By early February, the residents of Palomares who walked to the edge of their village and looked down toward the Mediterranean saw a curious sight. On the windswept Playa de Quitapellejos, edged up against the sea, sat a full-blown military camp. “The once-deserted Mediterranean coast at Palomares,” said Life magazine, now “looks like a World War II invasion beachhead.” Around the time that Joe Ramirez was visiting Tarzan the Shepherd, General Wilson decided that his men should not be camping in a dry riverbed. A flash flood — though a remote possibility — could easily wreck the camp. Even worse, airmen tromping around in the soft sand released an awful lot of dust — possibly contaminated — into the air. Looking around, Wilson decided that the barren, hard-packed playa near Palomares would serve his needs. He ordered a section of the beach leveled, and on Friday, January 21, Camp Wilson moved to its new home.
By February 1, Camp Wilson served as home and office to more than seven hundred people, who lived and worked in seventy-five canvas tents. General Wilson had his own command center, the walls hung with photomosaic maps and status boards listing aircraft movements, available vehicles, and the number of working radiation monitors. Air Force staff manned the command post twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. General Wilson held a briefing every morning at 9 a.m., where staff presented summaries of the last twenty-four hours and plans for upcoming projects. Every day, Wilson sent a report to SAC Commander General Ryan in Omaha, summarizing the search and cleanup activities.
To deliver mail and supplies, Wilson established a daily courier nicknamed the “Red-Eye Special.” The courier, either a truck or a helicopter, left Camp Wilson around 5 a.m. with a list of needed supplies. The courier made its way to San Javier, handed over the shopping list, and picked up the goods that had arrived from Torrejón, Morón, or elsewhere in Europe the previous day.
The Air Force sequestered all the enlisted men in Camp Wilson and told them to avoid contact with the villagers. Officers had a looser rein, however, and a few were lucky enough to find berths in town or at a seaside hotel within driving distance. Robert Finkel, the squadron commander who had slept with his head in a cardboard box, roomed above a gas station. The quarters had no shower but sported a bathtub with enough hot water for one bath. Finkel and his roommates rushed to get home at the end of each day — only the first arrival got the hot water; it was cold baths for the rest. Joe Ramirez, also rooming happily above a gas station, didn’t mind the cold showers as much as the meager breakfasts. One day, he complained about his grumbling stomach to a Spanish agricultural expert, who gave the young lawyer some life-altering advice. He told Ramirez to ask for a bocadillo de lomo de cerdo—a grilled pork sandwich — for breakfast. Ramirez took his advice, and after that his outlook improved considerably.
Even for the enlisted men, camp life had its pleasures. Gone were the days of sleeping under buses and choking down cold C-rations. Though not luxurious, Camp Wilson offered amenities that even the villagers on the hill didn’t have. Medical personnel ran a dispensary to treat sprains, blisters, and chest colds. A steady supply of water from the Navy allowed full laundry and bath facilities. The cooking staff set up an outdoor cafeteria that served three hot meals a day.
The Air Force provided entertainment as well: it borrowed a movie screen and projector from the Navy, so the men could sit on the sand and watch films at night. During the day, if the men had time and energy to spare, they played beach volleyball or touch football. The tough ones could swim in the sparkling but chilly sea.
Someone at Camp Wilson even designed a semiofficial emblem. It pictured a camp tent perched on the edge of the sea with a broken arrow — the military term for this kind of nuclear accident — in the sky overhead. Airmen took to wearing the emblem on black berets, the favored hat of the local Spanish men.
The villagers of Palomares, from their vantage point above the playa, watched the scene below with interest. To them, the rows of flapping canvas tents looked less like a military invasion than a curious patchwork quilt laid out by the sea. Among themselves, they called Camp Wilson “Villa Jarapa.” Jarapa is a regional word that doesn’t translate exactly into English. It’s something like a crazy quilt or a colorful rug woven from scraps and rags.
Judging by the size and scope of Camp Wilson, an observer could tell there was more going on than a simple search for debris. Everyone knew, and the press had widely reported, that the Americans were searching for a missing H-bomb. But, much to the frustration of the gathering hordes of international reporters, the military remained tight-lipped. It admitted that the crashed planes had carried nuclear armaments but said nothing about radioactive contamination or missing bombs.
According to the Air Force, the seven hundred men at Camp Wilson were simply cleaning up accident debris. The Navy was ordered to refer all news queries to the Air Force. “There are no denials. There are no confirmations,” said CBS News reporter Bernard Kalb. “Only ‘no comment’ again and again.” Kalb reported airmen wearing masks and radiation badges but could squeeze no information out of the Air Force, even after villagers told him where the first three bombs had been found. A rumor circulated that Paris Match was offering a week in Paris for information on the search. “So stringent is the official secrecy,” reported Newsweek, “that for once the men in the Pentagon have refrained from coming up with a catchy name for an operation, preferring to let this one go discreetly unidentified.”
Press briefings were maddening. New York Times reporter Tad Szulc described a typical exchange:
Reporter: Tell me, any sign of the bomb?
Air Force Spokesman: What bomb?
Reporter: Well, you know, the thing you’re looking for…
Air Force Spokesman: You know perfectly well we’re not looking for any bomb. Just looking for debris.
Reporter: All right, any signs of the thing that you say is not the bomb?
Air Force Spokesman: If you put it that way, I can tell you that there is no sign of the thing that is not the bomb….
Even the Spanish reporters, no strangers to official secrecy, were impressed. They started calling Air Force spokesman Barnett Young “Señor No Comment.”
The information vacuum quickly filled with misinformation and propaganda. London papers reported that Palomares had been sealed off and evacuated. The Sydney Sun ran a story under the headline “Death Rain from an H-Bomb.” Radio España Independiente (REI), the Spanish-language Communist radio station, leapt in with both feet. Almost every day, beginning on the day of the accident, REI broadcast news of Palomares. This was no small achievement, given that it usually had no actual news to report. Sometimes the coverage simply reminded listeners that a nuclear bomb was missing and called, vehemently, for the Yankee imperialists to get out of Spain and Vietnam.
But sometimes reports carried lengthy features, such as poems and songs sent in by listeners, interviews with authorities on radiation, and surveys of local farmers. (All of whom, of course, wanted the Yankee imperialists to get out of Spain and Vietnam.) The REI stories, reporting mass hysteria and poisoned produce, sounded shrill and absurd to many.
But in the absence of real information, they held power and resonance. Palomares was fertile ground for propaganda. Many of the villagers were illiterate, and the Americans told them little. For many of them, news came from gossip, and gossip often started with the radio. The radio said that the bombs had contaminated Almería with dangerous radiation, and the Americans offered little information to counter that. In fact, some Americans were walking around in masks, gloves, and sterile suits, talking about radioactivity and alpha particles. No wonder many of the villagers soon became worried.
At Camp Wilson, life for most of the enlisted men settled into a routine. The men woke at dawn, climbed into buses, and bumped across the countryside. At the appointed patch of desert, they stumbled out of the bus for another day of searching. According to the SAC final report, “It was a long, and a very trying and tiring task. Day after day, the entries in the daily operations log at the accident site simply stated: ‘Ground search continued.’” Walter Vornbrock, the base comptroller at Torrejón who helped organize the search parties, estimated that searchers covered about thirty-five square miles on foot, much of it two or three times. Despite the drudgery, the SAC report said, about 20 percent of the men “found they liked the outdoor life and volunteered to remain.” Of course, this meant that 80 percent did not.
Colonel Alton “Bud” White, the director of civil engineering for the Sixteenth Air Force, arrived in Palomares on January 22 to start clearing aircraft debris from the fields and hills around the village.
White had two flatbed trucks from Morón and Torrejón and soon added seven Spanish dump trucks to his fleet. Because most of the Air Force personnel were searching for bomb number four, White hired ten Spanish laborers. The Spanish were, however, leery of picking up chunks of radioactive debris. Ever since the accident, Spanish and American officials had been chasing them out of the tomato fields, warning them about radioactividad. The families of the ten laborers, alarmed about their new jobs, persuaded some of them not to return. Of the ten men that Bud White hired, only five came back the next day. Those five figured that if the Air Force guys were picking up debris, it couldn’t be that dangerous.
White soon supplemented his labor pool with forty-two fishermen from the nearby village of Villaricos. The Spanish navy had declared their fishing grounds off-limits, not out of fear of possible contamination but because their boats might interfere with the search for aircraft debris in the water.
The fishermen, according to White, proved “a pretty tough crew.” They were used to hard labor, long days, and handling rough fishing nets with their bare hands. White put them on the payroll, and they stayed for the entire operation.
White and his crew worked from dawn until dark. In just nine days, they cleared about 150 tons of scrap metal from the mountains and valleys around Palomares, heaping it on a junk pile just down the beach from Camp Wilson.
His men having cleared the bulk of the debris, White prepared to return to Madrid. That same day, General Wilson and the Spanish military liaison, Brigadier General Arturo Montel Touzet, arranged an assembly at the small movie house in the center of Palomares to calm the fears of the villagers.
Wilson and Montel spoke to a crowd of about 250 heads of local families. The Air Force banned members of the press from attending, physically barring at least one at the door. Speaking through a translator, Wilson thanked the villagers for their help and thanked God that nobody in Palomares had been injured. “On behalf of my Government, I would like to publicly express my most heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you,” said Wilson. “As Comrades-in-Arms in the defense against Communism, I know that the mutual admiration and high respect existing between the people of our two countries will continue in the future as in the past.” Wilson assured the villagers that the Air Force would clear the land of debris and pay the villagers for damages. He avoided mention of nuclear weapons, lost bombs, or radioactivity.
Wilson knew, however, that he had a major contamination problem on his hands. When Bud White reported that his team had cleared the major debris and his job was done, he was surprised — and a bit shocked — to learn that he was not going back to Madrid but would instead take over the “detection and decontamination division,” tracking down and cleaning up the scattered plutonium.
White knew next to nothing about radiation. He had grown up on a farm and held a degree in agriculture. But the next day, he took charge of the cleanup effort.
White did have some expert help. A team of scientists from the Spanish nuclear agency, Junta de Energía Nuclear (JEN), had been in Palomares since a day or two after the accident. Emilio Iranzo, one of the Spanish scientists, said that when he arrived and learned that two of the bombs had broken open, he worried that they would have to evacuate the village. But after some quick air measurements, the Spanish scientists decided that the air contamination was not bad enough to warrant an evacuation. Then they tested the crops and soil and found that much of the land had received a fine dusting of alpha particles. They ordered the villagers to stop harvesting tomatoes, and the Guardia Civil enforced the rule. The villagers watched in dismay as their tomatoes ripened, rotted, and fell off the vine.
Now White’s job was to calculate how far contaminated dust had spread from the two broken bombs and to map the contamination. Starting at each bomb’s impact point, White drew a series of lines leading away from the crater, each line angling about fifteen degrees from the next. White’s team, using a handheld alpha-measuring device called a PAC-1S, walked along each line, measuring the alpha contamination until it reached zero. They used this information to draw “zero lines”—giant squiggly circles around the contaminated areas.
Work proceeded slowly. Because alpha radiation travels such a short distance in air, PAC-1S operators — most of whom were trained on the spot — had to hold the face of the counter close to the ground to get a reading. But the PAC-1S had been designed for laboratory use; the measurement face was thin and fragile as paper and tore easily on the jagged rocks.
Despite the equipment problems, White and his team managed to run zero lines around the two bomb craters and the town itself. Their results were daunting. The contaminated area inside the circles included about 640 acres of hillside, village, and farmland. Of the 640 acres, 319 were cultivated farmland. In Oklahoma, 319 acres might add up to a couple of flat, level fields of soybeans — a tractor could plow it under in two or three days. But in Palomares, farmers had chopped the land into a patchwork of 854 separate plots, almost all of them smaller than four acres, some smaller than an acre. To separate their tiny, uneven fields, villagers had built stone walls and tangled cactus fences. Through this maze ran irrigation ditches, carrying water to the ripening tomatoes. In some fields, the crops stood thick; the tomato plants, especially, climbed high and sagged under their heavy fruit. The U.S. and Spanish governments wanted this maze of land cleared — and somehow cleaned of radioactivity — by April 1, so farmers could plant their next rotation of crops. “In twenty-four years of Air Force experience,” said Bud White, “I have never, never had a challenge like this one.”
While Bud White worked on a cleanup plan, something had to be done about the tomatoes. In Palomares, farmers used thin, flexible, six-to-eight-foot poles to support their tomato plants, forming dense thickets in the fields. The majority of poles and plants showed no contamination. But plutonium dust had settled in the soil around the plants, so the Air Force decided to clear the fields to the ground. “The only way you could treat that land,” said White, “was to get rid of those cane poles, because you couldn’t get the plow in there.”
The job of chief tomato plant chopper fell to Bob Finkel. His superiors gave him a handful of men and a bucketful of machetes. Every day, he faced a new patch of tomatoes. From dawn until dusk, he and his men hacked tomato plants until the fields lay clear. Someone nicknamed the group “Finkel’s Farmers,” but he thought they looked more like a chain gang. By the end of a day in the blazing sun, Finkel and his crew were filthy with sweat and dirt and sticky with rotten tomatoes.
Finkel’s Farmers piled the cane poles and green plants at the far end of each field for mulching and disposal. The ripe tomatoes, on the other hand, were gathered into gleaming red heaps. One news reporter wrote that most of the crop was dumped at sea, in an operation quickly dubbed “the Boston Tomato Party.” But residents of Camp Wilson knew that many ended up in the mess hall.
As a gesture of goodwill, and to help support the desperate tomato farmers, the Air Force had decided to buy the contaminated tomatoes, wash off any alpha contamination, and feed them to the airmen. At the peak of the harvest, it bought 250 pounds of tomatoes a day. “Anywhere you turned around, there was a bucket of tomatoes,” said Walter Vornbrock. “We could eat tomatoes all day and all night, for that matter. If you loved them, you were in Heaven.” A bit farther down the beach from Camp Wilson, somewhat aloof from the Air Force men, sat the Navy divers’ tent, sometimes marked by a cardboard sign over the door reading “EOD Command Post.” The divers took pride in being a bit rougher, a bit wilder, than their Air Force brethren. “The Air Force is okay,” said Gaylord White, a diver who came to Palomares from Rota. “I mean, they live in nice, clean, dry places; they eat good food. But we’re not used to that crap.” Noting strong winds on the beach, the divers set up their tent, holding the corners down with concrete clumps — the ubiquitous diving tools used to secure buoys and search lines — then watched smugly as other tents blew down. Inside the tent, the divers built a wooden workbench for mapping out search patterns. Underneath the desk, they dug a deep hole and buried an empty oil drum with the top cut off. They filled the drum with beer, fitted a plywood lid on top, and covered it with sand.
Anyone inspecting the scene would see a diver scribbling at his workbench and never suspect that his feet rested on a buried drum of beer. “Leave it to divers,” said White. “They’ll find a way.” On the afternoon of February 2, Ambassador Duke flew to San Javier with his special assistant, Tim Towell, and General Donovan. The group spent the night in San Javier, then flew by helicopter to Camp Wilson to meet General Wilson and Admiral Guest. It was the ambassador’s first visit to Palomares, but not his first report from the scene. Right after the accident, Duke had sent Towell and another embassy staffer, Joe Smith, to the village to survey the scene. After chatting with some locals in a bar, they had tracked down General Wilson, who was not thrilled to see them. Wilson viewed the accident as a simple military operation and saw little need for diplomats, diplomacy, or making nice with Spanish officials. “Just go in, put a clamp on the area, clean it out, and then get out of there,” said Smith, describing Wilson’s view. “I think they saw me being there, especially the fact that I spent a lot of time in the village… that that was not particularly a good thing,” he added.
Towell was more blunt. “General Wilson was totally dismissive of these civilian wimps from the State Department,” he said. “He didn’t want to play with a bunch of pointy-headed sissies. This was a job for real men.”
Smith and Towell stayed for a couple of days, eventually convincing Wilson to hold a sanitized briefing for the local military governor, which Wilson did reluctantly. “If you take care of sovereign people and deal with them in a respectful way, it advances the United States national interest,” said Towell. “You’re not just being Mr. Nice Guy.” Wilson, however, was searching for a missing H-bomb and contending with possibly massive plutonium contamination; he had little energy to devote to diplomacy. Smith and Towell returned to Madrid and told Duke what they had seen. Their report did not please the ambassador. He decided to visit Palomares himself.
At Camp Wilson, Duke met General Wilson and Admiral Guest for a briefing on the search for the missing bomb and the ongoing cleanup work. Then the ambassador visited the crash site, the junk pile, and the nearby fishing village of Villaricos. He also spent time in Palomares speaking to villagers. Duke took notes on the visit. Of General Wilson, he wrote, “His mission — to leave Spain as we found it before the accident.” Below, he wrote, “delighted to learn that there is no danger whatsoever to public health. However, whole operation will continue for at least another month.” Under the name of Admiral Guest, he listed the array of high-tech gear being used. He also scribbled the words Alvin and Aluminaut—the names of two minisubmarines that would soon arrive on scene to search the deep water. Most of the notes, however, related to the situation in Palomares. Farmers were working, but only in certain fields; fishermen could fish, but not in the search area; and villagers were filing claims for losses. At the top of the final page, he wrote the words “Local Morale” and underlined them. Underneath he wrote:
The population was fretting at not receiving information, and subject to rumors while idle. Now they appear to be more satisfied that they know what is going on after meeting with Genls Wilson and Montel — some have already gone back to work. Some will be picked up by the 16th. Foreign radio news was a disquieting factor, but some of the absurdities, which they could verify, tended to reassure them. Anxious that no outside labor be brought in. They are anxious to help and work.
On the back of the final page, Duke scribbled one last thought: “The people of Palomares,” he wrote, “have been propelled into the Atomic Age.”
Duke returned to Madrid with several new priorities. First, he had to ensure that the people of Palomares received quick, fair compensation to restore trust and keep the situation calm. Second, he had to convince the Spanish and U.S. governments to be more open with the news media.
Duke had already complained to Washington about the secrecy surrounding the operation. On January 27, he had sent a cable to the secretary of state outlining the problem. The press, he noted, had been able to “piece together essentially correct stories and TV coverage despite tight security and lack official statements.” Reporters, smelling a big story and a cover-up, would not simply disappear. American officials should give them controlled information, rather than just wishing them away. “Although number pressmen on scene has declined, introduction of exotic equipment and buildup at sea has rekindled high interest; many planning return to scene shortly.” 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.
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 all ow 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 Air 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.
The DSSP, created in 1964 for something exactly like the Palomares accident, simply was not ready.
We had “almost nothing,” said Craven. “No assignments had gone on, nothing,” said Brad Mooney, a thirty-five-year-old Navy lieutenant who had piloted the Trieste during the exploration of the Thresher wreckage and remained with the Trieste group afterward. “Then, before DSSP really gets its act together, the bomb goes down. So all that they could do was get a pickup team to go over there. And it was a ragtag pickup team.” Brad Mooney and other veterans of the Thresher search were sent to Spain, along with a handful of SEALAB divers. But if people expected the DSSP to provide a detailed recovery plan, a crack team of searchers, and lots of shiny new gear, they would be sorely disappointed. “The Navy had achieved no interim readiness for search and recovery,” said the Navy’s final report on Palomares. “The entire operation, from its initial inception to its termination, was improvised.”
Back on dry land, the Air Force continued its tedious search for bomb number four. Joe Ramirez spent his days talking to locals, collecting data for damage claims, and listening for clues about the bomb. Conflicting information, possible leads, and various complaints whizzed around the young lawyer with dizzying speed. To keep track, he started jotting notes in a narrow notebook.
Other pages held more interesting notes. One page read, “Antonio Alarcon Alarcon — House is next one over to south of La Torre. Have been moved out. Pig with litter of pigs — litter has to be fed.
Why can’t they move the pigs?” Another page listed two names already well known to many searchers: Roldán Martínez and Simó Orts.
One person who hadn’t yet heard of the two fishermen was Randy Maydew, the Sandia engineer who had overseen the computer calculations suggesting that bomb number four might have landed in the sea. At the request of General Wilson, Maydew had flown to Spain to help narrow down the search area. He was surprised by how much the Almería desert resembled Albuquerque, “except for that blue, blue Mediterranean out there.” But when he walked into Camp Wilson, he found that Air Force staffers didn’t have much regard for eggheads like him. This changed when General Wilson discovered that Maydew had also served in the Pacific during World War II. As a navigator in a B-29 bomber, Maydew had flown thirty bombing missions, including LeMay’s famous firebombing of Tokyo. The missions did more to establish Maydew’s credibility with General Wilson than his engineering degrees or his years of research on bombs and parachutes.
Though Maydew had won over General Wilson, by early February he was little closer to pinpointing bomb number four. Then, one morning, Joe Ramirez stopped by Maydew’s tent and told him about his interview with the Spanish fishermen. Ramirez knew that Roldán and Simó had seen something significant. Perhaps Maydew, with his engineering expertise, could put the pieces together. The engineer agreed to talk to Simó.
On the evening of February 2, Maydew and Ramirez drove to Aguilas and interviewed Simó in the mayor’s office. Simó told the men his story. He told them about the small parachute carrying a half man with his insides trailing. And he told them about the dead man, floating from a bigger chute, who had sunk before he could reach him. Maydew asked the fisherman how much the objects hanging from the chutes had swung in the sky. Moving his hand in the air, Simó indicated that the “half man” below the small chute hadn’t swung much, maybe about 10 degrees. But the “dead man” under the larger chute had oscillated about 30 degrees.
The information made sense: Maydew knew that the big sixty-four-foot chute would oscillate about 30 degrees as it fell, while the sixteen-foot chute would hardly sway at all. The engineer picked up a sheet of paper and roughly sketched the two parachutes, then asked Simó if they looked right. Simó examined the drawings and shook his head. Then he grabbed the pen and sketched his own, with greater detail. The engineer was astonished.
Looking at the fisherman’s drawings, it was obvious that Simó’s “dead man” was a bomb, or part of a bomb, falling into the sea underneath the sixty-four-foot parachute. And the “half man”? That was clearly the empty canvas bag of the large parachute, hanging from the sixteen-foot ribbon chute and trailing its “entrails”—the packing lines — behind. Simó had sketched it with uncanny accuracy.
“Before I left the mayor’s office,” Maydew said later, “I was convinced absolutely that he had seen number 4 go into the sea.”
By the time Maydew reported his findings to General Wilson and Admiral Guest a few days later, however, he had decided to hedge his bets. In their calculations, Maydew’s team took all information into account: Simó’s report; the testimony of the B-52 airmen who had seen parachutes after the crash; the location of the other bombs; the tailplate from bomb number four; and other important pieces of wreckage. They also noted another new piece of information regarding the B-52’s tail section: someone had found four scratches on the upper surface of the tail, which appeared to have been made by a radioactive object.
On February 5, Maydew’s team briefed General Wilson and Admiral Guest on their findings. It was certainly possible, they said, that Simó had seen the intact weapon fall into the ocean. But the more likely scenario was this: After the explosion, weapon number four had collided with falling debris (possibly scratching and contaminating the B-52 tail section) and broken up in midair. The heavy nuclear warhead had probably fallen onto land and buried itself five to twenty feet below the surface. The bomb casing had drifted out to sea, where Simó had seen it fall.
Maydew’s team advised the Navy to center its search on the area pinpointed by Simó. The Air Force, meanwhile, should continue its search on land, centering their efforts on a 10,000-foot-diameter circle calculated by the engineers. Air Force searchers had already combed this area, but this time they should look for a shallow depression about three to eight feet in diameter. The nuclear warhead would likely be buried below. Maydew’s team printed copies of their report and distributed them on February 7. Then they returned to America, leaving a handful of replacements to continue the work.
It is unclear whether Admiral Guest didn’t like Maydew’s team or didn’t trust their calculations, but he didn’t entirely buy their conclusions. Over the next few days, as more Navy men interviewed Simó, Guest became more convinced that the fisherman had seen the whole bomb fall into the sea.
On February 7, the USS Pinnacle again carried Roldán and Simó out to sea, where they again showed the Navy where the parachutes had hit the water. This time, Simó placed the chutes about five hundred yards west of his previous position, but the Navy men were still impressed by his story and navigation skills.
A few days later, Red Moody, who now berthed aboard the admiral’s flagship, went ashore to visit Simó himself. Red spent the afternoon with Simó reviewing the story, then joined him for a late dinner. Moody, already inclined to trust the instincts of locals, found the fisherman credible. By the end of the evening, Moody thought that Simó might have seen the bomb, but he couldn’t be sure.
“What does a weapon look like to a person that’s never seen one, when it’s coming down and you’re kind of busy?” wondered Moody. “Everybody on the scene was questioning: Is it intact? Is it not intact? If it’s not intact, how much? If it came apart, what would happen?” Moody drove back to Camp Wilson that evening, mulling over these questions. When he arrived at camp, he found that a storm was brewing and all boat traffic had been canceled. Marooned onshore, Red spent a miserable night in a wind whipped tent. He tried to sleep, but his cot had no sheets or blankets. Blowing sand scoured his face all night. It was the worst birthday he’d ever had.
On the night of the big storm, Red Moody had it bad, but Mac McCamis had it far worse. First of all, he was stuck inside Alvin with Val Wilson, or “Slick Willie,” as Mac liked to call him. Wilson, another Alvin pilot, always rubbed Mac the wrong way. Both men had served on Navy submarines, but Mac had spent his time with tools in hand, wrenching machinery into submission. Wilson had worked as a quartermaster, managing a submarine’s operations and handling copious paperwork. On the Alvin team, Wilson was known for his ability to push paper through Washington, an important skill but one of little interest to Mac. McCamis called him the “clock winder.” That was Wilson’s greatest mechanical skill, he said — winding clocks on a ship.
Being stuck inside Alvin with Slick Willie the Clock Winder was bad enough, but even worse, Alvin was trapped on the water’s surface off the coast of Palomares, moored to a buoy and rocking on the high waves. The previous day, the USS Plymouth Rock had arrived in Rota to pick up Alvin and her crew. The Plymouth Rock was a type of vessel called a landing ship dock, designed to transport marines and their amphibious landing craft to battle. The center of the ship contained a well deck, a cavernous compartment the size of a warehouse that flooded with water, allowing small boats to sail in and out. After the Alvin crew patched the sub together at Rota, they putted the craft into the Plymouth Rock’s well deck, parked it next to another submersible named Aluminaut, and set sail for Palomares. They arrived the following day.
The Plymouth Rock had to leave for other duties, so they prepared to transfer the Alvin and Aluminaut to another landing ship dock, the Fort Snelling. Wilson and McCamis sailed Alvin out of the well deck and tied the sub to a buoy. Nearby, the Aluminaut crew did the same. They planned to wait there for a couple of hours as the Fort Snelling moved into position and prepared to take them on. It was about 2 p.m., bright and sunny. For a while, the subs rocked placidly on the waves. Then, around 5:30 p.m., the wind began to blow.
The Navy captain Lewis Melson was sitting down to supper on the admiral’s flagship with Cliff Page, Admiral Guest’s chief of staff, when Page, whose seat faced out the door, suddenly stiffened and said, “Good gosh, look at that.” Melson turned to see a wall of flying sand bearing down on the ship. What happened next was so dramatic that Melson recorded it in a letter home: We rushed out onto the main deck and were greeted with a blast of wind that almost knocked us down. Later on, we found out the gust recorded 63 knots. We couldn’t see more than a few feet to seawards and the other ships had disappeared from sight. Out of the gloom came a small boat that was bearing down on our side and obviously out of control. As the boat neared us, we could see the coxswain struggling with his helm, then the canopy blew off and began to batter the passengers in the boat. The slight shelter from the side of the cruiser was enough to allow the coxswain to regain control and the boat slammed into our sides but did not capsize.
The thick cloud finally lifted and we could see the submersibles were still riding at their moorings.
With the wind howling above 50 knots, all we could do was sit back and wait. We knew there were men on the subs.
When the wind picked up, Wilson and McCamis closed the hatch and hunkered down inside the tiny sub. Underwater, Alvin swam so smoothly that passengers could barely tell they were moving. But on the surface, especially in rough seas, it rocked and bobbed like a toy boat in a tempest. With no windows and no fresh air, it was a nauseating ride.
Wilson and McCamis spent the night in the sub, rolling in the waves and undoubtedly grating on each other’s nerves. The next day, after twenty-one hours at sea, they managed to sail Alvin back into the Plymouth Rock, despite forty-knot winds and heavy seas. The two men emerged exhausted, as the crew inspected the tiny sub. Luckily, Alvin had suffered only minor damage, but it would still take days to repair.
Admiral Guest and the members of his staff had high expectations for Alvin when it arrived in Spain.
Guest was eager to investigate the promising sonar hits around the area of Simó’s sighting, and Alvin was one of the few tools he could use in such deep water. But the little sub wasn’t the admiral’s only hope. In addition to Alvin, the Technical Advisory Group in Washington had sent a few other gadgets. One was an unmanned device called the Westinghouse Ocean Bottom Scanning Sonar, or OBSS.
The OBSS, about the size of a sofa and weighing more than a thousand pounds, was a box of electronics with a propeller on one end. It was what Navy people call a “fish”: a device designed to be dragged underwater at the end of a long cable. A minesweeper towed the OBSS near the bottom, and the device scanned a lane about 200 yards wide. (The device did not, however, scan directly below itself. Once the OBSS swept a lane, the minesweeper had to drag it back to overlap this blind spot.) The OBSS could work as deep as 20,000 feet, but in Spain it generally operated with a cable about 3,000 feet long.
A problem immediately emerged: the OBSS often got snagged on the rugged seafloor contours.
When the OBSS sensed an undersea outcrop ahead, operators could winch it in or ask the minesweeper to speed up, either of which would raise the fish and hopefully spare it from harm. But both these tactics had a lag time, and by the time a minesweeper tried to raise the OBSS, it could be snagged, trapped, or lost. The Westinghouse technical representative in charge of the system decreed that operators could not tow the fish closer than 100 feet from the sea floor. Unfortunately, the device worked best at 20 to 30 feet off the bottom. The Navy eventually obtained three OBSS devices, so operators had some choices: they could tow low and accept a certain number of casualties, or they could tow higher and accept that the OBSS wasn’t going to work very well. Or they could attempt to fix a high-speed winch to the back of a minesweeper. They needed to figure out something, because the OBSS was the only deep water unmanned system the task force had.
The Washington group also sent Guest a handful of manned submersibles. The first to arrive was Deep Jeep, a two-man Navy sub that could dive to 2,000 feet but had dim underwater lights and insufficient power to fight the currents. After a few days, one of its electric motors failed.
Another sub, called Cubmarine, was twenty-two feet long, six feet high, and painted a bright banana yellow. It looked almost cartoonish, resembling the Beatles’ vessel in Yellow Submarine, but was reliable and maneuvered well. The little sub held two people and could stay underwater for up to eight hours. But it could dive to only 600 feet, putting the fisherman’s tantalizing search area out of its reach.
The Navy’s hope therefore rested on the only deep-diving submersibles cleared for classified work and immediately available: Alvin and Aluminaut. Both vehicles were odd ducks. “Alvin was decidedly mongrel,” wrote Victoria Kaharl in her book Water Baby, “a cross between aircraft, spacecraft and submarine.” With its white, bulbous body, it reminded people of a fishing lure, a pregnant guppy, a washing machine, or a bottle of Clorox bleach. “When people see it for the first time, they’re sort of let down,” said the longtime Alvin mechanic George Broderson. “They have this feeling it should be a long black sleek thing. Instead they see what looks like a big white toilet.” At Alvin’s core sat the personnel sphere, 6 feet, 10 inches in diameter, just big enough to squish three people inside and built of a new steel alloy that made the sphere thin and light enough to float on its own. The sphere rested in a metal frame that held batteries, ballast tanks, electric motors, and hydraulics. To make the contraption float, engineers designed a streamlined fiberglass hull and packed every nook and cranny with syntactic foam, a buoyant material made of microscopic glass bubbles embedded in an epoxy resin. Altogether, Alvin measured twenty-two feet long from nose to tail, its body only eight feet wide at the waist. Alvin’s batteries drove one big forty-eight-inch propeller on its tail and two fourteen-inch props on its back. The big prop could turn 50 degrees to either side, and the little ones could turn a full 360 degrees, allowing pilots to “fly” the sub like a helicopter. Alvin could glide along at about 2.5 knots or sprint at 6 knots in short bursts. She could stay underwater for ten hours, maybe twenty-four if the pilots conserved power, and swim down to 6,000 feet.
The only other sub in Spain that could dive that deep was Aluminaut, owned and operated by Reynolds Metal Company. (Company Vice President J. Louis Reynolds was a submarine buff and deep-ocean enthusiast.) Aluminaut was much bigger than Alvin, 50 feet, 11 inches long, and had greater endurance. Builders had assembled it from a series of huge aluminum doughnuts, shaped from the largest ingots of aluminum ever cast. Each massive doughnut stood eight feet tall; the builders had aligned them into a cylinder and bolted them together, capping each end with a bowl to create what looked like a giant aluminum Tylenol capsule. They had then painted the outside a bright orangey red. With three propellers the sub could cruise underwater at 3.8 knots, but its large size made it difficult to maneuver. If Alvin was a guppy, Aluminaut was a whale.
The sub could carry up to nine people, depending on the amount of gear they brought along. This is not to say that the sub was roomy. Rather, the inside felt like a subway car that had been shrunk to one-quarter scale and stacked high with luggage along the walls. The sub held two bunks that the crew usually pressed into service as work-tables. There was also a toilet, which the crew tried to use judiciously. With five to nine men in a cramped space for up to seventy-two hours with no fresh air, the sub already smelled like a sweaty locker room. No one wanted to add another smell to the already heavy air.
At the front end of the ship, a semicircular bench, padded and covered with green imitation leather, fit snugly to the inside of the hull. Sitting on the bench allowed one to see out of three of Aluminaut’s four viewports. The fourth viewport was under the bench, facing down toward the seafloor. If Aluminaut turned on its underwater lights, 1,500 candlepower of brightness would push into the gloom, allowing visibility of 100 feet.
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.”
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.
On the plane, Richardson explained his system to Andrews. He thought he could call it “search failure probability.” In other words, after the Navy had searched a given area, this was the probability that the bomb was there but the Navy had failed to find it. Andrews shook his head.
Tony, he explained, you have it all backwards. You are dealing with the Navy. You can’t talk about failure! You need to talk about success. Richardson objected, showing Andrews a sample probability he had plotted on his graph paper. Andrews looked at it and frowned. The line that Richardson had drawn sloped downward toward the bottom of the page. It looked like a business with a bad quarter or a stock market crash. No, no, no, Andrews explained. In the Navy, graphs need to point up.
Richardson and Andrews reported to Admiral Guest on February 22. Richardson’s reputation had preceded him. The ship had prepared for the arrival of the distinguished mathematician, assigning him a generous stateroom with a private sink and stewards. So Guest was a bit taken aback to discover that Dr. Richardson was a baby-faced twenty-seven-year-old who looked even younger than his age.
Eyeballing this new member of his team, Guest asked Dr. Richardson what he could do for the mission. Richardson launched into a description of his plan — now called search effectiveness probability — and an explanation of Gaussian probability distributions. As Guest’s eyes glazed over, Andrews stepped in and cut Richardson off. After the admiral escaped, Andrews turned to Richardson. Would this kid ever learn? “Tony,” he said, “don’t talk about Gaussian distributions to an admiral!” Later, Guest pulled Frank Andrews aside. “Where the hell did you get this high school kid?”
Soon, however, Guest began to see the value of his new addition. Richardson, working with the grid overlay of the search area, assigned each square a “search effectiveness probability” (or “SEP”) number between 0 and 1. A low number, close to 0, meant that if the bomb lay in that square, searchers probably wouldn’t have found it yet, either because they hadn’t searched there or because they hadn’t used the proper tools. A higher number, such as.95 or.98, meant that if the bomb rested in that area, the searchers probably would have found it by now. The goal was to get each square on the grid from a low number to a higher one.
Some on the task force had doubts about Richardson’s system. After all, the information he used to make calculations was vague. Nobody could say for sure when Alvin or Aluminaut or OBSS had “covered” a particular area, because their navigation accuracy and the underwater terrain remained largely unknown. But Richardson had equations to cover these uncertainties. Every night, he crunched numbers using a Frieden calculator — a mechanical adding machine the size of a cash register — in the Boston’s accounting office. Because the office was busy during the day, Richardson made all his calculations from about 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., the chug-chug-chug of the calculator keeping him company. At eight every morning, he presented his new chart to Guest at the admiral’s daily briefing.
Guest grew to love Richardson’s search effectiveness probability chart. Like all salvage missions, the search for the missing bomb was a succession of failures, one day after another of hard work, with nothing to show for it. Richardson’s ever-changing numbers were the only tangible sign of progress. “It’s important psychologically to have something that shows that you’re actually achieving something. And SEP served that purpose,” said Richardson. “It was kind of like the thermometer on the United Fund chart. It keeps going up and up.”
That is to say, the numbers in certain squares kept going up and up; namely, those searched by Red Moody’s inshore divers — probably the only searchers on Task Force 65 properly trained and equipped to do their job. By February 17, they had thoroughly scanned the water from the beach out to eighty feet deep. “He had guys swimming along the shore that were actually looking at the bottom with their eyes,” recalled Richardson. “So I’d always have these very high numbers for Red, like over ninety percent.” The numbers cheered Admiral Guest, not only because they showed progress but because he could then tease Red Moody, the towering, muscular diver, about intimidating the skinny mathematician into fixing his stats.
Deep water, however, was another story. With Alvin, Aluminaut, and OBSS struggling, the numbers in the deepwater boxes remained stubbornly close to zero. At times, Guest moved the submersibles inshore, probably to be able to check off a few more boxes on Richardson’s chart. The submersible crews, with no understanding of the admiral’s motivations, were greatly annoyed by these seemingly arbitrary moves. But the admiral didn’t care, because he was greatly annoyed by the submersibles.
By the time Alvin and Aluminaut had been in Spain for a few weeks, specific grievances began to emerge. During a dive on level terrain, Aluminaut veered off her back-and-forth sweep pattern to examine what appeared to be a piece of airplane wreckage. The crew took photos and presented them to Guest at a meeting on the flagship. Instead of being congratulated on the find, as he expected, Art Markel received a rebuke. “What are you doing, going out of the area?” demanded Guest. “I think I’ll have to send you back to the States, because you don’t know how to take orders.” Markel, proud of his work and his ship, was furious.
The Alvin crew had its own problems with the admiral. The high seas had led to several close calls for the little sub. On February 23, the waves rose too high for the crew to maneuver Alvin into the well deck of the Fort Smiling, so the Navy ship used its crane to lift Alvin over the side. It was a risky maneuver, dangling the fragile sub close to the side of the ship, and Earl Hays did not want to repeat it. He would not risk Alvin or her crew by diving in rough weather again and sent a message to the flagship stating so.
Soon after, Hays attended a briefing on the flagship. Guest told the scientist that he wanted Alvin to dive by 2 p.m. the following day. Knowing Alvin would dive only if the weather permitted, Hays replied, “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.” Guest, taken aback by the scientist’s insolence, asked what he meant. Hays, equally insulted by Guest’s demand, replied, “If you’re going to give me orders like that, Admiral, I’m going to take Alvin and go home.” With that, Guest threw Hays out of the room.
Then he turned to Brad Mooney, who had witnessed the exchange, and said, “What the hell do you do with a guy like that?”
Mooney, used to dealing with both admirals and scientists, knew that the two men came from vastly different cultures, one that demanded obedience and one that questioned authority. But Mooney also knew that no matter what their differences, these people had to work together to find the bomb. He said to Guest, “Admiral, he’s a researcher. Why don’t you not talk to him anymore and let me talk to him?” From that day on, says Mooney, Guest never spoke to Earl Hays. Such events soured the already strained relationship between Guest and the Alvin crew. Some of the crew understood the admiral, but many, according to Mooney, just “locked into their minds what a bastard Guest was.” By the end of February, Guest had all the deep-search tools he was going to get. Despite the personnel difficulties, Aluminaut and Alvin were diving and searching. The USNS Mizar had arrived, with hydrophones that could navigate Alvin more effectively. Mizar also brought a deep-towed camera sled to photograph the bottom. Often, the Mizar spent its days tracking Alvin and its nights taking photographs. The Ocean Bottom Scanning Sonar was up and running, at least for now.
One Navy captain estimated that if all the deep-ocean gear worked well every day, they could cut the search time from three years to two.
Catching glimpses of divers, minisubs, and high-tech gear, the press played up the James Bond angle. Life magazine reported, “At first the Thunderball aspects of the great search were not discernible. But gradually the search force took on the familiar trappings: squads of frogmen emerged on the beaches, and tiny two-and three-man subs prowled the waters. Now the spirit of James Bond is all over this tiny coastal area of southern Spain.” Admiral Guest would probably have disagreed. He was working with temperamental gadgets, experimental subs, and disrespectful scientists. He had nothing like the custom gear designed by James Bond’s Q.
One Sunday morning in February, Joe Ramirez sat in the claims tent at Camp Wilson, poring over legal documents. Ramirez plunged deep into the villagers’ claims, trying to place a value on each farmer’s patch of alfalfa, peas, or tomatoes. As Ramirez worked, the phone rang. General Wilson wanted to see him.
Ramirez scampered to Wilson’s tent to find an irritated general. “Your friend the fisherman,” Wilson said, looking at Ramirez with annoyance, “has run the blockade.” Early that morning, Simó had sailed his fishing boat into the Navy’s restricted area (which, as it happened, covered some prime fishing grounds). Simó had lowered his nets and caught something heavy, which he believed was the bomb. He had dragged the object to a small cove in nearby Terreros and tried to haul it up, but it had proved too heavy to reel in. Simó had radioed the Air Force with the news. I have your bomb, he said. If you want it, come get it.
Ramirez’s first thought was “Damn, we finally found this bomb!” General Wilson gave the orders: Ramirez and two EOD divers should fly to Terreros and check out the situation. If Simó had the bomb, Ramirez should secure the area and report back to him.
So, at about 11:30 in the morning, Ramirez climbed into a helicopter with Red Moody and Oliver Andersen and headed up the coast.
By this point, Air Force searchers had accepted that bomb number four was probably not lying intact in an open crater. Many assumed that the bomb had fallen into the sea. But as the sea search dragged on, several other possibilities arose.
A Palomares schoolteacher said that he had seen something on the day of the accident: a large cloud of dust near the B-52 tail impact point. Perhaps, thought investigators, the bomb had buried itself in the desert sand. Searchers were ordered to mark any sort of crater, depression, or patch of earth that looked disturbed. The problem was, nobody knew what the crater above a buried bomb might look like. General Wilson asked the Sandia engineers to arrange some drop tests. They contacted their colleagues in Albuquerque, and they quickly organized a test at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, in a stretch of desert that resembled the land around Palomares.
The engineers at Sandia assumed that if the bomb had stayed intact before hitting the ground, the searchers would have found scattered debris on the surface. Since that hadn’t happened, the engineers assumed that the bomb had broken apart in midair and that only the heavy primary or secondary sections had buried themselves underground. (These sections — top secret and possibly radioactive — were the parts of most interest to the military anyway.) They asked the scientists at Los Alamos to build some test shapes with the same weight and shape as the Mark 28 nuclear components. On Sunday, February 13, a handful of technicians and engineers gathered in the desert at dawn and watched as a helicopter hovered in the sky and dropped the shapes onto the sand.
Operation Sunday, as the exercise was called, discovered a couple of things. One was that the dummy bomb parts buried themselves about two feet underground when they landed. On the surface, they left elliptical craters about seven feet long and nearly two feet deep. Each crater and its rays, formed from moist soil, were darker than the surrounding ground, easily visible to an untrained observer. However, after a few hours, the soil dried out. Within a day, the crater and its rays were exactly the same color as the surrounding earth. The only telltale sign remaining was the shallow crater itself.
The engineer who compiled the test results recommended that all vehicular and food traffic in the search area should be “severely restricted,” since it would easily destroy shallow craters. “Above all,” he added, “no defoliation at all should be done until the areas have been cleared by ground-impact teams: it is probable that normal craters would be destroyed or filled in by the defoliating crews.”
But trucks and buses had been swarming the area for weeks, with airmen tromping over miles of terrain and tearing up hundreds of tomato plants. If their work had damaged a crater, there was nothing to be done about it now. Sandia gave the Air Force some guidance for the next step: searchers should use long poles to probe any suspect hole, crater, divot, or ditch down to five feet.
The Air Force also asked a representative from the Bureau of Mines to examine mine shafts and Oliver Andersen’s divers to inspect open wells. Over the next few weeks, searchers would explore close to two hundred craters, mines, and wells.
Maydew’s airburst theory was also looking more probable to everyone. In mid-February, the four B-52 airmen who had survived the explosion had urine samples tested for radiation. Only Larry Messinger showed a positive result. While his radiation level was not dangerous, it was puzzling.
Messinger, like the others, had descended without an oxygen mask. Perhaps he had inhaled radioactive particles from the shattered bombs on the ground below. Or, perhaps bomb number four had broken apart in the air, and Messinger had encountered radioactive particles as he fell.
As the weeks went by, other witnesses kept emerging who had seen parachutes fall into the sea. The Spanish vessel Juan de la Cosa noted a parachute in its log on the day of the accident. Joe Ramirez also found a pharmacist in Garrucha, the fishing port just south of Palomares, who usually drank his morning coffee on a patio overlooking the Mediterranean. On the day of the accident, the pharmacist had had a perfect view of a handful of parachutes falling into the sea. He told Ramirez how many he had seen and pointed out where they had fallen.
As the possibilities proliferated, the searchers’ morale drooped. Sweeping the fields for the sixth, seventh, or eighth time, a sense of futility grew. “This could only be considered as normal,” said SAC’s final report on the accident. “Even the most sincere dedication to a cause falters when nothing appears that promises to end a frustrating situation.”
The helicopter carrying Ramirez, Moody, and Andersen spotted Simó’s boat in a small cove a few hundred yards from the shore. Ramirez could see Simó’s net resting on the bottom and something large tangled in it. He asked the pilot to circle low over Simó’s boat. Catching the fisherman’s eye, Ramirez signaled for him to send his small rowboat to shore. Then the helicopter settled down on the beach, and the three men stepped out onto the sand.
Simó’s rowboat arrived shortly. The weather was cold and blustery. Once on board the fishing boat, Ramirez spoke to Simó while Andersen and Moody looked at the net. Something was tangled in there, but they couldn’t tell what. For the sake of speed and because they didn’t know if Simó had actually caught anything, they hadn’t brought scuba gear. But as they studied the net, the weather began to pick up. The waves rose higher, rocking the boat and clouding the bottom with silt. Moody and Andersen soon realized that they couldn’t identify the object from the boat. They would have to fly back to Camp Wilson to pick up scuba gear. Joe Ramirez decided to stay with Simó. Before the divers left, Ramirez asked them what they thought. One said he couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if Simó might have snagged the bomb.
After about an hour, the divers returned with their gear. Andersen, now with two new divers, dove to look at the net. They came to the surface and yelled to Ramirez, but the wind and seas swelled so high that he couldn’t hear them. Finally they delivered the news: the fisherman had caught a concrete clump. Because of the rough seas, the divers decided it was too dangerous to clear the net. They buoyed it off with flotation markers, and Simó dropped the rig from his boat.
A couple of days later, when the weather settled down, Andersen and the divers returned to the cove and untangled the net from the four-thousand-pound clump. It had anchored one of the Navy’s scientific buoys, used to measure current speed. The divers cleared the clump and delivered the tangled, torn net back to Simó.
While the search for bomb number four slogged on, Bud White got busy. Colonel White, the man in charge of decontaminating Palomares, didn’t know much about alpha radiation. But, having grown up on a farm in Texas, he knew how to run a tractor. It would prove a valuable skill in his difficult task.
Bud White did not have to clean up Palomares on his own. Spanish scientists from the Junta de Energía Nuclear (JEN) had rushed to the area soon after the accident. A week later, Dr. Wright Langham, a plutonium expert from Los Alamos, also arrived with a team. Langham was well known in the world of radioactive contamination. He had joined the Manhattan Project fresh out of graduate school and stayed at Los Alamos afterward, cultivating his knowledge of plutonium, the key ingredient in the “Fat Man” bomb dropped over Nagasaki. Plutonium exists in nature, but only in minute quantities. To get more than a few micrograms, scientists had to make their own, a feat they first accomplished in 1940. For years afterward, scientists had handled the warm, heavy metal, not knowing how dangerous it was. Everyone knew plutonium was radioactive, but nobody knew what would happen if you got some on your skin or breathed in a bit of dust. To keep workers safe, scientists began to study the effects of plutonium ingestion. Langham was involved from the start.
By the time of the Palomares accident, he was the world’s foremost expert on the subject, widely known as “Mr. Plutonium.”
Many people involved with Palomares regarded Langham as a heroic figure, and he did much to calm the budding fears over radioactive contamination in the village. When the JEN scientists had arrived in Palomares, for example, they had taken a number of urine samples from villagers and Air Force men. Some of the urine samples had come back alarmingly high, sending the team into a panic. Langham quickly determined that the samples must have been contaminated during collection; anyone with readings that high would already be dead or close to it. Langham suggested that the scientists collect samples again under more sterile conditions. When they did, the results settled into the safe range. Langham next tackled crop and animal worries, assuring the villagers that they could eat livestock that had eaten contaminated vegetation, since animals take up little plutonium through their guts. He also told the farmers that once the Americans had cleaned up the contamination, even if a little was left behind, future crops would be safe, since plant roots could not absorb plutonium.
To Langham, the scene in Palomares was uncannily familiar. In 1962, the U.S. and British governments had cosponsored a series of four nuclear tests in the Nevada desert. The tests, called Operation Roller Coaster, examined what happened when the high explosive in a hydrogen bomb accidentally blew up, scattering uranium and plutonium without a nuclear detonation — in other words, an accident just like the one at Palomares.
Operation Roller Coaster, together with similar studies done in the 1950s, taught the scientists a lot.
They learned, much to their surprise, that the greatest danger came from the immediate plutonium cloud and that the concentration of plutonium decreased rapidly with time. In Palomares, Langham said, the major plutonium hazard had vanished before anyone knew what had happened.
At the time of the accident, Langham also knew how much plutonium a human could ingest without danger. (He had used himself as a guinea pig, placing a bit of plutonium on his skin to measure absorption and also drinking a tiny amount in a glass of water.) At the time, the “maximum permissible body burden,” the total amount of plutonium that a person can carry safely in his or her body, was judged to be six tenths of one millionth of a gram, about the weight of a dust particle. (Current limits, based on annual uptake, are more restrictive.) The maximum permissible air concentration was.00003 millionth of a gram per cubic meter of air, an amount akin to a grain of salt in four cubic yards of soil.
Plutonium-239, the material used in the Mark 28 weapon, has a half-life of 24,360 years. So if the Americans left any traces in Palomares, the villagers would have to live with it for a long, long time.
Operation Roller Coaster was designed to study the long-term effects of plutonium ingestion, as well as the problem of resuspension — what happens when the heavy plutonium settles in the soil but then wind, weather, or people send it back into the air. But the tests had been conducted only four years before. Despite Langham’s confidence, nobody in 1966 knew what the effects of such an accident would be in twenty or thirty years. But Langham, together with a team of Spanish and American scientists, plus military and government officials, had to invent a decontamination plan for Palomares now.
Studying Bud White’s maps of the contaminated land, Langham calculated how much soil and vegetation the Air Force would have to remove in order to clean up the plutonium. Then, to be absolutely safe, he applied the standard “factor of ten,” setting the safe levels ten times below his calculations, and created a proposal for cleanup. The Spanish officials looked at his numbers and shook their heads. They wanted more assurance that the area would be safe — that tourists would keep coming to Spain’s sunny coasts, that real estate values would keep climbing, and that the farmers of Palomares could sell their next tomato crop. The Spanish drew up a counterproposal and gave it to Langham’s team. They wanted the Americans to remove topsoil from more than one hundred acres of land, replacing it with uncontaminated dirt.
The Air Force considered this excessive. If the accident had happened on American soil, it would never agree to this level of decontamination. Eventually the two sides reached a compromise. The Air Force would remove any topsoil reading above 400 micrograms of plutonium per square meter.
Areas with less contamination would be watered and/or plowed under to a depth of ten inches, diluting the plutonium to a safe level. This meant that Bud White’s team would have to remove topsoil from only 5.5 acres of land. They would have to plow or water more than five hundred acres more.
The area around the site of bomb number two posed its own set of problems. The ground there was too steep and rocky to plow, but it was also the most contaminated. The Air Force agreed to turn the area by hand, with picks and shovels, until the radiation count dropped below the level of detection.
They also agreed to work with the Spanish government to create a long-term monitoring program of Palomares and its people.
The Strategic Air Command had actually been through similar situations before. According to the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy, there had been at least twenty-eight nuclear accidents before the one in Spain. Here are a few examples, paraphrased from official DOD/DOE records:
March 11, 1958: A B-47 left Hunter Air Force Base, Georgia, en route to an overseas base. After leveling off at 15,000 feet, the plane accidentally jettisoned an unarmed nuclear weapon, which landed in a sparsely populated area 6½ miles east of Florence, South Carolina. The bomb’s high explosive detonated on impact, causing property damage and several injuries on the ground.
October 15, 1959: A B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker were refueling in the air, 32,000 feet over Hardinsburg, Kentucky. Shortly after the B-52 began refueling, the two planes collided. Four members of the B-52 crew ejected from the plane, but four did not. All four men aboard the KC-135 tanker were killed. The B-52’s two unarmed nuclear weapons were recovered intact. One had been partially burned but did not disperse any nuclear material.
January 24, 1961: During an airborne alert mission, a B-52 suffered a structural failure of the right wing. The B-52 broke up in the air, dropping two weapons near Goldsboro, North Carolina. Five of the eight crew members survived. One bomb’s parachute deployed, and the weapon received little damage. The other bomb fell free and broke apart upon impact. No explosion occurred, but a portion of one bomb containing uranium landed in a waterlogged field. Despite excavation to fifty feet, the bomb section was not recovered. The Air Force purchased an easement, requiring permission for anyone to dig there. There is no detectable radiation in the area.
These accidents were public knowledge. And many Americans, accepting the logic of deterrence, also accepted that accidents could and would happen. But they assumed that the people in control of nuclear weapons were, in fact, in control. Others were not so sure.
By the early 1960s, a public debate began to take shape, as Americans started to wonder whether they were more likely to be killed, injured, or contaminated by American nuclear weapons, set off by accident, rather than a Soviet attack. As the United States’ nuclear arsenal continued to grow, this possibility seemed increasingly likely. With thousands of warheads stuffed into silos, trundled onto planes, and exploded in countless tests, it seemed inevitable that someday something would go terribly wrong.
Even President Kennedy grew worried. Reportedly he found the 1961 Goldsboro accident, which occurred four days after his inauguration, especially alarming. Although the Air Force never admitted this publicly, a nuclear physicist named Ralph Lapp later claimed that the bomb jettisoned over Goldsboro had been equipped with six interlocking safety mechanisms, all of which had to be triggered in sequence to detonate the bomb. “When Air Force experts rushed to the North Carolina farm to examine the weapon after the accident,” wrote Lapp, “they found that five of the six interlocks had been set off by the fall.” President Kennedy, shocked by this close call (and reportedly by his limited control of SAC planes during the Cuban Missile Crisis), ordered that nuclear weapons safeguards be reexamined to reduce the possibility of an accident. His order led weapon designers to equip bombs with electronic locks called permissive action links, or PALs, ensuring that only the president could launch a nuclear attack.
Yet public fears remained, played out in popular books and films of the early 1960s such as the drama Fail-Safe and the dark comedy Dr. Strangelove. Dr. Strangelove, in particular, openly parodied the Strategic Air Command. In the 1964 film, Colonel Jack D. Ripper (widely rumored to be based on Curtis LeMay) is a SAC wing commander at the fictional Burpleson Air Force Base.
Ripper goes bonkers, overrides presidential authority, and sends an armada of B-52s on airborne alert toward the USSR. The president orders the Army to seize control of Burpleson and take Colonel Ripper into custody. This leads to several ironic battle scenes, as soldiers exchange heavy gunfire near billboards bearing SAC’s motto: “Peace is our profession.” Eventually, one B-52 makes it to a Soviet target and is able to drop one nuclear bomb. This is enough to trigger war.
Within the military, however, SAC was widely considered one of the strictest and safest commands.
Safety was almost a religion in SAC, and its straitlaced in-house magazine, Combat Crew, reflected this zeal. Combat Crew was notable for its utter lack of levity. One regular feature was “Pilot Error,” a grim comic strip demonstrating how sloppy flying technique led to deadly accidents. Another regular item, “Safety Bird Is Watching,” contained a “gotcha” photograph of an airman engaged in unsafe behavior, such as wearing a wedding ring while working on a plane. The “Safety Bird” photos, most of which seemed to be taken with a telephoto lens, gave the impression that any slip would be noted and punished. Some airmen thrived in this rigid environment, but others found it oppressive. One pilot, who eventually left SAC to fly fighter planes in another command, described SAC as uptight. “You needed a checklist to take a shit” was how he put it. In many officers’ clubs, pilots replaced the SAC insignia, which featured an armored fist gripping lightning bolts and a laurel of peace, with a caricature: an armored fist crushing a man’s genitals.
Both those who feared and those who lauded nuclear weapons used the Palomares accident to bolster their arguments. Some said that Palomares proved how dangerous the nuclear arms race had become, endangering lives even in peacetime. Others pointed out that, until the accident in Palomares, 18,340 KC-135 tankers had safely launched to refuel 8,209 airborne-alert B-52s over Spain. One accident, out of all those refuelings, was a pretty good record. Furthermore, some boasted that the Palomares accident had actually proved how safe nuclear weapons were, because the bombs had endured such stress but still had not detonated.
Still, everyone could agree that losing a nuke in another country — and doing it publicly, over civilian territory — complicated matters. Operation Roller Coaster and similar tests in the late 1950s had led the U.S. Air Force to create a cleanup plan called “Moist Mop.” The plan called for radiation teams to enter the area first, accompanied by EOD teams. The radiation teams would check for contamination while the EOD men tended to fragments of high explosive. Everyone except emergency personnel should stay 1,500 feet away from the accident; everyone entering the area should wear full face masks for protection.
But Moist Mop assumed that the accident would take place somewhere under U.S. government control, such as an Air Force base. It didn’t account for sheep, goats, tomato fields, and curious Spanish villagers. Nothing in the plan mentioned that one bomb would be found by an Air Force lawyer, another by a Spanish shopkeeper.
Thus, the early days of the Palomares cleanup were decidedly ad hoc. Any men plowing, scraping, or removing vegetation were supposed to wear gloves, surgical caps, and masks. Anyone working in a dusty area was supposed to wear a half-face respirator. Men were ordered to tape their shirtsleeves and gloves together with masking tape to keep dust out; the same with their pant cuffs and boots. At the end of every day, each man and his gear were to be checked for contamination and washed down. Some adhered to these guidelines, and enforcement certainly got more strict as the operation progressed. But many airmen recall spotty safeguards and monitoring in the beginning.
Robert Finkel, who spent many long days chopping tomato plants, says his men wore fatigues and T-shirts. Their only protective gear was hats for the sun. At the end of each day, they would decontaminate themselves by walking, fully clothed, into the Mediterranean. “Ultimately we got showers, and things improved dramatically,” recalled Finkel. “But initially it was pretty tough.” Soon after Red Moody arrived in Palomares, he suggested that the Navy begin testing for contamination. The Navy regularly sampled the water and also swiped dew off ships’ decks to test for airborne alpha. To the best of Moody’s memory, the Navy never found any contamination, but the divers weren’t entirely out of harm’s way. One day, Gaylord White, one of the divers who had come to Palomares from Rota, traded a diver’s knife for a warm Air Force jacket. White, happy with the swap, took his new jacket back to the EOD tent. When he arrived, one of the other divers told him to leave the jacket outside while he ran to get an alpha monitor. Sure enough, the jacket was contaminated. White, undeterred, came up with a plan. He ran a line up one sleeve and out the other, then staked the jacket on the beach below the high-tide line. After a few days of ocean washing, White let the jacket dry in the sun.
Some contamination stories had more dramatic endings. Henry Engelhardt, the commander of an Army EOD detachment in Mannheim, Germany, answered a call for assistance and sent a small EOD team to Palomares shortly after the accident. When Engelhardt’s unit commander arrived on the scene, an Air Force colonel told the men not to wear protective clothing “because it might scare the locals.” The Army commander refused the order and appealed to a higher command. According to Engelhardt, the Air Force colonel was finally relieved over the dispute, and the Army men were allowed to wear protective gear. However, Engelhardt, worried about the primitive safety conditions in Palomares, had a decontamination team waiting when the team returned to Germany. As suspected, the men were hot — their clothing and gear tested four times as high as permissible levels.
Three men also had high counts on their fingernails, probably from putting their hands in their pockets. The decon team ordered the men to undress on the spot, bagged their clothes and gear, and sent the men to the showers. Luckily, says Engelhardt, they didn’t have to decontaminate the plane.
Despite such mishaps, “Don’t scare the locals” became the overriding theme regarding radiation in Palomares. When Bud White’s team first mapped out the contaminated areas, for example, they marked the boundaries with red flags. This color choice “proved to be unacceptable due to psychological factors,” according to the SAC final report. The Air Force ordered the red flags changed to green. Furthermore, the guardias civiles and U.S. air police who controlled access into the contaminated areas were forbidden to post signs prohibiting entry or noting the radiation hazard.
In any emergency situation, authorities want to prevent undue panic, a logical and even admirable goal. But in Palomares, it is unclear whether the Air Force crossed a line, choosing public relations over public health. When they decided not to post warning signs, they undoubtedly prevented unnecessary worry, but they also avoided embarrassing photographs being published in the international papers. It is difficult to determine which goal was more important.
This much is certain: the broken bombs certainly emitted enough alpha radiation to cause harm. And at the start of the operation, safety measures were haphazard at best. Some men, such as Gaylord White and the Army EOD team, left Palomares with high radiation readings and were monitored for months afterward. The Air Force maintains that the radiation exposures were not significant, but military health records from Palomares remain classified or heavily redacted.
After Spanish and American officials decided how much soil and vegetation to remove, another question arose: where to put it. The vegetation problem was quickly solved. Spanish officials said the Americans could burn the less contaminated vegetation in the dry bed of the Almanzora River, as long as the smoke blew out to sea.
Burning the vegetation was an operation in itself. On an average day, Bud White’s team hauled 140 truckloads of vegetation to a temporary pit or the burn site, located near the former resting place of the B-52 tail section. In late February, the Air Force built a new road to the burn site so they wouldn’t have to drive their radioactive haul through an inhabited area. In the end, the team hauled 3,728 truck-loads of vegetation to the riverbed, and burned it all.
This left the question of what to do with the more contaminated dirt and vegetation. At first, it was generally assumed that the Americans would bury it in Spain. But to hold all the contaminated soil, they would have to dig a pit about the size of the Empire State Building lying on its side. To complicate matters, the Spanish government wanted the pit in a mountainous, uninhabited area about three miles west of Palomares.
As ideas bounced between Washington and Madrid, with Ambassador Duke, the State Department, and the Department of Defense weighing in, opinion quickly turned against a burial pit in Spain.
Jack Howard, the assistant secretary of defense for atomic energy who oversaw Palomares for the Pentagon, worried about a permanent monument to the accident. A burial site could become a stark reminder of nuclear danger for decades to come, perhaps even a gathering point for annual anti-American protests. Nobody wanted that.
Spanish and American officials had already worked through this problem with regard to the aircraft debris. Neither the United States nor Spain wanted to leave the wreckage (some of which was slightly contaminated) lying around Spain, possibly leading to “lingering recriminations against the United States.” Spain, with an eye toward the tourist and fishing trades, also didn’t want the debris dumped in the Mediterranean. Both sides eventually agreed to dump the wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean. The Navy built a fifty-foot pier off the beach at Palomares and used a twelve-ton crane to load two barges full of debris. The USS Luiseno hooked the barges and pulled them through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic. By February 27, the Luiseno had dumped the debris into the deep ocean, in international waters about 170 miles west of Portugal.
Officials discussed whether to dump the dirt in the ocean as well or move it to the United States.
Eventually, the Americans agreed to haul it to the Savannah River Facility, a nuclear processing center in Aiken, South Carolina.
To prepare the dirt and vegetation for shipment, the Americans decided to excavate a temporary burial pit at the site where bomb number two had been found. This area was already contaminated, relatively barren, and some distance from the village. The Americans dug a trench measuring approximately one thousand cubic yards and started to haul in contaminated dirt and mulched vegetation.
Once the U.S. government started stripping contaminated crops and topsoil from the land, the farmers had to be paid. By late February, the Air Force had a full-blown claims office, with lawyers interviewing about twenty people a day to assess damages to crops, homes, livestock, and livelihoods.
The claims work was as complicated as the radiation cleanup, if not more so. Lawyers had to sort out which odd-shaped plot of land belonged to whom, how big it was exactly, what had been growing there, and how much that crop had been worth. This might have been easy in Oklahoma, but in Palomares, farmers often marked property lines with buried rocks or nothing at all. Formal records didn’t help: when lawyers consulted the owners’ registry at Cuevas de Almanzora, they found that the entries were as much as six years behind. Furthermore, boundaries had been shifted and parcels had changed hands without being recorded. It didn’t help that many people in Palomares had similar — or identical — names. Four claimants, for instance, were named Francisco Sabiote Flores; twelve were named Navarro Flores.
Joe Ramirez sympathized with the villagers. He did his best to be fair with their claims and give them their due, and he says the Air Force supported him. He was troubled, however, that it never made any allowance for fear, anguish, or general disruption of life. The Air Force had procedures for foreign claims and in some Eastern countries it allowed a “salve” payment for mental hardship. But there was no such plan in place for Spain. Ramirez felt that the United States had upset these people’s lives and they should be compensated. It was not an easy situation, recalled Ramirez. “How do you value anxiety?”