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

The embassy had drafted a press release to be given to reporters at this event. Part of the release stated that the weapon had been found “in 2,500 feet of water, approximately five miles off shore by the submersible Alvin.” The Navy said this made it look as if Alvin had done all the work alone. It asked the embassy to change the sentence, and it complied. The statement released to the press read:

“The weapon was located on March 15 in 2,500 feet of water, approximately five miles off shore by units of Task Force 65.”

After the bomb display, Guest, flanked by Wilson, Duke, and Spanish dignitaries, held a press conference aboard the Albany. He gave a detailed explanation of the search and recovery operations, then opened the floor for questions. One reporter asked him how much the operation had cost. Guest refused to estimate. But regardless of the cost, he said, the Navy had learned more about deepwater operations from Task Force 65 than from any previous mission.

Guest had hardly slept in days, and, as the press conference wore on, he sounded steadily more testy and exhausted. He praised the Alvin crew but couldn't remember their names. At one point, he apologized for asking a reporter to repeat a question, saying “I'm just about out on my feet.” Finally, before the admiral collapsed, Duke stepped in and commandeered the mike. “Admiral,” he said,

“you have the gratitude of grateful countrymen, a grateful host country, and in fact the gratitude of the world. Thank you very much.” With that Guest thanked the crowd and signed off.

Palomares invites superlatives. It involved the greatest striking force in military history, the worst nuclear weapons accident, the largest sea search. The magnitude of the accident forced Americans to confront their country's nuclear policies as never before.

Throughout the Cold War, there had always been people who worried and complained about nuclear weapons. But most Americans managed to make peace with them, or at least accept them as a necessary evil. This uncomfortable peace existed only because Americans believed that their government had control over the weapons. The United States would launch the nuclear bombs only to respond to a Soviet attack or to offer a controlled display of American strength.

That is why Palomares proved so disconcerting. The United States not only lost control of four hydrogen bombs, it actually lost one of them. The accident upset the fragile peace that Americans had made with nuclear weapons, the deal they had made with their government. Palomares was “a nightmare of the nuclear age,” as one writer said, not because of what happened, but because it opened people's minds to what could have happened. Despite America's best efforts, it seemed that nuclear weapons could not be easily controlled. Perhaps, in accepting this necessary evil, America had made a deal with the Devil.

Suddenly, the 32,193 warheads stashed around the country seemed less like a security blanket and more like a loaded gun with the potential to misfire. As the security expert Joel Larus wrote in 1968, Palomares “made millions of people aware of how threatened their lives had become — even in peacetime.” In the years after the accident, the public increasingly questioned the need for such a massive, potentially dangerous nuclear arsenal. After 1966, amid growing concerns of nuclear accidents and neglect of conventional forces, America began to shrink its nuclear stockpile. The deal with the Devil, people decided, no longer seemed quite so worthwhile.

EPILOGUE

After the press and VIPs left the scene on April 8, the EOD team finished dismantling the weapon.

That afternoon, they placed its parts into an aircraft engine container, packed sand around them, and sealed the lid. General Wilson had proposed that the bomb be taken ashore, trucked to San Javier, flown to Torrejón, and then shipped back to the United States. Spanish Vice President Agustín Muñoz Grandes nixed this idea, saying he didn't want the bomb to touch Spanish soil. So, after dismantling the bomb, the Navy loaded it onto the USS Cascade, which carried the weapon back to the United States and handed it over to the Air Force.

The Air Force sent bomb number four to join its three siblings at the Pantex Ordnance Plant in Amarillo, Texas. Weapons experts disassembled the bombs, buried the most contaminated parts, and salvaged the valuable nuclear material. Then they sent the fuses, firing sets, and weapon bodies from bombs one and four to Sandia for analysis. The plutonium pits went to Los Alamos.

The engineers learned some lessons from Palomares that prompted them to change the design of weapons. The accident proved that high explosive could detonate in an accident, as it had in bombs two and three, scattering dangerous plutonium. After Palomares, Los Alamos developed an insensitive nuclear explosive that would not detonate on impact. It eventually incorporated it into most nuclear weapons.