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.”
9.
The Fisherman's Clue
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.
FOR FEB 2 '66
2. Buyers
3. Mayor of Villaricos
4. Maj. Geir Oranges
5. Lady w/injured arm
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 t
ime 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.
The Day We Lost the H-Bomb: Cold War, Hot Nukes, and the Worst Nuclear Weapons Disaster in History Page 15
