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

In early March, the group held a meeting that Sproull described as “very glum.” The committee had two major concerns: Spain and the USSR. “We were always looking toward Capitol Hill,” said Sproull, “how we would guarantee to the Congress that the Soviets would not pick it up and that it would not do any damage to the relations with Spain.” The men went home that day having decided little. They planned to meet again on March 16.

In anticipation of the next meeting, Admiral Leroy Swanson, the head of the Technical Advisory Group and also a member of the Vance Committee, sent a list of questions to Guest. He wanted to know, among other things, what percentage of Alfa 1 and Alfa 2—the top-priority areas — had been searched and when the task force would finish Alfa 1. He also wanted to know the probability that the bomb could have buried itself in the bottom mud and what sort of protective screen had been placed around the area before the Navy arrived. Swanson wanted answers by Tuesday, March 15, in time for the board's next meeting. For Guest, the clock was ticking.

14. The Photograph

On the morning of March 1, Mac McCamis stood in front of an instrument panel, manning Alvin's surface controls. The day's search plan had put him in a rotten mood. Alvin had been searching the rough terrain of area B-29, a square inside Alfa 1, for a week, and it would dive there again today.

Mac thought they had covered B-29 frontways and back and the time had come to move on. This decision, however, like so many others, was not his to make. The Fort Snelling maneuvered into position and opened its well deck, allowing Alvin

to sail out into the waves. Mac directed the Alvin pilots to dive. As the sub disappeared beneath the surface, Mac hatched a plan.

Today, three weeks after their arrival in Spain, Alvin pilots Bill Rainnie and Val Wilson were piloting the sub, with Frank Andrews as a guest observer. Andrews had asked Earl Hays, the senior scientist for the Alvin group, for a ride in the sub. Hays, who didn't feel compelled to tell Admiral Guest who rode in

Alvin or why, much less ask the admiral's permission, often gave the observer spot to old friends and VIPs. Andrews, being both, squeezed in for the ride.

To dive, Rainnie and Wilson vented Alvin's ballast, blowing a froth of bubbles to the surface. The sub, now five hundred pounds negatively buoyant, sank slowly toward the bottom. As Alvin descended, the passengers felt no sense of falling. The three men sensed movement only by looking out the portholes and watching the “snow”—swirling clouds of tiny organisms — moving upward as the sea grew dark. When Alvin

neared the bottom, the pilot flipped a switch and dropped two stacks of steel plates weighing a total of five hundred pounds. Now neutrally buoyant, the sub could cruise the area without floating up or down. (To make smaller adjustments in ballast-up to two hundred pounds positive or negative — the pilot could use Alvin's variable ballast tanks, which pumped seawater in and out.) When the time came to surface, Rainnie and Wilson would drop another five hundred pounds of steel plates and float to the surface. The plates would remain on the ocean floor, a trail of breadcrumbs marking Alvin's path.

The pilots and observer had their eyes glued to Alvin's three viewports — one in the front center and one on either side. (A fourth viewport, on the sub's belly, was hidden by the floor and rarely used.) Each window was a Plexiglas cone twelve inches in diameter on the outside, tapering to five inches diameter on the inside. Observers peeking out these tiny windows could see only a narrow, V-shaped sliver of the world outside. Their fields of vision did not overlap; they could not see directly above, behind, or beneath the sub. Their view was further obscured by shadows, silt, and the distortion of water, which made outside objects appear closer than they were.

In Palomares, the visibility near the bottom was especially poor. On a good day, the crew could see about twenty feet. But if they accidentally brushed the bottom, the fine silt stirred into a dense cloud, an underwater sandstorm that could hang for fifteen to twenty minutes. And because the surface ship could position them within only a few hundred yards, pilots basically had to navigate on their own.

In order to steer a straight line, a pilot had to look at his compass, peer out the tiny porthole, get a glance at the bottom, and look back at the compass. It was, said McCamis, like trying to walk “a straight line in a snowstorm.” In much of the search area, the bottom stretched before them gray and featureless, with no vegetation or landmarks for guidance.