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

The engineers at Sandia assumed that if the bomb had stayed intact before hitting the ground, the searchers would have found scattered debris on the surface. Since that hadn't happened, the engineers assumed that the bomb had broken apart in midair and that only the heavy primary or secondary sections had buried themselves underground. (These sections — top secret and possibly radioactive — were the parts of most interest to the military anyway.) They asked the scientists at Los Alamos to build some test shapes with the same weight and shape as the Mark 28 nuclear components. On Sunday, February 13, a handful of technicians and engineers gathered in the desert at dawn and watched as a helicopter hovered in the sky and dropped the shapes onto the sand.

Operation Sunday, as the exercise was called, discovered a couple of things. One was that the dummy bomb parts buried themselves about two feet underground when they landed. On the surface, they left elliptical craters about seven feet long and nearly two feet deep. Each crater and its rays, formed from moist soil, were darker than the surrounding ground, easily visible to an untrained observer. However, after a few hours, the soil dried out. Within a day, the crater and its rays were exactly the same color as the surrounding earth. The only telltale sign remaining was the shallow crater itself.

The engineer who compiled the test results recommended that all vehicular and food traffic in the search area should be “severely restricted,” since it would easily destroy shallow craters. “Above all,” he added, “no defoliation at all should be done until the areas have been cleared by ground-impact teams: it is probable that normal craters would be destroyed or filled in by the defoliating crews.”

But trucks and buses had been swarming the area for weeks, with airmen tromping over miles of terrain and tearing up hundreds of tomato plants. If their work had damaged a crater, there was nothing to be done about it now. Sandia gave the Air Force some guidance for the next step: searchers should use long poles to probe any suspect hole, crater, divot, or ditch down to five feet.

The Air Force also asked a representative from the Bureau of Mines to examine mine shafts and Oliver Andersen's divers to inspect open wells. Over the next few weeks, searchers would explore close to two hundred craters, mines, and wells.

Maydew's airburst theory was also looking more probable to everyone. In mid-February, the four B-52 airmen who had survived the explosion had urine samples tested for radiation. Only Larry Messinger showed a positive result. While his radiation level was not dangerous, it was puzzling.

Messinger, like the others, had descended without an oxygen mask. Perhaps he had inhaled radioactive particles from the shattered bombs on the ground below. Or, perhaps bomb number four had broken apart in the air, and Messinger had encountered radioactive particles as he fell.

As the weeks went by, other witnesses kept emerging who had seen parachutes fall into the sea. The Spanish vessel Juan de la Cosa

noted a parachute in its log on the day of the accident. Joe Ramirez also found a pharmacist in Garrucha, the fishing port just south of Palomares, who usually drank his morning coffee on a patio overlooking the Mediterranean. On the day of the accident, the pharmacist had had a perfect view of a handful of parachutes falling into the sea. He told Ramirez how many he had seen and pointed out where they had fallen.

As the possibilities proliferated, the searchers' morale drooped. Sweeping the fields for the sixth, seventh, or eighth time, a sense of futility grew. “This could only be considered as normal,” said SAC's final report on the accident. “Even the most sincere dedication to a cause falters when nothing appears that promises to end a frustrating situation.”

The helicopter carrying Ramirez, Moody, and Andersen spotted Simó's boat in a small cove a few hundred yards from the shore. Ramirez could see Simó's net resting on the bottom and something large tangled in it. He asked the pilot to circle low over Simó's boat. Catching the fisherman's eye, Ramirez signaled for him to send his small rowboat to shore. Then the helicopter settled down on the beach, and the three men stepped out onto the sand.