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

Once the U.S. government started stripping contaminated crops and topsoil from the land, the farmers had to be paid. By late February, the Air Force had a full-blown claims office, with lawyers interviewing about twenty people a day to assess damages to crops, homes, livestock, and livelihoods.

The claims work was as complicated as the radiation cleanup, if not more so. Lawyers had to sort out which odd-shaped plot of land belonged to whom, how big it was exactly, what had been growing there, and how much that crop had been worth. This might have been easy in Oklahoma, but in Palomares, farmers often marked property lines with buried rocks or nothing at all. Formal records didn't help: when lawyers consulted the owners' registry at Cuevas de Almanzora, they found that the entries were as much as six years behind. Furthermore, boundaries had been shifted and parcels had changed hands without being recorded. It didn't help that many people in Palomares had similar — or identical — names. Four claimants, for instance, were named Francisco Sabiote Flores; twelve were named Navarro Flores.

Joe Ramirez sympathized with the villagers. He did his best to be fair with their claims and give them their due, and he says the Air Force supported him. He was troubled, however, that it never made any allowance for fear, anguish, or general disruption of life. The Air Force had procedures for foreign claims and in some Eastern countries it allowed a “salve” payment for mental hardship. But there was no such plan in place for Spain. Ramirez felt that the United States had upset these people's lives and they should be compensated. It was not an easy situation, recalled Ramirez. “How do you value anxiety?”

MARCH

13. Spin Control

Ambassador Duke stood on a rocky beach, dressed in nothing but swim trunks, loafers, a blue bathrobe, and a bathing cap. The morning air felt sharp and chilly; the blue waves, slithering on the shoreline, looked cold and forbidding. Behind the ambassador, up a slight incline, squatted a white modern building — a new parador, or government-run hotel — that seemed utterly out of place in the barren desert. The dapper ambassador, too, seemed out of place, half naked and shivering on this godforsaken strip of sand. But Duke was a man of duty, and he had a job to do. He slipped off his loafers and sank his toes into the cold, damp sand. He untied his bathrobe and tossed it aside on the beach. Then, as a swarm of news reporters watched, their cameras clicking, Duke shouted, “Okay, let's go!” With his children following gleefully behind, he ran down the beach and splashed into the 54 degree water.

A few minutes later, Duke emerged looking winded. The water was “thrilling,” he told the gathered reporters. “Sensational!” As the ambassador dressed quickly, the questions peppered him: “Did you detect any radioactivity in the water?” asked one reporter. “If this is radioactivity,” said the ebullient Duke, “I love it!” Another reporter questioned the ambassador: “When you were out there, did you happen to see the bomb?” Duke replied gamely, “I wish I had!” On March 2, less than a week before the ambassador's swim, the U.S. government had finally admitted that it had lost an H-bomb in Spain. For weeks, the U.S. and Spanish governments, aware that the current press policy was neither controlling information nor calming fears, had been debating how to release more information. Duke had been pushing for a more liberal press policy since early February but could not get the two governments to agree on the particulars. The stalemate finally broke when Dr. Otero Navascuéz, president of Spain's Junta de Energía Nuclear, discussed the subject with the Spanish news agency CIFRA, which published lengthy articles on March 1. The Americans didn't know if Navascuéz had acted independently or in concert with the Spanish government, and the leak annoyed them. But it was also a relief. The Department of Defense used the opportunity to publish a formal press release. It read: Search is being pressed off the Spanish Coast for the recovery of material carried by the two planes involved in the recent air collision, and for fragments of wreckage which might furnish clues to the cause of the accident. Included aboard the B-52 which collided with the KC-135 tanker were several unarmed nuclear weapons, one of which has not yet been recovered.

When this search and investigation have been concluded further announcement will be made of the results.

The impact of the weapons on land resulted in a scattering of some plutonium (PU 239) and uranium (U 235) in the immediate vicinity of the point of impact. There was no nuclear explosion.

Built-in safeguards perfected through years of extensive safety testing, have allowed the US to handle, store and transport nuclear weapons for more than two decades without a nuclear detonation.