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

by Barbara Moran

  On January 27, General Wilson requested that Randy Maydew or his boss, Alan Pope, fly to Spain. Wilson was building an advisory team to help define the search area, and he wanted someone from Sandia on board. Having experts on site, he had decided, would be better than “furnishing data to unseeing computers.” As the engineers in Albuquerque continued to hog the IBM 7090 for their calculations (ultimately generating a three-foot stack of paper printouts), Maydew prepared to jet off to Spain. As he was packing, a fellow engineer dropped by his office with a gift: a forked stick, like those used by diviners to search for hidden water.

  While Maydew and his team were crunching numbers in Albuquerque, Joe Ramirez had been chasing leads up and down the coast of southern Spain. Soon he would have to begin the sticky work of settling claims, but for now, all focus remained on the search. Ramirez had another lead that seemed even more promising than Tarzan. One morning, a Spanish naval officer had shown up at camp with some pieces of aircraft debris he had collected at sea. He told Ramirez that some bigger pieces were still sitting on his ship and asked if the Americans could send someone to pick them up. Ramirez grabbed an airman and headed to Garrucha, a fishing port just south of Palomares, where the Spanish navy ship was anchored.

  President Kennedy, General Curtis LeMay, and General Tommy Power. LeMay transformed SAC from a “creampuff outfit” to the most powerful military force in history. Official United States Air Force photograph, provided by the U.S. Strategic Command History Office

  A KC-135 tanker refueling a B-52 bomber. In 1966, the Strategic Air Command kept bombers in the air at all times, loaded with nuclear weapons, in anticipation of a Soviet surprise attack. Official United States Air Force photograph, provided by the U.S. Strategic Command History Office

  The village of Palomares in 1966. Courtesy of Lewis Melson

  Found on the day of the accident on the bank of a dry river, the first bomb was largely intact. Courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories

  Some of the high explosive in bomb number two detonated, exploding weapon fragments up to 100 yards in all directions. The surrounding area was highly contaminated. Courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories

  Pepe López pulled the parachute aside to find bomb number three. “I immediately knew this was a bomb,” he said. As in bomb number two, high explosive had detonated, scattering radioactive debris. Courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories

  By February, hundreds of Americans were scouring the Spanish countryside for the missing bomb. When searchers found debris, they marked it with a colored flag or a bit of toilet paper. Courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories

  Admiral William S. Guest (white hat) briefs Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke (right) at Camp Wilson. Duke clashed with the military over the secretive press policy. Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Library, Duke University

  Duke speaks with Palomares resident Antonio Sabiote Flores during a visit to the village, as Admiral Guest (left) and General Delmar Wilson (right) look on. Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Library, Duke University

  The Air Force collected aircraft debris in a pile near Camp Wilson. Here it is loaded onto a barge to be dumped at sea. U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph

  Workers cleared a dense thicket of tomato stakes so fields could be decontaminated. The Air Force bought the tomatoes and fed them to airmen. Courtesy of Lewis Melson

  To dilute plutonium in the soil, the Americans agreed to plow or water more than five hundred acres of land. Courtesy of Lewis Melson

  The most contaminated dirt was packed into 4,810 barrels for shipment to the Savannah River nuclear processing center in South Carolina. Courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories

  Manolo González (right) and Joe Ramirez (standing left) with a photo-mosaic map used for claims work. Courtesy of Joe Ramirez

  Alvin being lifted from the Fort Snelling's well deck. The sub had completed only one mission prior to Palomares. U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph

  Alvin pilots Bill Rainnie, Mac McCamis, and Val Wilson. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

  Admiral Guest outlined four search areas, encompassing twenty-seven square miles of ocean. The area to search was larger than Manhattan. Courtesy of Lewis Melson

  Aluminaut under water. Larger and less maneuverable than Alvin, Aluminaut could stay submerged for up to seventy-two hours. Courtesy of Georgianna Markel

  Francisco Simó Orts, the Spanish fisherman who saw a “dead man” on a parachute fall into the sea. Guest centered a high-priority search area on Simó's sighting. Courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories

  Lieutenant Commander DeWitt “Red” Moody, an EOD expert who joined Guest's inner circle. Official U.S. Navy photograph, courtesy of D. H. “Red” Moody

  Brad Mooney, a thirty-five-year-old Navy lieutenant, was a veteran of the Thresher search and understood the submersibles' capabilities. Courtesy of Brad Mooney

  Ambassador Duke (right) and Manuel Fraga Iribarne waving to photographers during their famous swim. The publicity stunt made papers around the world; Variety dubbed it the “Best Water Show since Aquacade.” Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Library, Duke University

  On March 15, 1966, Alvin took this photo at about twenty-five hundred feet below the surface. “How do you know it's not a parachute full of mud?” asked. Guest. U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph

  To retrieve the bomb, Red Moody helped construct POODL. One Navy man called it a “kludge.” U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph

  CURV, a torpedo-recovery device, used a specially designed grapnel to attach lines to the parachute. Courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories

  CURV twists a grapnel into the parachute. U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph

  April 7, 1966. The log of the USS Petrel reads, “0846: Weapon on deck with parachute.” U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph

  An EOD technician begins to render the bomb safe. Everything went smoothly until the team reached the battery. U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph

  General Wilson (left, hands on knees), Red Moody (center), Cliff Page, and Admiral Guest examine bomb number four. Lieutenant Walter Funston, who safed the bomb, is in the foreground. CURV is in the background. U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph

  Aerial shot of the USS Petrel during the press review. The bomb and CURV are visible on the fantail as Alvin and Aluminaut pass by. This was the first time that the United States displayed a nuclear weapon in public. Courtesy of Brad Mooney

  After finding the ship and collecting the debris, Ramirez stopped to chat with some of the Spanish officers. One of them asked Ramirez if he had spoken to the fishermen who had rescued the bomber pilots. No, said Ramirez. He hadn't even heard about the fishermen. The navy officer told him that they lived in Aguilas, a port city thirty miles up the coast from Palomares.

  The paved road to Aguilas, winding along the beautiful Spanish coastline, proved far less grueling than the narrow path to Tarzan's mountain home. Ramirez and a major from Camp Wilson arrived in the evening and found the port authority office on the second floor of a small, two-story building. The port captain greeted them warmly and asked them to wait while he called the fishermen. He told Ramirez their names: Francisco Simó Orts and Bartolomé Roldán Martínez.

  As the winter night deepened, the officers chatted with the port captain, waiting for the fishermen. Around 8 p.m., Simó and Roldán arrived. The fishermen, especially Simó, impressed Ramirez. Businesslike and straightforward, Simó—who did most of the talking—clearly understood the sea. “He did not appear to me to be a charlatan,” said Ramirez. “Whatever he said, he meant. There was no fooling around.”

  Simó told Ramirez about that bright morning on his shrimp boat, about the explosion and the many parachutes. Ramirez, who had just recently learned that some nuclear bombs have parachutes, asked the fisherman to describe them. Simó did. And then he said something that Ramirez found strange: he apologized for not saving the other fly
er. “What other flyer?” asked Ramirez, puzzled. He knew that all the airmen had been accounted for. Simó explained that he had seen all the airmen drifting down to the sea, and he knew they were alive because their arms and legs were moving. But this other person, the man who had fallen near him, hadn't been moving at all, so he must have been unconscious or maybe dead. Simó apologized profusely for not having reached the motionless man in time. When the flyer hit the water, he said, he had turned his boat and tried to rescue him. But his nets had still hung deep, and had slowed the boat; the man had sunk before he arrived.

  Simó added one more twist: another, smaller parachute had fallen near his fishing boat. “I saw a parachute smaller than the others, which carried what seemed like the chest of a man,” said Simó. “I didn't see legs or a waist. Something was hanging from the bottom.” Then Simó added a gory detail: what he had seen dangling from the torso, he said, were the man's intestines.

  Ramirez didn't know what to think. Simó insisted that he had seen a dead man—maybe two—but that couldn't be true. Or could it? Had Ramirez been misinformed about the number of airmen in the planes? Or could Simó have seen the bomb dangling from a parachute? Ramirez wasn't sure. “I came out of that meeting convinced that there was something substantive there,” he said. “But I knew that someone with more knowledge than I had to talk to him.” Ramirez wrapped up the meeting and asked if the fishermen could show the Americans where the parachutes had fallen. Of course, they said.

  Ramirez reported this latest bit of news back to Camp Wilson. A day or two later, on January 22, he found himself on the USS Pinnacle with Simó, Roldán, and a handful of U.S. Navy officers. The Pinnacle, along with the USS Sagacity, both minesweepers, had arrived the previous day to search the area with mine-detecting sonar. The Navy officers asked Simó to show them where he had seen the larger parachute enter the water. He guided them to the spot without a compass, using only his seaman's eye to align various landmarks on shore. When the Pinnacle arrived at the specified point, their sonar got two hits. The water was just over two thousand feet deep.

  The Pinnacle then moved away, and the officers, testing Simó's navigation skills, asked him to guide them back. Simó fixed the position again. The Pinnacle found the same two sonar hits. Then the Navy officers asked Simó and Roldán to show them another area where debris had fallen. The fishermen guided the Navy men to the spot. More hits blipped onto the Pinnacle's sonar. The Navy men were impressed by the fishermen's navigation skills, but the sonar hits were vague. One report described them as both “sharp and hazy” and guessed that they could be “either a school of fish or a parachute partially filled with air bubbles.” Nonetheless, the blips were duly noted, and the Spanish fishermen returned to shore.

  On the evening of Simó's boat ride, in Washington, President Johnson sat down in the White House screening room to watch a movie with several guests, including Lady Bird, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and McNamara's wife. The movie was the new James Bond thriller Thunderball, released a few weeks earlier and now at the top of the box office. In the film, an international ring of evildoers called “SPECTRE” hatches a sinister plan. An agent of SPECTRE, disguised as a NATO commandant, hijacks a fighter plane loaded with two nuclear bombs, kills the crew with poison gas, and crash-lands the plane in the ocean. After the plane settles gently to the bottom, a group of scuba divers appears, driving a futuristic underwater craft that looks like a giant orange stingray. The divers snatch the nuclear bombs and squirrel them away aboard a pleasure craft. SPECTRE demands £1 million in flawless diamonds, or it will detonate the bombs in a city. James Bond, braving spear guns, shark attacks, and a duplicitous redhead, saves the day.

  During the week after the Palomares accident, everyone was talking about the movie. When Jack Howard called Alan Pope at Sandia, he told the engineer that the nation was facing a real-life Thunderball. And now a handful of people, led by a Spanish fisherman, an Air Force lawyer, and a few computer nerds, was starting to realize that a real nuclear weapon might now be lost under a real sea. And early reports noted that real Soviets—not the caricatured evildoers of SPECTRE—were circling in the waters. The bomb saga was about to shift from the parched Almería desert to the cold Spanish sea. James Bond, sadly, was nowhere in sight.

  6.

  Call In the Navy

  Red Moody sat in the cockpit of a KC-135, looking out the window at the driving snow and thanking his lucky stars he was a diver, not a pilot. He and his dive team had been scheduled to land at Andrews Air Force Base that morning, but a snowstorm had buried the runways and air traffic control had diverted the plane to Dulles. Sitting in the jump seat just behind the pilots, Moody listened now as they discussed whether they could land in a blizzard with thirty-five-knot gusts. The pilots decided to go for it. Moody watched, with alarmed fascination, as the pilots cranked up the power and turned the plane almost sideways to approach the runway. Down they went, the snow whirring and whistling by the windows, Dulles barely visible below. Wheels touched tarmac, and the plane skidded out straight. Moody and the divers in the back breathed a sigh of relief.

  Moody had been up for hours, ever since the late-night call from the duty captain at the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). On January 22, still less than a week after the accident, Assistant Secretary of Defense Jack Howard had called the Navy. The following day, the CNO had established a task force, known as Task Force 65, to help the Air Force recover its lost bomb. Then the Navy had ordered men and ships to Spain. Lieutenant Commander Moody oversaw a group of Navy divers in Charleston, South Carolina, who specialized in explosive ordnance disposal, or EOD. Moody's divers handled all sorts of dangerous jobs: they defused floating mines, found missiles lost in offshore testing ranges, and tracked down planes that crashed into swamps. The duty captain called Moody around midnight on January 22 and asked when Moody could get a dive team to Palomares. Moody said they'd be at the airport, with their gear, by 9 a.m.

  After surviving their landing at Dulles, the divers sacked out while the maintenance crews scrambled to find fuel for the plane. The snow slowed everything down, and the divers were stuck at Dulles for hours. They finally took off for Spain that evening and landed at Torrejón the following day. They ate lunch, flew to southern Spain, and took a bus to a small Spanish town. By this point Moody and his divers had been awake for nearly forty-eight hours.

  After a few hours of sleep, Moody went out to find a local tavern. As he drank at the bar, a man in a business suit sat down next to him and introduced himself as Captain Page. Cliff Page, it turned out, had just been appointed chief of staff to Admiral William S. Guest, the man who would oversee Task Force 65. The two men chatted for a while. Then Page asked Moody why his divers were still here, zonked out in the hotel, instead of reporting for duty at Camp Wilson. Red bristled at the question but played it cool. He patiently explained that his men had been awake for almost two days and were in no condition to dive. They would get a decent night's sleep and report for duty the next day. Page backed off quickly and offered to arrange a bus for the divers in the morning. Moody accepted.

  On Tuesday, January 25, Red Moody, eleven divers, and about 14,000 pounds of diving gear arrived at Camp Wilson to join the growing Navy contingent. Four U.S. Navy minesweepers, an oceanographic ship, and a destroyer already sailed offshore, with a handful of tankers, tugs, and other ships on the way. A small team of EOD divers from Rota, led by Lieutenant Oliver Andersen, was setting up shop on the beach when Moody's team joined them. A young ensign followed on Moody's heels. “His sole purpose in life,” recalled Andersen, “was to follow behind Red and write down everything that was happening.” Andersen, curious, asked the kid for his notebook and flipped through it. “Closer we get to the scene,” the ensign had written, “the more outstanding the confusion.”

  Moody spoke with an Air Force colonel to get a rundown of the situation. Afterward, Moody and Andersen talked for a few minutes, sharing what little information they had. Then Moody made a
n announcement: he was heading out—uninvited—to the USS Macdonough, the admiral's flagship, to see what the Navy brass could tell him. Commandeering an inflatable seven-man rubber boat, he left Andersen in charge of his divers and puttered out into the waves.

  DeWitt “Red” Moody was a tall, fit, broad-shouldered man with a commanding presence and a thick Texas accent. Everyone called him “Red” because he had once sported a full head of copper-colored hair. Now, at age thirty-eight, most of his hair was long gone, his forehead rising high and bald as a bullet above his face. The nickname, however, had stuck.

  Moody was a freshman in high school when the United States entered World War II, too young to join the military. He waited, impatiently, and then enlisted in the Navy in 1944, the day after his seventeenth birthday. He went to sonar school and served in the Pacific on the USS Strong but saw little action. When the war ended, he decided to stay in the Navy. He came from a broken family with little money, and the Navy offered him a camaraderie and security he had never experienced before. Stationed on an aircraft carrier, he met some Navy EOD divers and saw them at work. The men impressed him with their teamwork and “can-do” attitude. He decided that diving was the job for him.