seconds, then cut itself loose. As it drifted away, it yanked another pack out of the bomb, pulling the cover off a sixty-four-foot chute. The sixteen-foot chute floated away, carrying the empty bag, as the larger chute finished the job. This monstrous canopy opened and slowed the bomb to about twenty-eight feet per second by the time it hit the ground, giving the pilots time
to get away. To complicate matters for the bomb search, the Mark 28 was also designed to free-fall from a high altitude. In that case it would release only a small, thirty-inch chute, which would stabilize the bomb as it sailed down to its target.

  Because bomb number four had been torn from its rack in an explosion, any—or none—of the parachutes might have opened. The three bombs found on land only emphasized the range of possibilities. The first bomb, which had hit the ground at about 140 feet per second, had deployed the sixteen-footer but nothing else, but that had been enough to keep the bomb intact. The second bomb had landed without deploying any chutes, smashing into the ground at about 325 feet per second. This high-speed impact had detonated the high explosive, scattering plutonium dust, case fragments, and remnants of parachute over the Spanish countryside. The third bomb had deployed the sixteen-foot chute, but because the chute was damaged, it hadn't supplied enough drag. The bomb had hit the ground at about 225 feet per second, igniting its high explosive and scattering radio active debris.

  There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of possible scenarios for bomb number four. But despite the dearth of data, the Sandia engineers made some quick calculations over the weekend. Since bomb number four's tail plate had come off, it seemed likely that at least one of its parachutes had popped out behind it. If the big, sixty-four-foot chute had deployed right after the explosion, and if the wind had been blowing out to sea, and if the gusts had been strong enough, the engineers thought, the bomb could have splashed into the Mediterranean. Only one of many possibilities, it was an early hint that the bomb might not be on land. On Monday, one week after the accident, Sandia told the Pentagon that the bomb might have gone into the sea. A few days later, Sandia's computer spit out an estimated location: 37° 13.9' N, 01° 42.3' W. This was not good news; according to this calculation, the bomb had plunked far out in the Mediterranean, closer to Africa than to Spain.