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

On March 1, as usual, Alvin was “flying a contour.” The area loomed with steep slopes and deep gullies, mimicking the mountains alongside Palomares. The plan called for Alvin to stay at a consistent depth while flying along an undersea slope, looking for something lying on the hillside and snapping photos along the way. When they had finished searching the area at one depth, they could move deeper.

Mac McCamis, however, had lost patience with B-29. He noticed that Alvin was near an adjacent search area, C-4, closer to the actual point where Simó had seen the “dead man” hit the water. Mac asked the support ship's captain if he could “play stupid” and steer Alvin out of its assigned space.

“You're the controller,” said the captain. “Why not?”

McCamis seized the moment and sent the sub into the new area. Near the end of the dive, pilot Bill Rainnie spotted something on the bottom.

“Wait a minute, I see something,” Rainnie said.

“What?” Wilson asked.

“I'm not sure, a little to the left, that's it, no, dammit, you went over it, to the right.”

“What?”

“To the right, dammit! That's it, right on target.”

“What is it?”

It's nothing, Rainnie said. Never mind.

The pilots saw nothing else of interest and surfaced soon afterward. Mac's gamble, it seemed, had been a bust.

When they arrived back on the Fort Smiling

, the pilots handed off their film for developing. That night at their briefing, the Alvin crew gathered around the latest batch of photos. Mac, looking at the pictures, spotted something odd — a curious track in the sediment. It looked, he said, “like a barrel had been dragged over the bottom, end to end.” Brad Mooney agreed with Mac. “To me, it looked like a torpedo had slid down,” said Mooney. “It had a curved shape to it, all the way down.” The pilots were excited. What they were seeing, they hoped, was the track of bomb number four sliding down the undersea slope. The next day, this time with official permission, the Alvin crew returned to the area to look for the track. They couldn't find it. They returned on March 3, 4, and 7, combing the bottom, going over and over the area where they had photographed the track. Nothing.

On March 8, the day of Ambassador Duke's swim, the task force suddenly yanked Alvin off the trail and sent her to search a shallow inshore area. Near the beach, some undersea gullies plunged too deep for Navy divers to search. Most likely, Admiral Guest had sent Alvin to investigate these gullies so he could check another square off his chart. But whatever the admiral's intentions, the Alvin

crew received no explanation for the sudden change and no information about when they could return to the promising track. The move, which seemed completely arbitrary, demoralized the crew and hardened their attitudes toward Guest. “My turn at surface control,” grumbled Mac, “and we're still messing around in 800 feet of water.”

By the third week in March, the mood of the searchers had settled into a mix of frustration, boredom, determination, and despair. Alvin moved back to deeper water but couldn't find the mysterious track. Aluminaut, likewise, was coming up empty-handed. The Ocean Bottom Scanning Sonar, Task Force 65's only unmanned deep search system, made nine runs over a dummy test shape and couldn't find it. On March 12, an OBSS towed by the USS Notable snagged a ridge, snapped its line, and never came up from the bottom.

The divers had wrapped up most of their inshore search, leaving Red Moody without much to do.

Guest asked the long-faced Moody if he wanted to head home to Charleston. With little work left for him in Spain, Red agreed. On March 14, Red Moody flew to Rota Naval Air Station to catch a plane home.

Ambassador Duke, picking up on the mood in Palomares and catching wind of the shifting tone in Washington, sensed that the search might soon be called off. Trying to ensure his role in the endgame, Duke wrote to Jack Valenti, special assistant to Lyndon Johnson: Madrid, March 14, 1966