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

by Barbara Moran

  Without Washington's approval, Duke took matters into his own hands. A few hours after his return from Palomares, he called a press conference at his residence in Madrid. Though he didn't admit that the United States had lost a hydrogen bomb, he explained the goal of the operation—to leave Spain as it had been before—and said that work would continue until the job was done. He gave a detailed description of the sea search, discussing the new equipment arriving in Spain and promising to try to get some unclassified photos released. The newsmen appreciated the meeting, savoring the first solid news from Palomares. Washington was less enthusiastic. The next day, the Pentagon gave Duke a wrist slapping for ignoring its “no comment” policy. Duke, convinced his actions served America's best interest, took it in stride.

  The day after the press conference, approximately six hundred people gathered outside the U.S. Embassy to protest nuclear overflights, U.S. bases in Spain, and the United States in general. The protest surprised no one; leaflets had been circulated in Madrid, announcing the place and time. Security guards shut the embassy gates as hundreds of riot police gathered outside.

  At the time, it was illegal to assemble in Spain without a permit. But when the protestors—mostly students—arrived, the police let them march up and down the street for a bit, burning newspapers and chanting “Yanquis, no! Bases, no!” and other anti-American slogans. Soon, however, the police charged in, beating the protestors with wooden clubs until the crowd dispersed.

  Ambassador Duke watched the scene from the fifth floor of the embassy. The protest was a minor one, but it must have reinforced his feelings about the situation in Palomares. The accident offered a rich propaganda opportunity for those who wanted the U.S. military out of Spain. Defusing the tension was going to require some creative diplomacy. But there was only so much Duke could do. The shouting wouldn't end until someone found the missing bomb.

  8.

  Alvin and the Deep, Dark Sea

  Mac McCamis had a problem. Alvin, the miniature submarine he piloted, was acting up. Alvin and her crew had arrived at Rota Naval Air Station in Spain, about 350 miles down the coast from Palomares, after a grueling trip on a prop plane from the United States. Alvin was a curious-looking little sub, twenty-two feet long, with a white bulbous body and a fiberglass “sail” towering over the hatch. To fit her on the cargo plane, the crew had separated Alvin into several large pieces and strapped the parts onto wooden pallets. Now they had reassembled the sub and were attempting a test dive—or rather a test dunk—off a pier at Rota. A crane slowly lowered the rotund, three-man submersible into the water as the crew watched. Water soon covered three-quarters of Alvin; only the top still bobbed on the surface. Suddenly, a battery shorted out. The crew sighed. One of them signaled the crane to lift Alvin from the water and lower her back onto the pier.

  Mac and another Alvin pilot named Valentine Wilson had flown with Alvin on the plane from the United States, and the ride had been bone-jarring. During the flight, Wilson swore he could have stood still and passed a rod under his feet, the vibrations jolted him so far up off the floor. Mac figured the same vibrations must have shaken something loose in Alvin. The crew removed the batteries and—sure enough-found that the connector plates had loosened, letting water leak in. They opened every battery case, then drained and cleaned each battery.

  When it came to mechanical matters, Marvin J. McCamis, known universally as “Mac,” almost always guessed right. In 1966, Mac was in his forties but still wiry and strong as a teenager, his eyes bright and intense beneath his flat-top buzz cut. He never exercised but could crank out one-arm pull-ups without breaking a sweat. According to Alvin lore, he had once gotten into an argument with an Air Force officer in a bar and the two had agreed to fight it out. The officer had grabbed Mac in a martial arts hold, threatening to break his finger unless he gave in. Mac had simply stared the officer down until his finger finally snapped.

  As a teenager, Mac had dropped out of high school, enlisted in the Navy, and trained as an electrician. He spent twenty years in Navy submarines and developed a deep, innate understanding of underwater mechanics. But despite his long service and experience he remained prickly and temperamental. He had little respect for, or patience with, people who lacked mechanical skill and who failed to see things his way. “He was totally uneducated and unpolished,” said Chuck Porembski, an electronics engineer who worked with McCamis. “That's why he often got into trouble.”

  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 allow 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 A
ir 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.