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

As the town sprawls outward, however, the echoes of the past are making themselves heard. In 1966, during the initial cleanup, the Spanish and American governments created a program to monitor the air and soil of Palomares, as well as the health of its people. They named the program

“Project Indalo” and put Emilio Iranzo, the JEN scientist, in charge. (The name “Indalo” comes from a petroglyph found in nearby caves, showing a stick figure of a man holding an arc over his head. Indalo is an omnipresent tourist symbol for Almería, visible on place mats, key chains, and shot glasses throughout the area.) From the beginning, the U.S. government has funded part of the program, though it refuses to say publicly how much it has contributed.

In 1966, JEN set up air monitors in and around the town and has regularly checked the contamination levels since then. It has also tested chickens, rabbits, tomatoes, and other crops. Every year, about 150 residents of Palomares travel to Madrid — all expenses paid — for complete physical examinations, including urine testing for plutonium. So far, at least 1,029 people have received more than 4,000 medical and dosimetric examinations. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, these tests show that about 5 percent of the people studied carry plutonium in their bodies. However, say the authorities, the increased plutonium causes no health risk. This is proven, they say, by the fact that the residents of Palomares have shown no increase in illnesses or deaths that might be caused by plutonium ingestion.

Unfortunately, neither CIEMAT — the successor to JEN — nor the DOE has made these medical results public. Villagers who visit Madrid for screenings are given detailed printouts listing their weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol but are never told anything about the plutonium that may or may not be in their bodies. Only one small study examining the villagers' long-term cancer rates has been published. It found that the cancer rates in Palomares were no higher than those in another Spanish town with a similar population.

Nevertheless, the accident continues to haunt the village. In the late 1970s, a large irrigation pool was built next to the area where bomb number two fell and cracked open. This area, which also served as the staging ground for loading the contaminated soil into barrels, remains the most contaminated zone. The heavy digging for the pool resuspended some of the buried plutonium, spiking contamination levels. Iranzo, who still ran the program at the time, insists that the levels, even at their highest, remained safe for the villagers.

In 2002, because of development encroaching on this same area, CIEMAT purchased about twenty-three acres of contaminated land in order to restrict use. It forbade farmers to plant in the area and eventually enclosed it with a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. (“Now they put a fence around it!” said Dolores González, rolling her eyes.) Around the same time, DOE and CIEMAT created a new program to survey, once again, the contaminated areas around Palomares.

Between November 21, 2006, and February 22, 2007, CIEMAT technicians swept 71 million square feet of land — the equivalent of 660 soccer fields — in and around Palomares with radiation meters, collecting 63,000 measurements. The preliminary results, released in the summer of 2007, surprised the scientists. The plutonium contamination was higher and more widespread than they had suspected, and several areas they had considered clean were contaminated with americium, a product of plutonium disintegration. In April 2008, CIEMAT announced another surprise: the discovery of two trenches, about ten yards long and thirty yards wide, containing radioactive debris.

Little information on the trenches is available, though they appear to contain many “small radioactive metal objects” left by the Americans. Though the U.S. and Spanish governments had long known of the trenches' existence, they had not known their exact location.

The scientists insist that the radiation levels, though higher than expected, are still safe for residents.

But as a result of the 2007 findings, they widened the “contaminated” zone from 107,000 square yards to almost 360,000. They have also restricted construction in and the sale of produce from the most contaminated areas. They have not yet established a plan for remediation.

The townspeople, who stand to gain or lose much from land use restrictions, are not happy with the increased attention. Manolo and Dolores González consider the new rules ridiculous. Manolo is not worried about the plutonium; after the accident, he says, he took a piece of the melted wreckage and used it for a paperweight, and he is healthy as a horse. “Everybody is healthy, no one is sick. The death rate in Palomares is below the national average,” said Manolo. Everyone just needs to be tranquilo.

Alvin and Aluminaut met, one final time, in 1969.