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

The Mizar's crew snagged the floating buoy tied to the anchor and the POODL. They jettisoned the buoy and attached the lift line to the ship's winch. Moody and Jon Lindbergh stood by the Mizar's moon pool to watch the operation. Guest and members of his staff waited in the ship's laboratory, watching the instrument panels. At about 7:30 p.m., Mizar's winch began to turn. Guest started to pray.

After about an hour, the instruments noted a slight strain as POODL rose off the seafloor. Fifteen minutes later, the rope took a heavy strain: the anchor had cleared the bottom. Slowly, the winch turned. The line grew steadily more taut, but the instruments showed that the strain was not severe.

Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. The instruments showed another strain. The bomb had lifted off the bottom.

Three minutes later, the instruments jumped. Moody and Lindbergh, watching the line, saw it suddenly go slack. Staring at the loose line, Lindbergh felt a terrible sinking feeling. Moody thought,

“Oh, shit.”

The winch took another long hour to reel in the anchor. The line below the anchor — the one that had been attached to the bomb — ended in a frayed stump. The bomb itself was gone. Looking at the mangled rope, Lindbergh guessed that about three fourths of the strands had been cut cleanly on some sharp object. The rest had just split.

Moody later discovered that Mizar

had, in fact, drifted off course while raising the bomb. The captain had cut power while the winch turned, sending the ship drifting toward shore and likely dragging the bomb upslope before lifting it. But it's not clear if Mizar's drift snapped the line. The line could have fouled on the anchor flukes, rubbed on a sharp rock, or even cut itself on the POODL. Perhaps the nylon line was too prone to splitting or this particular line was defective.

Nobody ever figured it out for sure.

McCamis and Wilson were eating dinner when they heard the bad news. “Oh, boy,” said Mac. “Now we got to go find it again.”

Alvin needed a battery charge and repairs to her ballast system and couldn't dive again for almost a full day. The admiral ordered

Aluminaut to head down and look for the bomb. Several times, Mizar reported that the sub passed within 100 feet of the weapon's former position, but the Aluminaut crew saw no sign of it. After five hours of searching, they were ordered to surface to avoid disturbing the bottom further. When Alvin returned to the weapon site on the evening of March 25, the bottom was scored with deep gouges. “The slope looked [as] if it had been torn up by bulldozers,” said Mac. The pilots found chunks of stone, clay, and mud, but no bomb.

The broken line seemed like a small mishap — an unlucky break rather than a tragedy. The recovery team hadn't moved the weapon far from its original resting place, and they knew where they had dropped it. How far could it have gone? Surely, the subs would soon find it again. So, as Task Force 65 combed the ocean floor, the embassy staffers didn't panic. Instead, they continued to argue about how to display the bomb when Guest finally brought it up. Ever since word had leaked out that the bomb had been found, an international chorus had been offering suggestions and making demands.

The Soviet newspaper Izvestia called for an international commission to verify the discovery, witness the bomb raising, and judge if the bomb had leaked any radiation. U.N. Secretary General U

Thant privately suggested inviting the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) to verify the recovery. American officials balked at both suggestions. The Soviet Union was a member of the IAEC, and the military certainly didn't want a mob of Communist scientists poking around its top secret weapon.

There was still the question of logistics, as well. The embassy wanted Duke, Spanish Vice President Muñoz Grandes, and other VIPs to witness the actual bomb raising. Wilson opposed this idea: the bomb might be dangerous and should be rendered safe before VIPs showed up. Should he keep Muñoz Grandes, the number two man in Spain, waiting in a tent, maybe for days? Guest agreed.

Military officials hated the idea of displaying the bomb in public. If they had their way, they would raise the bomb in secret, pack it into a box, and ship it back to the United States under cover of darkness.