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

by Barbara Moran

  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 w
ould 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 Admir
al 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.”