The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

by Barbara Moran

  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.

  11. The Fisherman’s Catch

  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.

  12. Radioactividad

  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 twen
ty 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.