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

The general ended with a warning and a plug for the airborne alert program. America's deterrent force is not as strong as it was a few years ago, he said. Our enemies are moving faster; the gap is narrowing. Cutting down the manned bomber force, depending too much on missiles, would be a mistake. With manned bombers, he argued, SAC could offer more choices to America's leaders. “A man can think and react and do things he never thought he'd have to.” If war began, he wanted “a thinking man, a loyal man,” at the controls. Not some mindless missile.

While the big shots handled public relations, Wilson's men started loading barrels with contaminated soil and vegetation.

The Navy requested that a radiological survey team accompany the barrels back to the United States. However, they offered to dispense with this formality if each barrel was numbered and painted with the words “Poison Radioactive Material” on the top, bottom, and sides. The Air Force balked at the request. Such alarming labels were not, they said, “in line with the spirit of the operation.” After some discussion, the Navy agreed to carry the barrels with standard radiation warnings.

As the barrel loading continued, General Wilson and the Spanish military liaison, Brigadier General Arturo Montel Touzet, held a meeting for the townspeople of Palomares and Villaricos. Wilson apologized for causing any hardship and thanked the villagers for their patience and cooperation.

“The payment of claims is now progressing satisfactorily and should proceed at a rapid pace,” he said. “It gives me great satisfaction to see a return to normalcy for this area.

“Although my camp will disband in the near future and we will be returning to our bases, I want to assure you that our close ties will continue,” he added. “We will be leaving with a great admiration for the people of this part of Spain, and I also hope that we will be leaving as your lasting friends.” On March 24, men moved the last barrel off the beach and onto the USNS Lt. George W. G. Boyce

for shipment to Charleston. The ship left that day, carrying 4,810 barrels of Spanish soil. One chapter of the Palomares saga, it appeared, had closed.

There was still, of course, the matter of the missing bomb.

By early March, the land and sea searches were still plowing forward, but everyone was running out of ideas. A second team of ballistics experts had recrunched the numbers and come up with another high-probability area on land, which the Air Force duly searched. “By 1 March,” said SAC's final report of the accident, “literally no stone had been left unturned, and no depths unplumbed. It was doubtful if any area of equivalent size, about ten square miles, was as well-known as this one.” With regard to the water search, the ballistics team interviewed the Garrucha pharmacist, took a second look at the contaminated debris, and ran the numbers again. They concluded that Messinger and the tail section could have been contaminated by dust rising from the broken weapons on the ground, rather than a midair breakup of bomb number four. Sandia engineer Bill Barton briefed Admiral Guest on March 1, concluding what the admiral already believed: that Simó Orts had probably seen bomb number four land in the water. Based on this new report, the secretary of defense authorized General Wilson to terminate the land search. The burden of finding bomb number four now fell squarely on Guest.

In Washington, officials in the Defense Department braced for a bad outcome. Guest's job seemed impossible, and Pentagon insiders began to accept that the Navy would probably not find the bomb.

On March 9, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance created a “Search Evaluation Board” to evaluate Guest's task force, putting the physicist Robert Sproull in charge. Sproull had worked in the Pentagon for two years as the director of ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. He had recently returned to academia but still held high government clearances. Sproull was chosen for this job, he says, because he was “expendable.” “It was pretty clear that if the fourth one was not found, there'd be a congressional investigation, and mud all over the face of everyone,” said Sproull. “But if Congress made a monkey out of me, it wouldn't hurt the Defense Department.” The Search Evaluation Board, also known as the Vance Committee, included representatives from every agency involved: the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, Defense, Navy, Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Labs. Vance ordered the group to “examine all implications of the search.” But its main job, everyone knew, was to figure out when, how, or if the Navy could safely abandon the search.