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

by Barbara Moran

  Promotional artwork of the sub showed an otherworldly creature, armed with two grasping claws like a praying mantis, using high-powered lights to illuminate the ocean depths. Future applications for the new sub were enormous, according to press releases. It could cultivate undersea fish farms, dredge manganese modules from the seafloor, carry vacationers to underwater cities. “The Old Testament promises man ‘dominion over the sea,’” said one slick brochure. “The Aluminaut is the first step toward the realization of that prediction.”

  Despite the heady propaganda, Aluminaut had limited prospects. During 1965, it completed diving trials and made demonstrations for scientists at the University of Miami and the Department of the Interior. Eventually it received a contract from the Navy Special Projects Office to test Doppler navigation equipment for submarine rescue. But with no other work on the horizon, the Aluminaut crew was eager to prove their worth, perhaps even more so than the Alvin group.

  Despite his initial high hopes for Alvin and Aluminaut, Guest was quickly disillusioned. The admiral came from a different world than the submersibles. On his aircraft carriers, crack teams of young pilots flew the best equipment in the world. Guest expected both men and machines to perform at the top of their games. One can only imagine his thoughts when this odd-looking band of untested submersibles, bobbing in the waves like a pack of oversized bathtub toys, arrived off the coast of Spain. The subs were nothing like the high-performance jets streaking over Vietnam. They were delicate and temperamental. Even worse, each sub came with a ragtag crew of civilian operators and—in the case of Alvin—research scientists. Though many of the submersibles' crew members had served in the military, they had left that spit-and-polish world behind them. And the scientists had no use whatsoever for barking authority figures. Earl Hays wrote that Guest was “no great shakes.” The feeling was mutual.

  When the subs finally arrived, Guest planned to have them investigate promising sonar contacts, but their limited navigation made that impossible, at least at first. Alvin used a crude and rather unreliable method to navigate, sending pings and voice messages to a surface ship via underwater telephone. On a good day, the system could direct Alvin to within 400 yards of a desired point. When Alvin first arrived on scene, however, not even that primitive system was operating. The sub's underwater telephone worked erratically. Even worse, none of the surface ships on the scene could vector Alvin (or Aluminaut) below 2,000 feet. This situation would improve once the scientific support ship USNS Mizar arrived, housing gear that could navigate the submersibles with more accuracy. But all Guest knew at this stage of the game was that Alvin was basically blind. In addition, Alvin's mechanical arm had not yet arrived. Even if the sub somehow stumbled upon the missing bomb, she would have no way to attach a line, a transponder, or anything else.

  In short, Admiral Guest had no idea what to do with the subs. At one point, he suggested they drop a large concrete clump in the center of the search area, tether Alvin to the clump with nylon line, and let the sub swim around in circles like a dog chained to a tree. The plan would have left Alvin hopelessly tangled, but Guest didn't understand the subs or the deep sea. “What did he ever have to do with deep-ocean technology? Almost nothing,” said John Craven of the Technical Advisory Group in Washington. “He expects another unit of the Navy to come in with bright, shining uniforms.” Guest got nothing of the sort. “He was very displeased with the equipment,” added Craven. “That I knew.”

  10.

  Guest Charts a Course

  In mid-February, Brad Mooney, the thirty-five-year-old Navy lieutenant who had helped search for the Thresher, arrived in Spain to join Admiral Guest's task force. Mooney reported to the USS Boston, which had replaced Macdonough as the flagship, and tracked down Guest in the admiral's stateroom. The young lieutenant entered the room and took a good look at the admiral. Clearly exhausted and ill, Guest sat bundled in a blue flannel shirt and leather flight jacket, with a white scarf wrapped around his neck. Every so often, a medical corpsman bustled into the room, took the admiral's temperature, and tried to feed him medicine.

  Guest had slept little since he had arrived on the scene. He now understood the enormity of the task before him. His determination had turned to despair, and he poured out his heart to Mooney. He told Mooney an odd story, one that stuck with the young man for decades. Two years earlier, said Guest, he had been in the Tonkin Gulf during a questionable exchange of fire between U.S. and Vietnamese boats. This incident had led, shortly thereafter, to the rapid escalation of the Vietnam War. Now, he said, someone in the Navy was out to get him. “They sent me here to fail,” he told Mooney. “I don't know anything about deep-ocean search and recovery. I'm an aviator.”

  Guest's remarks were curious. At the time of the Tonkin Gulf incident, Guest commanded an aircraft carrier, the USS Constellation, near the area. On August 2 and August 4, 1964, U.S. Navy destroyers in the gulf reported that Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked them. Admiral Guest, as commanded, sent fighter planes to retaliate. Years later, evidence emerged that the August 4 attack most likely had not happened; sailors, confused by rain and radar ghosts, had mistakenly thought they were under fire. Guest, however, was barely involved with the initial incident, except for retaliating as ordered. And by February 1966, questions about Tonkin Gulf had not yet reached the public. According to the historian Edwin Moïse, Guest's involvement was peripheral; no one could legitimately have blamed him for anything. Moïse guesses that some in the Navy might have faulted him for not controlling the situation better, but this was hardly a major error.

  Guest's stepson Doug Kingsbery also finds it unlikely that the Navy sent Admiral Guest to Palomares as punishment. The bomb search “was an extremely important mission at that time in the Cold War,” said Kingsbery. “I can't imagine that the president and the high military people would not have selected the best person available they thought could do the job.”

  Regardless of his exact role in the Gulf of Tonkin, Guest was deeply affected by his tour in Vietnam. When he came home, his stepson Robert remembers him sleeping only two to four hours a night and smoking a carton of cigarettes a day. Faced with a seemingly impossible task in Palomares, it is not surprising that Guest grew despondent. It was not an easy assignment, even if he had not been set up to fail.

  Brad Mooney listened to the admiral's story and did his best to cheer him up. He told Guest that few people in the world knew anything about finding lost objects in the deep ocean. Mooney had some experience from his time with the Thresher and the Trieste and also knew a bit about Alvin and Aluminaut. He promised Admiral Guest that he would do his best.

  Soon afterward, Admiral Guest reported that Brad Mooney's arrival had been “like a ray of sunshine.” Finally he had someone who understood the deep ocean and knew what to do with these ridiculous submersibles. Red Moody was also impressed with the new lieutenant, even though their similar names caused confusion when read over the ship's crackling intercom. “When Brad came aboard, he was a mover and a shaker,” said Moody. “I just said, ‘Here's a guy who can get things done.’” When the accident happened, Mooney had orders to report to Pearl Harbor and then take command of a submarine. During the mission in Spain, the Navy twice attempted to send Lieutenant Mooney to his original duties. Both times, Admiral Guest arranged to keep him on.

  With Red Moody overseeing the divers, Brad Mooney tackling the submersibles, and the rest of his team and gear in place, Guest hunkered down and made a plan. On February 17, 1966, he laid it out in a long letter to the chief of naval operations.

  First, Guest reviewed the current situation, which was not stellar. The Decca navigation system, which was supposed to have been up and running twenty-four hours after it arrived, still wasn't fully functional. The Ocean Bottom Scanning Sonar was scanning hundreds of contacts but couldn't tell if any particular contact was a lost bomb or a school of fish. (The ships of Task Force 65 didn't help matters by regularly dumping their garbage overboard in the search area
, adding paint cans, soup cans, and machine shop shavings to the sonar contacts.) Deep Jeep was useless and had been sent back to the United States. Aluminaut had battery trouble, Alvin had sonar problems, and neither could navigate easily. Cubmarine was great, but only down to 600 feet. All in all, summarized Guest, “We enter this phase with equipment largely R&D and of marginal reliability and ruggedness.”

  Then Guest laid out his four search areas. Two were top priority: Alfa 1 and Alfa 2. One, a semicircle adjacent to the beach, extended the aircraft debris pattern into the ocean. For the other, Guest located the point where Simó had seen the “dead man” and his parachute hit the ocean, then noted eleven sonar contacts nearby. He averaged those sonar hits, noted that point on the chart, and drew a one-mile-radius circle around it. Guest also identified two other areas based on Sandia calculations. These, large rectangles stretching into the sea, were named Bravo and Charlie. Altogether, the four search areas encompassed about twenty-seven square miles of ocean. Guest had narrowed down the search area from two Manhattans to just over one. His task force would now have to sweep every inch of it for the missing bomb.

  To divide these four large areas into searchable zones, Guest's team created a 132-square-mile grid system that they could lay over his charts. They first divided the area into lettered two-by-four-mile rectangles, then divided each of those into thirty-two numbered squares, each measuring 1,000 by 1,000 yards.

  Guest depended on divers, sonar, and Cubmarine to handle the areas close to shore. Then, with Brad Mooney's advice, he made a plan for the submersibles. The more maneuverable Alvin got the deeper areas near Simó's sighting, where the underwater terrain rose and fell with rugged ridges and trenches. Aluminaut was sent to cover shallower, smoother areas, a plan that irritated her crew. Like almost everyone else, they thought that Simó Orts had seen the bomb fall and wanted to search there.

  Mooney understood the crew's feelings, but he had reservations about Aluminaut. Aluminum, if exposed to salt water, can suffer catastrophic failures. So, for protection, builders coated Aluminaut with several layers of colored paint. After almost every dive, the submersible's support crew checked the hull for scratches or scars that might expose the aluminum to salt water. This vulnerability “probably scared a lot of people from using her very much,” said Mooney. “Did me.”

  Such concerns annoyed the Aluminaut crew to no end. Art Markel, the manager of the Aluminaut team, thought his ship was far more capable than the Navy gave it credit for, and certainly more adept at deepwater searching than Alvin. Aluminaut was outfitted with search sonars that could read out to 800 feet, as well as a sweeping sonar that could see 2,000 feet. Alvin had nothing so elaborate. “They were using eyeballs,” said Markel. “When you used an eyeball, you could see about fifty feet at the most. Fifty feet, that's all. The rest of it's black.”

  On one of their first dives, the Aluminaut sonars picked up a sunken Spanish ship, which appeared to be quite old. Markel suggested that his bosses at Reynolds contact the Spanish government regarding salvage rights. Perhaps Aluminaut could retrieve a cannon from the “ship of antiquity,” as he called it, or even a treasure chest full of gold. He also suggested to Guest that they go back into the area and use the sunken ship as a target for calibrating Aluminaut's sonar. Markel's request irked the admiral. Stop fooling around with Spanish galleons, he told Markel. We're looking for a hydrogen bomb.

  Guest had little time to worry about the Aluminaut crew's bruised feelings. The Soviets had just cranked the international tension up a notch, putting the lost bomb into the middle of the fray. On February 16, the Soviet foreign minister handed a memorandum to the American ambassador to Moscow, charging the United States with violating the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty by dropping bombs on Palomares and contaminating the atmosphere. The following day, the same day that Guest laid out his search plans for the chief of naval operations, the Soviets upped the ante. At a disarmament conference in Geneva, the Soviet delegate, Semyon Tsarapkin, took the floor and read the accusatory memo to the entire assembly. Washington, said Tsarapkin, was endangering foreign lands and people with its B-52 missions. Only “a fortunate stroke of luck” had prevented an atomic catastrophe in Spain; America must end the nuclear flights without delay.

  U.S. diplomats dismissed these charges as ridiculous, but they made international news and refocused attention on the missing bomb. And the Soviets weren't the United States' only diplomatic headache. A week later, President Charles de Gaulle of France announced that, by 1969, all military bases on French soil would be taken under French control. The United States, at the time, had several large Air Force bases in France, as well as a Navy headquarters and a number of Army supply and communication centers. If de Gaulle kicked the Americans out of France, it would likely heighten the importance of the U.S. bases in Spain. Ambassador Duke received assurances that the Spanish government would not take “Machiavellian advantage” of the situation, but every day the bomb stayed lost, the Spanish government gained more diplomatic clout.

  Though not directly involved in any of these incidents, Admiral Guest surely felt pressure from all of them. His daily situation reports were often read by the chief of naval operations and sometimes by the secretary of defense and the president of the United States. Having to report no progress, day after day, was tremendously demoralizing. Red Moody said that he had never—even in combat—seen a flag officer under such pressure as Guest.

  The admiral soon faced a problem closer to home: a Soviet spy ship, the Lotsman, cruising near the search areas. Guest, with permission from the Spanish, had established a large restricted zone in the Mediterranean encompassing the Alfa and Bravo search areas. He had then sent a Navy destroyer to patrol the boundaries. On February 17, the destroyer reported the arrival of the Lotsman. The Soviet ship was well known to the Americans—she usually cruised near Rota Naval Air Station—and she didn't try to hide. For about two weeks Guest sent the Navy destroyer USS Wallace L. Lind to shadow the Soviets, just in case they tried any funny business.

  The Lotsman sat low in the water, covered with rust. If anything happened, she was no match for the Lind. The Navy destroyer, about twice the size of the Lotsman, was built for antisubmarine warfare and armed with torpedoes, bombs, and guns. But occasionally the Soviets pushed their luck. On at least one night, the Lotsman steamed toward the Lind, trying to intimidate the American ship and force it to give way. The Lind held its ground. Anthony Colucci, the twenty-five-year-old lieutenant deck officer, recalled the Lotsman coming within twenty-five yards of the Lind. Colucci, who had served on an amphibious ship during the Cuban Missile Crisis, knew a few things about Cold War tension. But this was personal. “There were certainly more important strategic concerns,” he said. But “when the captain is asleep and the Lotsman is coming in closer and closer to me, what was I thinking? I was thinking ‘Oh crap, there's gonna be a collision.’”

  News of the Lotsman's snooping rippled through the task force, inviting speculation on what the Russians might try next. At the time, the Soviets had two advanced submersibles that could dive to 6,500 feet. Supposed they pulled a Thunderball, dove down, and picked up the bomb themselves? Or, even worse, suppose a Soviet submarine slipped into the search area and released a timed nuclear device? The bomb would explode, and everyone would point fingers at the Americans.

  The Lotsman stayed on scene until early March, usually cruising between five and eleven miles away from Alfa 1. Then she vanished. Nobody knew what she had learned during her stay.

  From Washington, Guest's Technical Advisory Group kept a close eye on the developments in Spain. Even if the bomb had fallen into the sea, Guest might never find it. If the admiral came up empty-handed, the Navy would have to stand before Congress—and the secretary of defense—and explain why it had spent so much money on an unsuccessful search. Heads would roll.

  The TAG understood this clearly. The advisers were not only sending gear to Spain, they were also thinking about the endgame. If the
search failed and the Navy brass were hauled before Congress, they would need proof that Guest had done everything possible to find the bomb. Or at least they would need something that seemed like proof-some fancy numbers to wave in front of the politicians. What they needed, they decided, was math.

  John Craven of the Technical Advisory Group called Captain Frank Andrews, who had overseen the search for the USS Thresher, and asked for assistance. Andrews had retired from the Navy but was happy to help. He suggested that Craven call Wagner Associates, a small consulting firm outside Philadelphia. Soon Dan Wagner, the owner of the company, was flying to Washington with a member of his staff, a probability expert named Tony Richardson.

  In Washington, Craven briefed the two mathematicians on the situation and gave Richardson a rough “probability map” that he had sketched. The map, which showed the area off the coast of Palomares, resembled a contour map. However, the contours on Craven's map showed not the height of a mountain ridge or the depth of an ocean trench but the probability that the bomb had fallen into certain points in the sea. Craven hadn't had much information when he had drawn the map, so his initial stab basically outlined what everyone already thought: that the bomb lay either right off the beach or somewhere near the fishermen's sighting. Craven gave Tony Richardson a copy and sent him and Frank Andrews to Spain.

  On the plane to Madrid, Richardson sat next to Andrews and discussed his strategy, sketching out ideas on graph paper. He knew basically how to run a systematic search—mathematicians had been working on search theory since at least World War II. First he had to develop a probability map laying out where the bomb might be hiding. Second—this was the tough part—he had to find a way to evaluate the search as the Navy carried it out. And not just say “good” or “bad” but quantify the search, evaluate it mathematically. Then, as the search continued and new information came in, he would update the probability map, hopefully narrowing down the search area. Richardson could keep the analysis going until the Navy found the bomb or gave up the search.