The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

by Barbara Moran

  Guest came from a long line of military men, most of whom had served in the U.S. Army cavalry.

  When Guest received an appointment to the Naval Academy rather than West Point, his father devised a scheme by which the young officer could transfer to the Army after graduation to carry on the family tradition. Guest, who had fallen in love with the Navy, refused his father’s offer. The elder Guest, a wealthy man, told his stubborn son that if he stayed in the Navy, he would disinherit him.

  Admiral Guest thought it over and refused the offer again. His father stayed true to his word; according to family lore, the two men did not speak again. When Guest’s father died, he left his son one dollar.

  During World War II, Guest flew a dive-bomber in the Pacific and achieved a spectacular fighting record. He was the first carrier-based aviator to sink an enemy ship in that war, a feat that won him the Navy Cross, the second highest honor in the Navy. (The only higher award is the Medal of Honor.) During the rest of his service in World War II, Guest won the Air Medal, a Gold Star, the Legion of Merit, and the Bronze Star. The Navy also awarded him several Purple Hearts, which he never wore. After the war, he climbed the Navy hierarchy, becoming a rear admiral in 1962.

  In Palomares, Guest hit the ground running, establishing a high-probability search area on the day he arrived, January 24. At the time, he already knew about the Spanish fishermen. But he also knew that the Air Force had found three bombs on land and that Navy divers and minesweepers were picking up debris and sonar hits near shore. It seemed clear that if bomb number four had fallen into the water, it had landed either in the area described by Simó and Roldán or in the shallow debris field adjacent to the beach.

  However, at this early stage in the game, Guest couldn’t afford to leave anything out. On a map, Guest found the point where the fishermen had plucked Larry Messinger from the sea. Guest knew that Messinger had opened his parachute immediately after ejection. If the bomb had done the same, he reasoned, it probably wouldn’t have floated much farther than the airman. From Messinger’s landing point, he drew two straight lines to shore, one reaching far north of Palomares, the other far south. This created a triangular-shaped search area encompassing every piece of debris, every sonar hit, and every parachute observed to have fallen into the ocean. The search area was massive: a giant pie-shaped wedge stretching from the Spanish shoreline to a point in the sea. The wedge measured just over fifty square miles, more than double the size of Manhattan. Guest knew he had to narrow it down. This was just too much ocean to search.

  Oliver Andersen, left in charge of the divers by Red Moody, was doing his part to cover some ground. His divers, equipped with scuba gear, could make quick dives to 100 or 150 feet — maybe 200 feet, if they really pushed it — and spent much of the early search doing just that. Navy minesweepers collected sonar hits and handed the information to Andersen’s divers, who made quick “bounce” dives to see if the contact might be the bomb. The divers found a lot of debris in the first couple of weeks: fuselage sections, tubing, an instruction manual, a survival kit bag, a wing section, wiring, fuel cells, and a flashlight. No bomb.

  After a week, Andersen decided that they needed a more systematic plan. He found the coordinates of the three bombs that had fallen on land and drew a line from those into the ocean, hoping that bomb number four had landed along the same path. Then he picked points to the north and south, farther than he thought the bomb could have drifted. Having no decent maps, he used a handheld compass to mark bearings and sketch out a search area. Then his divers methodically began to swim the full shoreline, back and forth, out to where the water was about eighty feet deep.

  Underwater searching is complicated, since divers can’t see far and their time beneath the surface is limited. So they use something called a “jackstay.” The setup for a jackstay search is simple. A line is attached to a “clump,” a weight that sits on the bottom, underneath the water. The other end of the line is attached to a buoy that floats on the surface. Then a second line and buoy are attached to a second clump. Finally, the two clumps, resting on the bottom, are joined together by a “distance line.” The distance line can be any length, depending on visibility and the size of the area to be searched.

  To run a jackstay search, a diver swims down to a clump, puts a hand on the distance line, and swims to the other clump. (The search can also be done with two divers swimming on opposite sides of the distance line.) While swimming, the diver feels the way in front of him, hoping to find the object he’s looking for. “You’re basically searching like a blind man,” explained Master Diver Ron Ervin. Lights are not usually useful because of the silt, unless you find an object and want to take a close look.

  After the diver swims the distance line and reaches the other end, he picks up the clump and walks, say, ten steps with it in a certain direction. (He’s not exactly walking, though — it’s more of a half stumble, half crawl, tripping over the fins on his feet.) Then he sets the clump down, taking care to keep the line taut so he stays on course, and swims the line back to the other end. The process continues, the diver slowly covering the search area.

  Divers who search for lost objects are perpetually annoyed by people who expect the search to go faster. As Ervin explained, “It’s not like walking through a parking lot. You have very little visibility — you’re really just putting out your hands and hoping you run into it. If the thing has any surface area, it’s going to float off, and if there’s current, it’s going to go even further. It’s like trying to look for something on land and having someone pushing you all the time.”

  “That’s what pisses you off,” said Ervin. “When people who never dive are saying ‘I dropped it right there, why can’t you find it?’ Or even worse, ‘I could have found it myself by now.’” It makes you want to say, ‘Okay, go ahead. I’m taking my toys and going home.’” In Palomares, Andersen’s divers had few toys to begin with. At one point early on, the divers needed a way to see how far they were from shore. They didn’t have enough line to reel off five hundred yards here and five hundred yards there. So they used toilet paper. “We found out that a roll of toilet paper was about yea so long,” said Andersen. “One guy would walk over to the beach and he would hold on to a roll of toilet paper, and we would get in our boat and we’d steam out at right angles to that little beach mark until we ran out of the roll of toilet paper.” At that point, Andersen dropped a buoy, marking that they were exactly one roll of toilet paper from shore. It wasn’t precise, but it was better than nothing.

  Back aboard the USS Macdonough and cruising far offshore, Admiral Guest was quickly realizing the enormity of his task. For one thing, the Costa Bomba — as people had quickly started to call this stretch of Spain — was an enigma: nobody knew much about the underwater terrain or currents, and there were no decent charts of the offshore waters. Guest had one large-scale Navy chart of the area, drawn in 1935 from old Spanish charts and slightly revised in 1962. A note on the chart read, “Some features on this chart may be displaced as much as one-half mile from their true position.” Navigators soon found that this caveat was the rule rather than the exception. Someone dug up another chart that actually showed Palomares, as well as nearby Villaricos and Garrucha, but it contained so little sounding data or landmarks that navigators found it equally useless. One Navy captain named Lewis Melson had the foresight to grab an issue of National Geographic featuring Spain as he left for Palomares. For a while, the National Geographic pullout map was the best the task force had.

  This would never do. Admiral Guest told the Navy he needed some real charts. On January 27, the USS Kiowa arrived with a device called the Decca hi-fix. The hi-fix involved three radio transmitters set up on shore. The transmitters broadcast overlapping radio waves, creating a “net” that could be read by a ship’s receiver. The ship could use the radio waves to calculate its location, but only relative to the transmitters. The Navy had a grander plan: once the system was operational, the USNS Dutton, an oceanograp
hic survey ship, would use the Decca net to create proper charts.

  The plan made perfect sense, but it soon butted up against military bureaucracy. When the Decca hi-fix arrived in Palomares, it sat in its crates. Nobody knew how to set it up. Even worse, some of the Decca technicians were foreign nationals, from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Holland, whom the Navy wouldn’t allow on site without clearance. It would be several weeks before technicians got the system up and running, several more before the Dutton could deliver accurate charts to Admiral Guest.

  Salvage operations never run smoothly, and Admiral Guest was not a salvage expert. He was an aviator whose brain brimmed with knowledge of fighter planes and aircraft carriers. And this particular salvage operation was tougher than most, both physically and politically. The United States had lost a top secret nuclear weapon somewhere over the territory of a key Cold War ally.

  There was a chance that the twelve-foot bomb had fallen somewhere into the vast, dark Mediterranean Sea, a terrain filled with unknown canyons and currents. General Wilson had sent hundreds of men walking across the Spanish desert to look for the bomb, but Admiral Guest could do no such thing. If the bomb had fallen into the deep ocean, Guest had few means to search for it, much less pick it up. The bomb might as well have been on the moon.

  The impossibility of the search was surpassed only by the metaphors dreamed up to describe it.

  Guest himself said it was “like going up here in the hills behind Palomares at midnight on a moonless night, and taking a hollow can and putting it over one eye, and covering the other eye and taking a pencil flashlight and starting to look through 120 square miles of area in these hills. It’s not easy.” One diver described it as “throwing a needle into a swimming pool and then blindfolding a guy and telling him to go pick that needle up.” Time magazine compared it to “finding a needle in a haystack — or perhaps in a hayfield.”

  But a SAC colonel perhaps put it best. “This must be the devil’s own work,” he said. “If someone had sat down to figure out the hardest way to lose a hydrogen bomb, he could not have come up with anything more devilish.”

  FEBRUARY

  7. Villa Jarapa

  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.