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

Duke's press release would prove extremely premature, his hope for a quick and easy recovery overly optimistic. The Navy might have found the bomb, but it had no way to lift it.

On March 16, McCamis and Wilson piloted Alvin back to the contact to relieve Aluminaut. Alvin, now outfitted with a transponder, could be guided by the Mizar almost directly to the target.

Aluminaut had been down for twenty-two hours, babysitting the parachute-covered object. As they approached the larger sub, the Alvin

pilots could see that it had parked itself at an angle, with its nose toward the bottom and its stern floating upward. The Alvin pilots approached the Aluminaut slowly, finally stopping just behind its elevated stern. At that moment, someone in the Aluminaut decided to walk to the back of the sub in order to use the urinal. As he did, the sub dipped its rear end toward Alvin, whose pilots squawked with alarm. McCamis grabbed the joystick and scooted Alvin off to the right. Then Aluminaut

took off for the surface, showering Alvin with steel shot and mud from her underside.

After recovering from these indignities, the Alvin pilots settled in for another shift. They had returned to keep an eye on the object, not attempt a recovery. Alvin by now had a mechanical arm with a reach of six feet, a rotating wrist, and two pincers like a lobster claw. They used the arm to place a transponder near the bomb, so the Mizar could find the weapon when Alvin left. But the arm couldn't lift the bomb. Outstretched, the arm could carry twenty-five to fifty pounds. Or it could hang on to two hundred pounds in the crook of the elbow. (Aluminaut would

eventually have two arms with similar lifting ability, but they hadn't arrived in Spain yet.) There was no way Alvin could lift a two-ton nuclear weapon.

Guest needed another way to raise the bomb. As McCamis and Wilson began their second vigil in the dark, the admiral's staff began to lay their plans.

15. POODL versus the Bomb

On March 22, 1966, CBS News aired a thirty-minute special report called “Lost and Found, One H-Bomb.” The show opened with the anchor, Charles Kuralt, seated before a two-color map of Spain indicating only two cities: Madrid and Palomares. “We live in a world in which it is possible to mislay a hydrogen bomb,” intoned Kuralt. “That is the central fact of the drama in Spain.” He continued:

With thousands of men and millions of dollars and a flotilla of fifteen ships and with luck, we have apparently also found it, lying on the bottom of the sea. With the concurrence of the dark Mediterranean, it now seems likely that it will even be recovered and put in a safe place. But for the sixty days that one of our H-bombs was missing, worried people in the village of Palomares and thoughtful people everywhere asked, “Could it explode?” “Could it leak poisonous radiation?”

“Could somebody else find it and put it to use?” Those are awesome questions but, considering the nature of the loss, not unreasonable ones.

Later in the report, CBS showed a long scene from the movie Thunderball, then cut to a shot of Deep Jeep being hoisted from the water. (The Navy had already sent Deep Jeep back to the United States, but the journalists were apparently unable to resist its photo-friendly bright yellow hull.)

“This is not a search for a fictional missing H-bomb, this is a search for a real one,” said Kuralt. “If it looks a little like Thunder-ball, that is a comment on how fantastic fact has become lately.” Kuralt wrapped up the program with a shot of the blue Mediterranean, the hills of Palomares rising in the distance. “The bomb has not yet been brought to the surface, but it must be,” he said solemnly.

“Because if we don't recover it, there remains the nagging, distant possibility that someone else will.”

For about a week, Red Moody, now back on the task force, had been working on a plan. The key problem was getting a line down to the bottom, one heavy enough to support the weight of the bomb. Alvin or Aluminaut could carry a very light line. But if a submersible stretched a heavy line from a surface ship to the bomb, the force of the line in the current could overwhelm the sub's engines and sweep it off course.