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

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.