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

Despite such mishaps, “Don't scare the locals” became the overriding theme regarding radiation in Palomares. When Bud White's team first mapped out the contaminated areas, for example, they marked the boundaries with red flags. This color choice “proved to be unacceptable due to psychological factors,” according to the SAC final report. The Air Force ordered the red flags changed to green. Furthermore, the guardias civiles and U.S. air police who controlled access into the contaminated areas were forbidden to post signs prohibiting entry or noting the radiation hazard.

In any emergency situation, authorities want to prevent undue panic, a logical and even admirable goal. But in Palomares, it is unclear whether the Air Force crossed a line, choosing public relations over public health. When they decided not to post warning signs, they undoubtedly prevented unnecessary worry, but they also avoided embarrassing photographs being published in the international papers. It is difficult to determine which goal was more important.

This much is certain: the broken bombs certainly emitted enough alpha radiation to cause harm. And at the start of the operation, safety measures were haphazard at best. Some men, such as Gaylord White and the Army EOD team, left Palomares with high radiation readings and were monitored for months afterward. The Air Force maintains that the radiation exposures were not significant, but military health records from Palomares remain classified or heavily redacted.

After Spanish and American officials decided how much soil and vegetation to remove, another question arose: where to put it. The vegetation problem was quickly solved. Spanish officials said the Americans could burn the less contaminated vegetation in the dry bed of the Almanzora River, as long as the smoke blew out to sea.

Burning the vegetation was an operation in itself. On an average day, Bud White's team hauled 140 truckloads of vegetation to a temporary pit or the burn site, located near the former resting place of the B-52 tail section. In late February, the Air Force built a new road to the burn site so they wouldn't have to drive their radioactive haul through an inhabited area. In the end, the team hauled 3,728 truck-loads of vegetation to the riverbed, and burned it all.

This left the question of what to do with the more contaminated dirt and vegetation. At first, it was generally assumed that the Americans would bury it in Spain. But to hold all the contaminated soil, they would have to dig a pit about the size of the Empire State Building lying on its side. To complicate matters, the Spanish government wanted the pit in a mountainous, uninhabited area about three miles west of Palomares.

As ideas bounced between Washington and Madrid, with Ambassador Duke, the State Department, and the Department of Defense weighing in, opinion quickly turned against a burial pit in Spain.

Jack Howard, the assistant secretary of defense for atomic energy who oversaw Palomares for the Pentagon, worried about a permanent monument to the accident. A burial site could become a stark reminder of nuclear danger for decades to come, perhaps even a gathering point for annual anti-American protests. Nobody wanted that.

Spanish and American officials had already worked through this problem with regard to the aircraft debris. Neither the United States nor Spain wanted to leave the wreckage (some of which was slightly contaminated) lying around Spain, possibly leading to “lingering recriminations against the United States.” Spain, with an eye toward the tourist and fishing trades, also didn't want the debris dumped in the Mediterranean. Both sides eventually agreed to dump the wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean. The Navy built a fifty-foot pier off the beach at Palomares and used a twelve-ton crane to load two barges full of debris. The USS Luiseno hooked the barges and pulled them through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic. By February 27, the Luiseno

had dumped the debris into the deep ocean, in international waters about 170 miles west of Portugal.

Officials discussed whether to dump the dirt in the ocean as well or move it to the United States.

Eventually, the Americans agreed to haul it to the Savannah River Facility, a nuclear processing center in Aiken, South Carolina.

To prepare the dirt and vegetation for shipment, the Americans decided to excavate a temporary burial pit at the site where bomb number two had been found. This area was already contaminated, relatively barren, and some distance from the village. The Americans dug a trench measuring approximately one thousand cubic yards and started to haul in contaminated dirt and mulched vegetation.