3.
Manolo González Navarro believed in fate. He believed in visions. As a boy, he had sometimes seen a plane flying far overhead—a strange and wonderful sight. Since that time he had experienced a specific, recurring premonition. In it, he saw an airplane crash and went to look at the wreckage. Over the years, the thought came again and again, until it seared into his mind's eye with the permanence of memory.
González did not find the premonition disturbing; he simply accepted it. But even he would have to admit that the vision was an odd one, given that he had grown up in the tiny farming village of Palomares, far from any airport or air base. In recent years, however, he had had a daily, fleeting encounter with the U.S. Air Force. Each morning, just after 10 a.m., a set of American jets passed high over his town. They had not inspired his vision, but they would certainly fulfill it.
At 10:22 a.m. on January 17, 1966, González was sitting on his motorcycle talking to his father. The white contrails marking the paths of the American planes appeared overhead, just as they did every morning, and the two men looked up. They saw the contrails in the sky and then an explosion.
Fiery debris rained onto Palomares. A section of landing gear smashed through a transformer in the center of town, cutting off electricity to a handful of homes. The B-52's right wing crashed into a tomato field, the fuel inside igniting and blazing orange. The tanker's jet engines, filled with fuel, screamed down to earth, thudded into the dry hills, and burst into flame. Black smoke hung in the air; twisted shards of metal lay everywhere.
González and his father watched in horror. Immediately Manolo's thoughts turned to his young wife, Dolores. Five months pregnant with their first child, she was teaching at a local school that morning. Worried that debris would hit the school, he sped to his wife on his motorcycle.
Dolores had just opened the school doors when the windows started to rattle. At first she thought a small earthquake was shaking the building. Then one of the students shouted that fire was falling from the sky. Everyone ran to the windows, watching the fire and smoke. Soon the storm passed, leaving the school unscathed. A passel of worried mothers arrived to collect their children, and Manolo roared up on his motorcycle. He made sure that his wife wasn't hurt, then rode off to see if anyone else needed help.
González dropped off his motorcycle, climbed into his Citroën pickup truck, and rumbled off to the hills surrounding the town. The village had no paved roads, making travel slow and dusty. Even the main road into town was hard-packed dirt. Not that it mattered—usually nobody was rushing to get in or out. Palomares was just a tiny farming village in the back of beyond. It didn't even appear on most maps of Spain.
Palomares sat on the southeastern coast of Spain, about forty miles south of Cartagena. To the south lay the Costa del Sol, booming with foreign tourists and high-rise hotels. To the north stretched the Costa Blanca, also popular with European travelers. Between them lay a Costa without a catchy name and the town of Palomares. Palomares had a beach, the Playa de Quitapellejos, but its sand was hard-packed and windswept, unattractive to both tourists and townspeople. The town itself rested on a gentle rise about a half mile inland.
Despite their proximity to the Mediterranean, the villagers of Palomares worked the land, rather than the sea. Around the town lay the evidence of their labor—flat plains furrowed with farmers' fields. On either side of the fields, mountain ranges ran down toward the sea. The “mountains” were actually large hills, deep brown from a distance and desert tan up close, thick with scrubby gray-green bushes, prickly pear cactus, and tall, spiky agave. The landscape looked remarkably like the American Southwest—so much so, in fact, that areas nearby had served as sets for spaghetti westerns. A few years earlier, Clint Eastwood had graced the desert to film his hit movie Per un Pugno di Dollari, better known to American audiences as A Fistful of Dollars.
For the most part, the 250 or so families living in Palomares farmed the land or raised sheep. In ancient times, people had mined and smelted ore from the nearby hills. But the mines had been tapped out long ago, and farming now seemed the only real option. But it was not an easy one. The town lay in the Almería desert, the most arid region of Europe. The region is so parched that when people speak of a “river,” they actually mean a dry riverbed. In the rare cases where a river runs with water, locals call it a río agua. At the time of the accident, the last measurable rain had fallen in Palomares on October 18, 1965, about three months earlier.
Faced with these tough conditions, forward-thinking farmers had formed an irrigation cooperative about a decade before. With money borrowed from local banks, the men had sunk nearly a hundred wells and created a pumping and irrigation system to water the dusty fields. They also started using chemical fertilizers. These upgrades allowed the farmers of Palomares to scrape together some respectable crops, including wheat, beans, alfalfa, and, most important, tomatoes. In Palomares, tomatoes ruled the roost. They were the town's crown jewels, its salvation. Under the relentless desert sun, they grew into magnificent, succulent red orbs, prized throughout Europe. In 1965, the town sold 6 million pounds of tomatoes to cities in Spain, Germany, and England.
Tomatoes had given the tiny, isolated town a measure of prosperity. Though most villagers still lived in small, low houses attached to animal pens, they kept the outside walls neatly whitewashed and the inside rooms brightened with electric lights. The townspeople had enough money to support seven general stores and three taverns. Some villagers still rode donkeys, but others had made the leap to motorized transport. All told, the residents owned fourteen cars and trucks, a handful of tractors, and a lot of scooters. Exactly eight television sets flickered their blue glow in Palomares. Most homes had radios. Few, however, had indoor plumbing. The nearest phone, in the town of Vera, was fifteen miles away.
Manolo González was more privileged than most of his fellow townspeople. His father, a prosperous landowner, was known as the “Mayor of Palomares.” Palomares didn't actually have a mayor, but the elder González worked for the post office in Cuevas de Almanzora, about fifteen miles away. Since Cuevas was the seat of local government and González was the senior civil servant in town, any local administrative duties naturally fell to him. His son Manolo had inherited some of this status. A cheerful, outgoing man, Manolo trained as an electrician and never had to work the fields. He and Dolores were good-looking and youthful, more middle-class than peasant farmer. They lived in a house adjoining the school. The house had a bathroom with a small sink and toilet but no running water. Like almost everybody else in Palomares, Dolores had to carry water from a nearby well.
González drove his little Citroën down rutted tracks past fields of ripening tomatoes and headed to the nearby hills. He had seen an orange-and white parachute falling to earth and wanted to investigate. When he arrived at the chute, he saw an ejection seat nearby, with a man still strapped to it. The seat had toppled forward and arched over the limp body. Another villager had already reached the man and started to cut the straps with a pocketknife. Together, González and the other man tipped the seat back and looked at the man. It was Ivens Buchanan, the B-52 radar operator who had ejected from the bomber and pulled his parachute out by hand. Still alive but barely conscious, Buchanan shivered violently. He said nothing except “I'm cold, I'm cold.”
González drove the injured man to the medical clinic in nearby Vera. Then he sped back to Palomares to see what else he could do.
Wendorf's bomber had not been alone in the sky at the time of the crash. It had flown the entire route in tandem with another B-52 from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. For the first third of the flight, Wendorf's plane had taken the lead. The two planes had planned to switch places after their turn around the Mediterranean. But after the first refueling, because of a minor radar malfunction in Wendorf's plane, he had relinquished the lead to the other bomber.
When Wendorf's plane exploded, the other bomber, with its own companion tanker plane, was a couple of miles ahead, completing its own midair refueling. This gave the boom operator—the only man with a backward-facing window—a view of the explosion. The boomer shouted the news to the cockpit, and the tanker crew radioed the news to their base in Morón. At 10:27 a.m., the Morón Command Post radioed the Sixteenth Air Force headquarters at Torrejón Air Base near Madrid with the first news of the crash. The call sign for the undamaged tanker was “Troubador One Two”:
Morón: We just received a call from Troubador One Two. He reports smoke and flames aircraft behind him, and he has no contact with aircraft. We're getting coordinates now.
Torrejón: Roger, thank you very much.
Torrejón: (Two minutes later) Was that in his aircraft or in the aircraft behind him?
Morón: That was the aircraft behind him. Troubador One Two says they have not made contact with the number two bomber. Reported sighted smoke and flames behind their refueling formation.
The tanker, after finishing the refueling, wheeled back to survey the scene. Flying at 4,000 feet, the crew reported what appeared to be the tail section of the B-52 in a dry riverbed, burning wreckage about a mile inland, and still more aircraft debris farther toward the hills. Meanwhile, Morón reported the incident to SAC:
Morón: Believe possible mid-air collision KC-135 and airborne alert B-52. It is not confirmed at this time. Was reported from Troubador One Two. The boomer sighted a burning aircraft spinning behind him in the formation. They have been unable to contact either the bomber or the tanker. The KC-135 from Morón Tanker Task Force … The B-52 from Seymour. Of course, weapons aboard.
As the news crisscrossed Spain and the Atlantic, the phone rang on the desk of a twenty-nine-year-old Air Force lawyer named Joe Ramirez. Ramirez worked in the staff judge advocate's office at the U.S. Air Force base at Torrejón. The person on the phone told Ramirez to get over to headquarters on the double.
Ramirez grabbed a notebook, told his boss about the call, and hustled across the street to headquarters. In the war room, things were humming. “The general was there, and people were running around back and forth,” said Ramirez. “We had sketchy information at the time, but I did learn that there had been a crash between a B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker.” Ramirez knew that those were big planes and that the tanker had been full of fuel. A crash between them could be catastrophic.
Ramirez had never heard of Chrome Dome and had never seen a nuclear weapon. He worried more about damage from falling aircraft debris. He learned that the crash had happened over a remote part of Spain and was told to be ready to fly down there soon, probably within an hour, to help assess the damage on the ground. Ramirez went back to his office, grabbed a “claims kit” full of forms, and called his wife. He told her that there had been a crash and he had to go somewhere in southern Spain but would probably be back that evening or the next day. Around 12:30 p.m., he boarded a cargo plane with thirty-five other members of the disaster control team and headed for a town that nobody had ever heard of. He still had the keys to the family car in his pocket.
Though Joe Ramirez probably couldn't tell a nuclear bomb from a hot water heater, he proved to be one of the Air Force's most useful men in Palomares. As a lawyer, he was used to gathering spotty information from witnesses. In addition, Ramirez was the only airman deployed to Palomares that day who spoke Spanish fluently.
Ramirez had grown up in a small south Texas town, and his parents spoke both Spanish and English at home. His father was a tall, handsome man who had taught himself auto mechanics and eventually ran his own garage. Though Joe and his brother spent plenty of time working in the shop—the two of them could overhaul an engine in a day—their father pushed them to excel in school, telling them that education was the ticket to getting out of south Texas and seeing the world. Buoyed by his teachers and his close-knit family and encouraged by success in language arts and public speaking, Ramirez went to college and then law school, joining Air Force ROTC along the way.
Ramirez loved the Air Force. Soon after he was commissioned, he and his young wife, Sylvia, were stationed at Homestead Air Force Base, a SAC base outside Miami. Homestead often hosted Latin American politicians and dignitaries, and Ramirez was regularly asked to deliver briefings to top Spanish-speaking officials. He and Sylvia were often invited to important formal dinners, seated between Latin American generals and governors, and asked to make conversation and translate. This was heady stuff for the young couple, who were almost always the lowest-ranking people in the room. Because they spoke Spanish—and because he and Sylvia were gracious, charming, and discreet—the couple were given an entrée into a different world.
Ramirez enjoyed his work, but by 1965 he and Sylvia had two children, with another on the way. With college tuition looming ahead, he had been thinking about going into private practice. To entice him to stay, the Air Force offered him a plum posting at Torrejón Air Base. Joe and Sylvia, who had never been to Europe, decided to take them up on it.
Joe, Sylvia, and the two kids arrived in Madrid in the summer of 1965 and had a dramatic welcome to Spain. They flew overnight and arrived, exhausted, in the early afternoon. The Air Force had arranged for them to stay in a hotel in the center of town, on the main avenue called, at the time, Avenida del Generalissimo. They arrived at the hotel, climbed up to their room, closed the blinds, and collapsed into bed.
Shortly before 5 p.m., Ramirez woke up. Careful not to disturb his sleeping wife and children, he tiptoed to the windows and peeked through the shutters. He was on a high floor and could see the roof of the adjoining building. Looking in that direction, he was startled to see uniformed men in strange black hats, armed with machine guns, running around on the roof. He looked across the street and saw more men, also heavily armed, on rooftops across the way. “My God!” Ramirez remembers thinking. “We've landed in the middle of a coup!”
He woke Sylvia, then called the reception desk and asked what was going on. They said not to worry, it was just a soccer game. This didn't make a lot of sense until the desk clerk explained further: Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the ruler of Spain, loved soccer and would be attending today's match at the nearby stadium. The armed men were members of the Guardia Civil, Franco's paramilitary police force. The guardias civiles on the rooftops were advance guards. If you look out the window, said the clerk, you'll see the generalissimo himself in a few minutes. And sure enough, a bit later came the motorcade, with motorcycles and an escort car and Franco himself, with all the pomp and clatter befitting a military dictator. And watching from a hotel window high above was a young American family, enjoying the spectacle below.
About twenty minutes before 2 p.m. on the day of the accident, less than four hours after the bomber and tanker had exploded in the sky, the plane carrying Joe Ramirez and the rest of the disaster control team landed at a Spanish air base in San Javier, north of Cartegena. They were met there by General Delmar Wilson, who had flown down from Torrejón with his staff a bit earlier and had circled above the wreckage on the way.
Wilson was the commander of the Sixteenth Air Force, the SAC wing that supervised Torrejón and the other Spanish bases. He was a steady, capable leader, with the expected look of an Air Force general: tall, silver-haired, trim, and distinguished. More than one person described him as “straight out of Central Casting.”
Wilson also had a unique link to the nation's nuclear history. Late in World War II, the Air Force had created the 509th Composite Group, a special unit of B-29s on Tinian Island that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan. Wilson, then a young colonel, was Curtis LeMay's liaison to the Atom Bomb Project. But since the project was top secret, LeMay couldn't actually tell Wilson why he was sending him to Tinian. When Wilson arrived, the staff at Tinian wasn't thrilled to have him there. “They looked on me as a spy for LeMay,” he said. “They ignored me.” Eventually a Navy captain took pity and clued Wilson in, starting off by asking “Have you ever heard of an atom?”
Now, two decades later, Wilson had a big atomic problem on his hands. He had seen the tail section from the B-52 slumped in a dry riverbed and other wreckage spread over a wide area of desert, farms, and hills. Somewhere among that debris were four hydrogen bombs. At San Javier, he learned that three of the injured airmen lay in hospital beds in a town called Aguilas. He decided that he and his close advisers would visit them first. Wilson briefed the assembled disaster control team and sent them to Palomares, with orders to assemble at the tail section later.
Ramirez climbed into the lead car of the caravan. Until now, most of Ramirez's legal work at Torrejón had involved young American servicemen who had gotten themselves into trouble, usually involving large American cars, narrow Spanish roads, and cheap alcohol. He had never investigated an accident of this magnitude, and on the long drive to Palomares, he had plenty of time to fret. He knew that the tanker had been filled with fuel and the bomber loaded with weapons. Had the wreckage set a town on fire and killed hundreds? Would the ground be littered with charred bodies? Would the townspeople attack them in a furious mob? Ramirez looked out the window at the desert landscape and worried.
After a couple of hours of driving, the caravan pulled into Vera to get gas and ask for directions to Palomares. Ramirez asked the locals for news from the village and was relieved to hear that there were no tales of widespread death and destruction. Still, he was anxious.
The group finally pulled into Palomares about an hour and a half before sundown. Outside the village, Ramirez saw a dirt road leading up a hill past a whitewashed wall and a lot of activity in the area just beyond. With a handful of others, he approached the wall, which bordered a cemetery. He saw smoldering debris, burned branches, and a man's hand lying on the ground, severed at the wrist and swollen from the fire. A number of villagers approached, with Manolo's father, the Mayor of Palomares, among them. When they realized that Ramirez could speak Spanish, they clustered around him, excited and agitated.
“What I noticed immediately,” said Ramirez, “was that there was no hostility.” Instead, there was a massive gush of sympathy and concern. The villagers wanted to help. They wanted to tell what they had seen. They wanted to know how the accident had happened, if the dead airmen had any children. They pointed out a row of simple wooden caskets on the dirt road by the cemetery and explained that they had collected charred remains and placed them inside.
Ramirez questioned the assembled villagers: “Anybody killed or injured on the ground?” he asked. No, no, no, no. “Any animals?” No, no, no, no. “Any homes destroyed?” No, no, no, no. Ramirez was amazed. “You could see still smoldering debris in backyards, in alleys, in dirt roads, in a ditch, in a field, all around. But none on any structure.” January 17 was the feast day of Saint Anthony the Abbot, the patron saint of the village. Many said that the saint had sheltered Palomares from ruin. The local priest disagreed. “This miracle is too big for any one saint,” he said. “It was the work of God himself.”
A member of the Guardia Civil approached and spoke to Ramirez. He had seen something odd in the nearby hills. “Parece un torpedo,” he said in Spanish—it looks like a torpedo. Ramirez, by now knowing that nuclear weapons had been aboard the B-52 but not sure what one looked like, asked the guardia, “Donde?” Where?
Pulling himself away from the crowd, Ramirez found an Air Force colonel and told him about the torpedo. The colonel's ears perked up. Ramirez ran to find the guardia who had told him about it, and the three of them set off to search the hills.
Night had fallen by then. The colonel and the guardia each had a tiny flashlight; Ramirez had none. The three men walked into a rocky, uninhabited area outside Palomares. As they stumbled through the hills, the two feeble flashlight beams barely pierced the darkness. They could see rocks and scrub a few yards ahead, but the rest of the world was black.
The guardia led them toward the spot where he thought he had seen the torpedo. But all the dirt paths and beige rocks looked the same at night. The three men trudged through the hills for an hour or so, going over the same ground again and again—they thought—as the guardia grew steadily more embarrassed. Finally, the colonel called it quits for the night. The men headed back to the village.
One of Ramirez's fellow servicemen had more luck that day. A sergeant named Raymond Howe spent the afternoon locating major pieces of aircraft debris and checking them for radioactivity, including a big piece of the tanker fuselage that had fallen near the cemetery, and the B-52's tail section, which had landed nearly upright in a dry riverbed that led to the sea. Both tested negative. As dusk fell, Sergeant Howe was still poking around, asking if anyone had seen other major pieces of debris. One of the guardias civiles motioned him back toward the dry riverbed, near the mangled tail section. There, on the bank of the riverbed, about two hundred yards from the sea, lay a bomb.
The bomb was torpedo-shaped and dull silver in color, twelve feet long and twenty inches around. It had a nine-inch gash in its rounded nose, and three of its four tail fins had shorn away. The tail plate, a flat piece of metal that sealed the parachute compartment at the rear end of the bomb, had also torn away, and one of the parachutes lay spilled nearby. The ready/safe switch—part of the arming mechanism—was in the “safe” position. Except for the cosmetic damage, the bomb seemed intact. Howe checked for radiation and found none. He called some EOD—Explosive Ordnance Disposal—men, who also checked for radiation and rendered the bomb safe. Howe posted some Air Force guards around the weapon. It became known as bomb number one, because it was the first one the Americans found.
The “H” in “H-bomb” stands for hydrogen, the smallest atom in the universe and the simplest of the elements. The hydrogen nucleus consists of one solitary proton, which is circled by one electron—its own tiny, whirring solar system. Hydrogen makes up most of the gas in the universe and most of the mass of stars, and is found in all living things on Earth.
Hydrogen has an isotope—a sort of half sister—called deuterium. Though nearly identical to hydrogen, deuterium has a small but critical difference: its nucleus carries one proton and one neutron. For this reason, deuterium is often called “heavy hydrogen.” It is this tiny extra neutron that makes the hydrogen bomb possible.
In 1934, a physicist named Ernest Rutherford and two of his colleagues were working in England and discovered something curious about deuterium. When Rutherford sped up two deuterium atoms and smashed them together, they fused and became a new element: helium. This surprised Rutherford, because the deuterium atoms, each with one positively charged proton in its nucleus, had an immense repulsive force and should have stayed apart. Yet accelerating or heating the atoms gave them enough extra energy to overcome their repulsion and fuse together. Because the reaction required acceleration or heat to fuse the nuclei, Rutherford called it a thermonuclear reaction. He called the whole process hydrogen fusion.
Oddly, the fused helium nucleus weighed slightly less than the two separate deuterium nuclei. The missing mass, Rutherford discovered, had been converted into energy. A lot of energy. Theoretically, each gram of deuterium, when fused, would release energy equivalent to 150 tons of T.N.T. This is about 100 million times as much firepower as a gram of ordinary chemical explosive. To put this into perspective, the firepower of Curtis LeMay's biggest raid on Japan, involving hundreds of planes and thousands of bombs, would have required only 20 grams of deuterium, about the weight of a robin's egg. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima: just 100 grams, equivalent to two jumbo chicken eggs. The numbers scale up quickly as the analogy moves on to heavier forms of produce. Twenty-six pounds of deuterium—the weight of about half a sack of potatoes—would yield 1 million tons of T.N.T. That yield—one megaton—is about seventy times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It was also close to the yield of bomb number one, which Sergeant Howe had found on the soft bank of the dry Almanzora River.
Back in the 1930s, when Rutherford discovered fusion, however, the idea of a fusion bomb seemed nearly impossible. Rutherford needed a massive amount of energy to fuse just two atoms. It seemed unlikely that humans could find a source of energy hot enough to trigger a large-scale thermonuclear reaction and fuse a few kilograms of heavy hydrogen. Then came the atom bomb.
Atom bombs—the type of bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—work through fission, splitting the atom, rather than fusion. Every atom (except for hydrogen) has a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons, like a ball of marbles stuck together with glue. This nuclear glue has a name: binding energy. Because protons, with their positive charge, want to repel one another, it takes a lot of binding energy to hold a nucleus together, especially a big one. Nuclear fission splits the nucleus of an atom, breaking the marbles apart and releasing the nuclear energy in the form of heat, light, and radiation.
Some elements, namely those with more than 209 protons and neutrons, are so big that no amount of glue can hold their nucleus together. These heavy elements are naturally unstable and regularly shed bits of themselves, or “decay,” to become smaller and more stable. Scientists call these unstable elements “radioactive.” Probably the two most famous radioactive elements are those used in the atomic bombs of World War II, uranium and plutonium (or, more specifically, their highly fissionable isotopes, uranium-235 and plutonium-239). Scientists found that they could speed the disintegration by bombarding the uranium and plutonium nuclei with neutrons. When they did this, the nuclei split and released two or three neutrons and more energy. If additional uranium or plutonium atoms were nearby, the neutrons could blast their nuclei apart as well, releasing more neutrons and causing more fission. This reaction will eventually peter out, unless there is enough radioactive material placed closely enough together to sustain the reaction. If a “critical mass” of uranium or plutonium—about 110 to 130 pounds of uranium-235 or 13 to 22 pounds of plutonium-239—can be piled together, the number of neutrons released will increase in each generation. This leads to a chain reaction of atom splitting and a nuclear explosion.
Plutonium is more radioactive than uranium and more difficult to handle. But during World War II, uranium manufacturing moved slowly. The Manhattan Project scientists would have enough uranium-235 for only one weapon by 1945. If they wanted more bombs, they would have to build them from plutonium.
To build the bomb, metallurgists took a mass of plutonium and cast it into a hollow sphere. Then engineers created a shell of high explosive around the plutonium. In theory, if they detonated the high explosive from many different points at the same time, it would implode, crushing the plutonium into a solid ball. Hopefully, the squeezed plutonium ball would achieve critical mass and lead to a nuclear explosion. Few Manhattan Project scientists believed this design could work. “No one had ever used explosives to assemble something before,” Richard Rhodes explained in Dark Sun, his history of the hydrogen bomb. “Their normal use was blowing things apart.” Such a precise, perfectly timed explosion seemed implausible. The Navy captain in charge of explosives research said that the task was like trying to implode a beer can “without splattering the beer.”
But the implosion bomb did work, first at the Trinity test near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, and then over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The bomb over Nagasaki, “Fat Man,” reportedly used about 13.7 pounds of plutonium, for a yield of 23 kilotons. It was about 17.5 times as efficient as the Hiroshima bomb.
Even before the Trinity test, at least one Manhattan Project physicist was already looking ahead. Edward Teller had taken charge of the implosion group in January 1944, but increasingly he turned his thoughts to fusion. Maybe, he thought, the immense heat of a fission bomb could ignite a lump of deuterium, making a fusion bomb possible.
Teller, it turns out, was right. Finally, here was a source of energy powerful enough to trigger a fusion reaction. But the engineering problems were daunting, making an imploding beer can seem like child's play. Engineers had to design a bomb that could contain a fission explosion long enough to trigger fusion, then keep the fusion going long enough to get a good yield before the whole bomb assembly disintegrated. Yet by 1952 they had figured it out. On November 1 of that year, the United States exploded a hydrogen bomb on Eniwetok Atoll, about three thousand miles west of Hawaii. The test, code-named “Mike,” yielded 10.4 megatons, nearly seven hundred times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Mike vaporized the island of Elugelab and killed everything on the surrounding islands, leaving a crater more than a mile wide. If it had been dropped on New York City, it would have obliterated all five boroughs. For the physicist Herbert York and many others, the Mike test heralded the beginning of a more dangerous world: “Fission bombs, destructive as they might have been, were thought of [as] being limited in power. Now, it seemed we had learned how to brush even these limits aside and to build bombs whose power was boundless.”
The hydrogen bomb lying in the riverbank outside Palomares was called a Mark 28. The Mark 28 could be assembled in five different variants for a range of configurations and yields. This particular Mark 28 was a torpedo-shaped cylinder that weighed about 2,320 pounds. The bomb had entered the arsenal in 1958, and by May 1966, the United States had produced 4,500 of them.
The exact inner workings of the Mark 28 are still classified, but it is possible to make some educated guesses about what lay inside. The bomb contained a fission trigger, which was a plutonium core surrounded with reflective material (probably uranium) to contain the explosion, and high explosive to start the implosion. This “primary,” as it was called, was probably about a foot in diameter and vaguely resembled a soccer ball. Like a soccer ball, the primary had a pattern of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons, forming a sphere. Each of these hexagons or pentagons, designed to focus explosive power inward, was called a lens. Each lens was filled with high explosive and attached to a detonator wire. When detonated simultaneously they imploded, crushing the plutonium inside into a critical mass and igniting a fission explosion.
If the high explosive didn't detonate simultaneously, the plutonium would not be evenly compressed; there would be no critical mass and no nuclear explosion. Such a precise detonation could happen only when a bomb was armed—not the case with the bombs of Palomares. This is not to say that detonating the high explosive is a good thing. Plutonium is highly radioactive, and an explosion could scatter it for miles.
The rest of the Mark 28 bomb contained a secondary fusion bomb and probably a third fission bomb to keep the fusion reaction moving. All the various sections (as well as batteries and electronics) were probably supported by a dense plastic foam. When the primary implodes, the fission emits radiation that causes a series of reactions. In a few hundred microseconds or less, the massive energy crushes a cylinder full of deuterium, sometimes called the “pencil.” Inside the pencil, a plutonium “spark plug” explodes, releasing X-rays and gamma radiation. The radiation shoots outward, reacting with the plastic foam, which swells or explodes and further crushes the deuterium in the pencil. All this complicated engineering implodes and explodes within the blink of an eye, and the result is nuclear fusion. The Mark 28 was a deadly weapon and top secret—not the type of thing the United States wanted to leave lying around southern Spain, where anybody could see it, photograph it, or pick it up and cart it away.
As the sun rose on January 18, the Air Force searchers in Palomares began to gather for the day's work. For everyone, it had been a long night.
After landing at San Javier, General Wilson had taken a small party and driven about two hours up the coast to visit Rooney, Messinger, and Wendorf in Aguilas. He spoke to them about the accident and arranged for their transportation to Torrejón. Afterward, Wilson and his men drove back to Palomares and convened at the B-52 tail section. The general took a quick look around and listened to the early reports. The charred remains of the dead airmen had been brought to Cuevas de Almanzora, the local government seat. In Cuevas, a priest had said a Mass for the men. Later in the afternoon, authorities laid the wooden caskets in the reception room of the town hall and surrounded them with burning candles. Townspeople filed by to pay their respects.
That evening, General Wilson drove to Cuevas to claim the bodies. Somehow, the townspeople and guardias civiles who had gathered the remains had determined that there were eight bodies, rather than seven, and distributed the remains into eight coffins. Wilson met with the authorities in Cuevas and explained that there had been eleven airmen on the planes and that four had survived, leaving seven deceased. After some bureaucratic struggle, the Spaniards allowed Wilson to sign for seven bodies. Late that night, a baker's delivery van—the only appropriate vehicle available—carried the remains to San Javier. From there they were flown to Torrejón for identification and then home to America.
After completing this somber duty, General Wilson and his entourage drove back to Palomares to meet with the rest of the disaster control team. Most of the team—and, it seemed, most of the villagers-had crammed into a bar in the center of town. Amid the clamor, Wilson sorted through the day's good and bad news. The good news was pretty good: searchers had found one bomb intact with no leaking radiation. There seemed to be no one hurt in the village, and certainly no widespread death and destruction. The locals seemed willing to help, and at least thirty-eight guardias civiles had already arrived to aid with searching and security.
The bad news: seven men were dead; two planes lay shattered across the Spanish countryside; there were no accurate maps of Palomares; there was no secure communication link to Torrejón; and there were still three bombs missing.
Wilson had sent a message to Torrejón earlier in the day by using a helicopter radio to talk to a KC-135, which relayed the message to Morón and then sent it on to Madrid. But the chopper was gone and he needed to talk to headquarters. The Air Force team set up a single sideband radio, and Wilson ordered more men, better maps, food, water, and a secure communications link. Because anyone could easily tap into the radio channel, Wilson used the code name “Warner,” which would stick for the rest of the mission. He also sent a messenger to Vera to find a telephone and call Madrid with the news of bomb number one.
When Wilson's message arrived in Torrejón and Morón around midnight, available airmen were rousted from their barracks and ordered onto buses. Most carried only the clothes on their backs and maybe a blanket. Two convoys left Torrejón by 3 a.m., with 175 men on six buses and an ambulance trundling along with the group. Two additional convoys left Morón by around 4 a.m., with 126 men on six buses. The convoy from Morón also included an ambulance, as well as one van and one truck carrying bedding, food, water, and radios.
In Palomares, Ramirez and the rest of the disaster control team set off to find somewhere to spend the night. Ramirez and a handful of others drove to Cuevas, where, they were told, the Guardia Civil had made some arrangements. The group bumped along over the dark, unfamiliar roads, and eventually found Cuevas and the office of the Guardia Civil. Ramirez, the designated spokesman for the group, pounded on the door and woke up the guardia. The bewildered soldier had no idea who these Americans were or why they were waking him up in the middle of the night asking for somewhere to sleep. Ramirez explained the situation. “It doesn't have to be a hotel,” he said. “Anyplace where we can get a bed.” The guardia suggested a couple of boardinghouses, and the Air Force men fanned out across the dark town to see what they could find. Ramirez wound up in an old house and spent the night in a cold, sagging bed, happy to have a blanket and a roof over his head.
In the morning, Ramirez and the rest of his group headed back to Palomares and gathered at the tail section in the riverbed. By 7:30 a.m., they were joined by a seven-man disaster control team from SAC headquarters, who had left Omaha a few hours after the accident and traveled all night. The busloads of men from Morón and Torrejón wouldn't arrive until early afternoon.
The small teams moved out from the tail section and began searching nearby for the missing bombs, in the hope that they had landed near bomb number one. Aircraft debris—scraps of metal, shards of plastic—lay scattered all around. Radar-jamming chaff resembling silver tinsel hung from the trees. The teams walked slowly, scanning the ground and marking searched areas with string or toilet paper tied to bushes and poles.
At 9 a.m., helicopters arrived from Morón and began reconnaissance flights. At 10 a.m., a chopper pilot sent word that he saw a metal tube in the rocky hills behind the cemetery, about a mile west of the village. Ramirez and others went to look. There, in the same area he had explored the previous night, Ramirez saw a circular crater, twenty feet across and six feet deep. In the middle of the crater sat a parachute and a bomb. Or rather, part of a bomb.
Bomb number two was in bad shape. Some of the high explosive around the primary had detonated, digging the crater and exploding weapon fragments up to a hundred yards in all directions. What was left in the crater was the secondary—the fusion section of the bomb. Fragments of metal, parts of switches, and connecting rings lay all around. The ready/safe switch lay among the wreckage but was so damaged that its position was unreadable. Ten pounds of high explosive littered the area in small pieces and slivers. The afterbody—the tail section of the bomb, which held the parachutes—had been blasted apart from the rest and lay a hundred yards away. Next to the crumpled afterbody sprawled a ribbon parachute. The chute looked beat up, like a fishing net washed up on a beach after a storm. Another parachute, still tightly packed in its canvas bag, stuck halfway out of the afterbody. The nuclear core, or pit, was nowhere in sight.
Ramirez didn't know it, but the area around bomb number two was highly contaminated with plutonium. Although there had been no nuclear explosion, some of the high explosive lenses had detonated from the force of the impact, scattering radioactive plutonium across the countryside. It was, in effect, a dirty bomb. “I didn't know how an H-bomb worked,” said Ramirez. “But we had been told that if there was radioactivity, it would be low and not harmful. It's alpha type [that] we could brush off or wash off.”
The “alpha type” radiation that Ramirez had been warned about can be either harmless or lethal, depending on where it goes. Alpha particles—two protons and two neutrons—are given off by radioactive plutonium and uranium as they decay into more stable elements. These particles are relatively large and slow, so they can't travel very far or push their way through obstacles. An alpha particle shot into the air won't usually travel much farther than an inch and can be blocked by a sheet of paper.
If alpha particles land on human skin, they won't penetrate the dead layer of cells on the surface and will sit there until scrubbed off. When, however, alpha particles get into the bloodstream—usually because someone inhales them—they can be lethal. The large particles barge through the body's cells like a bull through a china shop, breaking DNA and causing genetic mutations that can lead to cancer. They are especially dangerous when inhaled into the delicate tissue of the lungs. There, alpha particles can come into direct contact with cells, wreaking havoc.
Ramirez, standing on the edge of the crater, didn't know any of this. He called to the rest of the crew, and they came running over. One man got to work with something that looked like a Geiger counter. Ramirez stayed out of the way.
If he had looked up into the sky right around that time, Ramirez would have seen two thin vapor trails appear far overhead, converge, and separate. The morning's Chrome Dome rendezvous went off without incident. The Cold War was proceeding on schedule.
Around 10:30 a.m., just after Ramirez found bomb number two, other airmen spotted a third. Bomb number three lay in a plowed field at the base of a wall, near the house of a shopkeeper named José López Flores, “Pepe” to his friends. At least three different stories tell who found this bomb and how. The first story says that the Guardia Civil had told Sergeant Howe—the first airman to see bomb number one the previous day—about a bomb lying near a garden wall, which Howe then tracked down. The second story tells of an unidentified airman, stopping to urinate near a stone wall, who happened to look left and saw a bomb protruding from a crater.
Both of the stories were hogwash to Pepe López himself, who knew that he had found the bomb the previous day. After the two planes collided in the sky, López heard a blast and ran outside. His aged uncle lay in the dust, knocked to the ground by the shock of the explosion. He helped the old man up, made sure he was okay, and led him back into the house. Then he went off to explore the damage. Walking over to the stone wall, he saw a half-burned parachute. A small brush fire burned nearby, and López smelled acrid smoke, the way a gun smells after a shot has been fired. Taking a closer look, the shopkeeper saw a bulky shape under the parachute. Worried that it might be a dead or injured pilot, he rushed to pull the parachute aside.
Removing the parachute, he found a “monster of a bomb” busted open like a watermelon. “I knew it was a bomb, because when it fell from the airplane it cracked open,” he said later. “It was cracked open in the back part where the metal is white and I could see inside, the powder. I immediately knew this was a bomb. There was some fire burning around it and I stamped it out, because of course I knew it wasn't safe to have a fire around a bomb.”
According to some accounts, Pepe López also gave the bomb a good kick, for reasons known only to him. Later, when he told the men at the bar what he had done, they laughed. “If that bomb had gone off,” they said, “Pepe would be a little speck of dust in New York.”
The bomb lay in its crater by the wall until the Americans found it the following day. As López had observed, the weapon was badly damaged. Like bomb number two, some of its high explosive had detonated, gashing a crater in the dirt and scattering shards of weapon in all directions. Some major parts were fairly intact: the secondary lay in the crater, which measured four feet across and three feet deep; the afterbody was dented but still in one piece. But the rest of the weapon case and innards were badly broken up. A bottle of tritium—a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that boosts the fission reaction—was found mashed and ruptured about 1,500 feet away. Eighty pounds of high explosive and plastics lay within a hundred feet of the crater, and weapon parts were scattered up to four hundred yards away. SAC's final report of the accident said that most of the weapon was so mangled “that you couldn't tell what it was or where it came from.”
Despite the conditions of bombs numbers two and three, the U.S. Air Force felt optimistic. Just a day after the accident, searchers had found three of the four bombs. No one on the ground had been harmed, and the villagers, far from turning into an angry mob and demanding vengeance, were friendly and anxious to help. The Air Force was still missing one bomb, as well as a combat mission folder and a box containing top secret codes and documents, but men were combing the area and more searchers were on the way.
There was some contamination to clean up, but even that didn't seem too bad. A situation report was sent to the secretary of defense, the White House, and others. Its tone was cautiously optimistic. The memo explained that high explosive had detonated in two bombs, which “could involve local plutonium scattering with related radiation hazard.” However, if the detonation had been small enough, there might have been no plutonium scattering at all. “It is not believed,” said the memo, “that there is any basis for undue concern over the low order detonation of the two weapons.” And, to the great relief of everyone concerned with U.S.-Spain relations, the memo reported, “Impact on populace practically nil.”