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

by Barbara Moran

  On the surface, Admiral Guest and Brad Mooney discussed options. Alvin could remain submerged for twenty-four hours—tops—if the pilots conserved power, meaning it had about twenty hours left. Mooney suggested sending Aluminaut down to rendezvous with Alvin. If the larger sub carried a transponder, the surface ship Mizar could fix her position when she got near the bomb. The rendezvous was a risky proposition, and Mooney knew it. At that depth, the silt and snow scattered light, allowing even powerful beams to pierce only about sixty feet. And depending on a sub's momentum, sixty feet might be too short to stop if the pilot suddenly saw trouble ahead. Generally, pilots avoided running two submersibles anywhere near each other under the sea. Mooney wanted to break this rule. What he proposed was much like sending two cars to meet in a midnight blizzard, on an icy road unfamiliar to both drivers. It would be dangerous, but it was their best option.

  Guest readily agreed to the plan, liking the idea of keeping human eyes on the target. But he had difficulty comprehending the risk involved. “I can fly my F4s wingtip to wingtip at Mach speed and they don't hit each other,” he told one staffer. “You guys can't even go in the same area and stay out of each other's way?”

  Mooney summoned Aluminaut. The sub picked up a transponder, got a quick battery charge, and hustled over to the search area. Though disappointed that Alvin had found the bomb first, the crew was glad they had an important role to play On the way down, Admiral Guest and his staff told the Aluminaut crew, more than once, not to touch the bomb or try to recover it. “He thought we were a bunch of wild cowboys down there,” grumbled Art Markel.

  The Alvin crew sat in the dark, on the bottom of the cold sea, for eight hours, waiting for Aluminaut. Finally, peeking through their windows, the crew saw the glow of lights in the distance. “It was beautiful, the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” said McCamis. “A great silvery-pink monster, it looked like, with great green phosphorescent eyes coming up silent through the water.” Mac flipped on Alvin's lights, giving Aluminaut a clear target. Aluminaut approached slowly, cautiously parking herself about twenty-five yards behind Alvin, in clear sight of the parachute. The Aluminaut held steady as Alvin left her station and rose to the surface.

  Alvin surfaced after ten hours and twenty-three minutes underwater, her longest dive of the mission. Mac sailed her to the Fort Snelling and entered the well deck at 8:12 p.m., just about the time that Guest and his staff arrived on board. The Alvin crew sent their photographs to be developed, then told the admiral what they had seen. The photographs were ready about midnight. The weary Guest gathered his key staff members to look at the pictures. They didn't see a bomb. They saw a parachute. Everyone agreed that the weapon probably lay shrouded underneath, but they couldn't tell for sure.

  Mac McCamis was outraged. He knew it had to be the bomb. Guest asked him, “How do you know it's not a parachute full of mud?” To which McCamis replied impatiently, “What else is going to be down there with a parachute and a bomb rack hanging on to it?” McCamis went to bed that night discouraged. “In all my life,” he said, “I'd never had my intelligence so insulted.”

  After the meeting, Admiral Guest wrote a situation report to his superiors, sending it at 2:50 a.m. on March 16. In it, Guest said that Alvin had photographed a large parachute covering an object. The contact was promising but not conclusive; positive identification was impossible. However, he was starting to plan the recovery. He planned to proceed as slowly and deliberately as possible, but if the object started to slide down the slope, he might have to take immediate action. He would use three ships, Mizar, Privateer, and Petrel, as the primary support vessels for the recovery, with two minesweepers on security patrol. All other ships would attend to business as usual. Guest didn't want the newsmen on shore to notice anything odd.

  The other memo, the one for the Cyrus Vance committee that had taken four days to write, was never sent.

  Early on the morning of March 16, Robert Sproull, the chair of the Cyrus Vance committee, went to the Pentagon for the group's second meeting. Sproull expected this gathering to be as gloomy as the first. He arrived around 4:30 a.m. to gather his thoughts and prepare for the meeting. He checked the message traffic, just in case there had been any developments in Spain, and found Admiral Guest's report. The second meeting, Sproull remembers, went off rather well.

  That morning in Rota, a radioman found Red Moody at the Bachelor Officers Quarters. Moody had stayed out late the night before, drinking with an old friend. The messenger handed Moody a clipboard, the cover indicating that the note inside was classified. Red looked at the note and then at the messenger. “Tell them I'm coming back,” he said. He asked for an early flight.

  That afternoon in Spain, Tony Richardson and John Bruce, the mathematician and oceanographer who had escorted Simó out to sea the day before, visited the fisherman at his house. Simó found the fathometer trace and unraveled it on the dinner table. John Bruce looked at the trace and questioned Simó. He saw nothing resembling the falling weapon.

  The Americans told Simó that he would be paid for the previous day's excursion—his boat had lost an entire day of fishing. Then Bruce, curious to see Simó's fathometer, asked if they could visit the Manuela Orts. Simó agreed. The men boarded the ship, took a look around, and were impressed with the sleek vessel and its modern gear. When they finished, Simó offered to buy the men a drink, and they headed to a nearby tavern.

  At the bar, Tony Richardson sipped a beer and watched news of the Gemini 8 space shot. The ship had launched from Cape Kennedy that morning and was due to orbit earth for three days. During that time, Gemini pilots planned to link the nose of their capsule with a satellite called Agena. If they pulled it off, it would be the first time two crafts had docked in space, a key component in the plan for landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

  After a flawless start to the flight, Gemini docked to the satellite successfully. But shortly thereafter, a thruster on the spacecraft stuck open and set the linked vehicles spinning crazily The astronauts separated their capsule from the satellite and stabilized the craft, using rockets normally reserved for reentry. NASA ordered the crew to make an emergency landing in the Pacific. The astronauts were picked up after three hours at sea.

  The outer-space drama received massive news coverage: a banner headline on the front page of The New York Times, with more than two full pages of stories. Alvin and Aluminaut's deep-sea rendezvous, the first time two submersibles had ever accomplished such a feat, remained secret.

  The same day that General Wilson received Guest's report, he sent three nuclear weapons experts to the Fort Snelling to look at the Alvin photographs. One man worked for the Atomic Energy Commission; the other two were EOD officers who had several years' experience with the Mark 28.

  The weapons experts showed the Alvin crew photos of a Mark 28 bomb, and they recognized it immediately as the object they had seen. “That's it!” the crew said. The weapons team then examined the photos that Wilson had taken underwater. Although the parachute had wrapped itself around the object almost completely, the experts saw what appeared to be a lift lug. They also recognized the parachute as the right type for a Mark 28. Convinced that the Alvin crew had seen the bomb, the weapons experts took a boat to the flagship to tell Admiral Guest.

  On board the USS Albany, the experts found Guest resistant to their news. “It is the opinion of my team that they had difficulties in convincing CTF-65 of similarities between the two sets of photographs,” wrote General Wilson in a secret telegram to his Air Force superiors the next day. “Offers by my EOD team to assist in recovery operations and provide technical assistance met with cool reception.” Wilson promised to keep his superiors in the loop as new developments arose.

  In the same message, Wilson also mentioned that both he and Guest had received marching orders from the embassy in Madrid. The identification and recovery of the weapon must be handled secretly. Only the embassy, working with the government of Spain, could make public ann
ouncements on the matter.

  In Madrid, Duke was determined to keep the rest of this story under his control. If he played his cards right, the weapon recovery could become a proud moment for the U.S. and Spanish governments, an example of how well the two countries had worked together to tackle a tough problem. In the upcoming base negotiations, Spanish officials would remember how well the Americans had handled the accident, scoring points for U.S. negotiators.

  But on March 17, two days after Alvin found the parachute, Duke's phone rang, and his vision of a smooth ride to the finish was shattered. The man on the phone was Harry Stathos, the Madrid bureau chief for UPI, who had just returned from a trip to Germany. On the plane, he had struck up a conversation with a Pan Am pilot, who had been out drinking with an Air Force colonel the night before. The colonel had told the pilot, who told the reporter, that the bomb had been found. Now Stathos asked Duke: Had it? Duke said simply, “No comment.” But the word was out.

  Trying to nip this gossip in the bud, Duke decided to hold a press conference to announce the news officially. The ambassador was hosting a gala reception at the embassy that evening. He would talk to the press when the party ended. Staffers sent word to the press corps to assemble at the American Embassy at 1 a.m.

  Meanwhile, Duke sent a telegram to the secretary of state. In light of the UPI news break, he said, he planned to make the following public statement:

  The undersea vessel, Alvin, made contact on March 16th with an object lying in 2,500 feet of water approximately five miles off shore near Palomares. Military experts have evaluated underwater photographs taken of the object and believe it to be the missing nuclear weapon. Actions are being taken to recover the device. The photographs show a parachute attached to an object with [sic] is similar in size and shape to the missing nuclear weapon. The parachute, however, is covering part of the object preventing positive identification. Experts who have examined the photographs indicate that the casing appears to be intact, thereby precluding any radioactive contamination in the water.

  At 12:45 a.m., as reporters gathered in the embassy, Duke received a reply from the State Department, ordering him to cancel the press conference and say nothing. Instead, the embassy information officer, William Bell, read a telegram from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to the assembled reporters: “There have been hopeful developments but I cannot give you further information at this time. If we have a positive identification and recovery, we will so inform you.” The reporters were furious. And the slight did not stop them from filing stories for the following day.

  The articles were remarkably accurate. They reported that Alvin had found the bomb and parachute at 2,500 feet and that experts had seen photos and identified the weapon. A front-page article in The Washington Post also explained that the object rested precariously on an undersea slope a few miles off the coast of Palomares. “Recovery promises to be a delicate operation,” the article added. “Not only is the parachute-shrouded object already in deep water, but apparently it is balanced on the slope in such a way that a wrong nudge could send it rolling into even deeper water.”

  A page-one story in The New York Times predicted a fast recovery. According to officials, claimed the article, it would take only up to three days to recover the weapon. “No pictures of the bomb or the recovery operations would be permitted,” it added, “because of the highly secret nature of the material.”

  Duke may have been unhappy about the news break, but he shared the reporters' confidence. He was certain that Alvin had found the bomb but also felt, contrary to the Times' report, that to ensure credibility the Navy must display the recovered bomb to Spanish officials and the press.

  The military thought that was a terrible idea. First, there was the problem of logistics: nobody had ever recovered a weapon from this depth. Guest didn't know how long the recovery might take or if it would go smoothly. He also had no idea if the weapon—if it was the weapon—was intact or broken and perhaps leaking radiation. As for the Air Force, it had no interest in showing a top secret H-bomb to the press. It had never displayed a nuclear weapon in public before. Why start now?

  Confident that he could iron out these disagreements, Duke formed a committee to devise a plan for the public recovery and viewing. Looking ahead, he also drafted a press release, which he sent to the secretary of state on March 18 for review:

  The fourth and final weapon from the January 17 crash near Palomares Spain has been recovered today and is enroute to the United States at this time. The casing was intact and no release of radioactivity into the coastal waters has occurred. The weapon was located on March 16 in 2500 feet of water, approximately five miles off shore by the submersible Alvin. Photographs taken at that time tentatively identified the object as the missing weapon. The recovery of this weapon brings to a close the search phase of the operation. All wreckage fragments and associated aircraft material of interest to the US have now been located and recovered.

  Duke's press release would prove extremely premature, his hope for a quick and easy recovery overly optimistic. The Navy might have found the bomb, but it had no way to lift it.

  On March 16, McCamis and Wilson piloted Alvin back to the contact to relieve Aluminaut. Alvin, now outfitted with a transponder, could be guided by the Mizar almost directly to the target. Aluminaut had been down for twenty-two hours, babysitting the parachute-covered object. As they approached the larger sub, the Alvin pilots could see that it had parked itself at an angle, with its nose toward the bottom and its stern floating upward. The Alvin pilots approached the Aluminaut slowly, finally stopping just behind its elevated stern. At that moment, someone in the Aluminaut decided to walk to the back of the sub in order to use the urinal. As he did, the sub dipped its rear end toward Alvin, whose pilots squawked with alarm. McCamis grabbed the joystick and scooted Alvin off to the right. Then Aluminaut took off for the surface, showering Alvin with steel shot and mud from her underside.

  After recovering from these indignities, the Alvin pilots settled in for another shift. They had returned to keep an eye on the object, not attempt a recovery. Alvin by now had a mechanical arm with a reach of six feet, a rotating wrist, and two pincers like a lobster claw. They used the arm to place a transponder near the bomb, so the Mizar could find the weapon when Alvin left. But the arm couldn't lift the bomb. Outstretched, the arm could carry twenty-five to fifty pounds. Or it could hang on to two hundred pounds in the crook of the elbow. (Aluminaut would eventually have two arms with similar lifting ability, but they hadn't arrived in Spain yet.) There was no way Alvin could lift a two-ton nuclear weapon.

  Guest needed another way to raise the bomb. As McCamis and Wilson began their second vigil in the dark, the admiral's staff began to lay their plans.

  15.

  POODL versus the Bomb

  On March 22, 1966, CBS News aired a thirty-minute special report called “Lost and Found, One H-Bomb.” The show opened with the anchor, Charles Kuralt, seated before a two-color map of Spain indicating only two cities: Madrid and Palomares. “We live in a world in which it is possible to mislay a hydrogen bomb,” intoned Kuralt. “That is the central fact of the drama in Spain.” He continued:

  With thousands of men and millions of dollars and a flotilla of fifteen ships and with luck, we have apparently also found it, lying on the bottom of the sea. With the concurrence of the dark Mediterranean, it now seems likely that it will even be recovered and put in a safe place. But for the sixty days that one of our H-bombs was missing, worried people in the village of Palomares and thoughtful people everywhere asked, “Could it explode?” “Could it leak poisonous radiation?” “Could somebody else find it and put it to use?” Those are awesome questions but, considering the nature of the loss, not unreasonable ones.

  Later in the report, CBS showed a long scene from the movie Thunderball, then cut to a shot of Deep Jeep being hoisted from the water. (The Navy had already sent Deep Jeep back to the United States, but the journalists were apparently unable to
resist its photo-friendly bright yellow hull.) “This is not a search for a fictional missing H-bomb, this is a search for a real one,” said Kuralt. “If it looks a little like Thunder-ball, that is a comment on how fantastic fact has become lately.”

  Kuralt wrapped up the program with a shot of the blue Mediterranean, the hills of Palomares rising in the distance. “The bomb has not yet been brought to the surface, but it must be,” he said solemnly. “Because if we don't recover it, there remains the nagging, distant possibility that someone else will.”

  For about a week, Red Moody, now back on the task force, had been working on a plan. The key problem was getting a line down to the bottom, one heavy enough to support the weight of the bomb. Alvin or Aluminaut could carry a very light line. But if a submersible stretched a heavy line from a surface ship to the bomb, the force of the line in the current could overwhelm the sub's engines and sweep it off course.

  Working with two consultants to the task force, Ray Pitts and Jon Lindbergh (a diving expert and son of the famed aviator), Moody designed and built a gangly contraption called POODL. The curious name, a contraction of Pitts, Moody, and Lindbergh, had nothing to do with POODL's appearance or duties. POODL looked nothing like a poodle; it was a seven-foot-tall steel frame shaped like a giant shuttlecock and mounted with a slew of items: several pingers and transponders so the Mizar could track the device, a strobe light, a bucket containing 190 feet of carefully coiled nylon line with a grapnel on the far end, and another 150 feet of coiled nylon line ending with a hook.