Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Lieutenant Michael J. Rooney, another copilot, was sitting below the cockpit, reading a book, when the two planes collided. He wasn’t near an ejection seat. The g-forces of the falling bomber delayed his exit for a few long minutes, tossing him against the walls, the roof, the floor. He managed to crawl out through the navigator’s escape hatch and opened his parachute. A burning engine pod flew right past him, close enough to singe hair. Rooney landed in the ocean, not far from Wendorf, and started to swim.

Rooney and Wendorf were picked up by fishing boats within half an hour, and Messinger was rescued about fifteen minutes later. Residents of Palomares, a nearby village, discovered Buchanan sitting in a field, strapped into the ejection seat, still unconscious. They took him to a hospital. Sergeant Ronald Snyder, the gunner, and Lieutenant George Glesner, the electronic warfare operator, died in the plane. Lieutenant Stephen Montanus, the navigator, bailed out, fell thirty thousand feet in his ejection seat, and hit the ground. For some reason, the parachute hadn’t opened. Montanus was the youngest member of the crew, just twenty-three, and his wife was only nineteen.

The B-52 carried four Mark 28 hydrogen bombs. None of the crew knew what had happened to them. A full-scale nuclear explosion clearly hadn’t occurred, and yet beyond that, little was known. A Disaster Control Team from the SAC base in Torrejón, Spain, arrived in the afternoon and started to look for the bombs. Debris from the B-52 littered the ground for miles; much of it had fallen in and around Palomares. The village was so poor and remote that it didn’t appear on most maps of southern Spain. The roughly two thousand inhabitants lacked electricity until 1958 and still didn’t have running water.

At dusk, members of the Spanish federal police led the Disaster Control Team to the first bomb, which had landed southeast of Palomares, about three hundred yards from the beach. The weapon was remarkably intact. One of the parachutes had opened, dropping the Mark 28 onto soft, clay soil. Air Force sentries were left there to guard it overnight. A group of experts from Los Alamos, Sandia, and the Atomic Energy Commission, assembled by the Joint Nuclear Accident Coordinating Center in Albuquerque, were supposed to arrive the next morning.

The second bomb was spotted from a helicopter, almost twenty-four hours after the crash. What was left of the weapon lay in the hills above the local cemetery. Its parachutes hadn’t opened. And its high explosives had partially detonated, digging a crater twenty feet wide, scattering bomb parts, and spreading plutonium across the hills. The third bomb was found about an hour later. It had struck the base of a stone wall, amid a vegetable garden on the outskirts of Palomares. The hydrogen bomb had missed a farmhouse by about seventy-five feet. One of its parachutes had deployed, and some of the high explosives had gone off. Pieces of the weapon, charred explosives, and a cloud of plutonium had been blown into nearby tomato fields.

The fourth bomb couldn’t be found. Long lines of troops walked for miles, shoulder to shoulder, looking for it. Planes and helicopters looked for it. Hundreds of abandoned mine shafts, wells, and other holes in the ground were carefully explored for it. A month and a half after the crash, the Mark 28 was still missing, and the search of the countryside near Palomares was called off.

The little village had been overrun by reporters from around the world. At first, the Air Force refused to confirm or deny that nuclear weapons were involved in the accident. But the sight of “450 airmen with Geiger counters looking for nuclear material,” as Reuters reported, soon made the subject hard to avoid. Three days after the accident, the Air Force admitted that the B-52 had been carrying “unarmed nuclear armament,” stressed that “there is no danger to public health or safety as a result of this accident,” and failed to disclose that a bomb had been lost. As a small armada of American ships searched for it, headlines conveyed the growing anger and doubts about the official story: “SECRECY SHROUDS URGENT HUNT FOR MISSING A-WEAPON,” “MADRID POLICE DISPERSE MOB AT U.S. EMBASSY,” “NEAR CATASTROPHE FROM U.S. BOMB, SOVIETS SAY; ‘NUCLEAR VOLCANO’ IN SEA OFF SPAIN.” After weeks of bad publicity, the Pentagon finally acknowledged that a nuclear weapon was missing. The news brought to mind the plot of the latest James Bond film, Thunderball , and its underwater search for stolen hydrogen bombs.

The governments of Spain and the United States denied that the plutonium released by the two weapons posed any threat to the public. “There is not the slightest risk in eating meat, fish, vegetables from the [impact] zone, or of drinking milk from there,” Spain’s Nuclear Energy Board declared. The truth was somewhat more complex. Little research had been done on plutonium dispersal or the proper methods of decontamination. And the alpha particles emitted by plutonium were hard to detect outside of a laboratory. They traveled about an inch and could be blocked by a blade of grass or even a thin film of dew — making it almost impossible, with the available equipment, to determine exactly how much land was contaminated around Palomares. The Air Force had been caught unprepared for a weapon accident that spread plutonium. Portable alpha detectors had to be rushed to Spain from bases in other NATO countries, the United States, and North Africa. And the detectors often didn’t work.

Nevertheless, traces of plutonium were detected in the mile-long strip of land between the two spots where bombs had landed. The contamination extended through the village of Palomares into nearby tomato fields. Residents weren’t evacuated from these areas, and hazard control lines weren’t established, a report by the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA) later explained, because of “the politics of the situation.”

The United States promised to decontaminate Palomares. But guidelines for removing plutonium after a weapon accident didn’t exist. Nor did criteria for determining safe levels of plutonium in the environment. Almost four thousand truckloads of contaminated beans, cabbages, and tomatoes were harvested with machetes and burned. About thirty thousand cubic feet of contaminated soil were scraped from the ground, packed into steel drums, sent to an AEC facility in Aiken, South Carolina, and buried. The soldiers who cleared the fields and filled the drums were given surgical masks. According to the DNA report, the masks offered no protection against radiation hazards and served mainly as a placebo — “a psychological barrier to plutonium inhalation.” To reassure the public and encourage tourists to visit southern Spain, the American ambassador brought his family to the beach near Palomares, put on a bathing suit, invited the press to join him, and took a well-publicized swim in the ocean, not far from where the hydrogen bomb had landed.

Randall C. Maydew, head of the aerodynamics department at Sandia, was recruited to help look for the missing bomb. His group had designed the parachutes and casing of the Mark 28. Before Maydew left for Spain, his friend Bob Peurifoy gave him a tool to aid with the search: a forked stick, like the divining rods used by dowsers to find water. Maydew and his team tried to ascertain where in the sky the two planes had collided. They performed reverse trajectory calculations — based on where the three bombs and the B-52’s engines had hit the ground — and decided that the crash had happened somewhere within a circular, mile-wide patch of the sky, two miles from the coast, at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. Given that location, the prevailing winds at the time of the accident, the discovery of the missing bomb’s tail plate on the beach, and an assumption that its parachutes had opened, Maydew’s team pointed to an eight-square-mile area in the Atlantic where it had most likely landed. A few days later, their conclusions were supported by a Spanish fisherman, who claimed to have seen a “stout man,” attached to a large parachute, fall into the water there.