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

The shore was crowded with curious onlookers. In his excitement, the Dorita's captain crashed into the dock, giving the passengers a good knock and badly damaging the boat. Two bread trucks were waiting nearby to take the injured airmen to the local infirmary. Rooney remembers lying on a wooden bench in the back as the truck struggled up a windy mountain road. “Every time I looked up, the driver's looking back at me to see how I'm doing,” Rooney said. “And I'm turning to him saying ‘Look at the goddam road!’ I've already been in a plane crash and a boat wreck, and if they get me in a car wreck, that's going to be three strikes and I'm out.” Larry Messinger had a longer journey to safety. As he ejected from the exploding B-52, he knocked his head hard enough to make him woozy. Disoriented, he pulled his rip cord immediately, opening his parachute at 31,000 feet. “I shouldn't have done that,” Messinger recalled. “I should have free-falled and the parachute would open automatically at fourteen thousand feet. But I opened mine anyway, because of the fact that I got hit in the head, I imagine.” Messinger, fighting the strong wind, drifted out to sea. Helplessly, he watched the coastline dwindle as he sailed farther and farther over the Mediterranean, miles past the spot where Wendorf and Rooney landed. Finally he splashed into the sea, about eight miles from land. Messinger inflated his life raft and climbed in. He floated for about forty-five minutes, riding huge swells and shivering from the cold. Eventually two fishing boats approached. Simó's brother, in the Agustín y Rosa, got to him first. The crew pulled him aboard, stripped off his soaking wet clothes, and wrapped him in a blanket. Then they gave him a shot of brandy and headed to shore.

When Air Force officials visited his bed in the Aguilas infirmary, Messinger remembered something important. Drifting over the ocean below his parachute, he had seen something odd in the water below, off to the side. It was a huge ripple on the surface of the sea, “like when you drop something in the water and it makes a big circle,” he said. Messinger told the officials about the huge circle in the water. As far as he knows, they never did a thing about it.

That evening, a helicopter took the survivors to nearby San Javier. There they boarded a plane for the U.S. air base in Torrejón, near Madrid. The next day, the accident board convened at the air base.

The investigators questioned the men separately and told them not to discuss the accident among themselves. Wendorf recalls no one asking him about the four nuclear bombs missing from his plane, and he didn't venture any guesses. The interrogation continued for two days. Then the investigators took the survivors' statements and left.

The survivors stayed at Torrejón Air Base for two weeks to recuperate. One day, a week or so after the accident, Wendorf, Messinger, and some other Air Force personnel were shooting the bull. They started talking about the accident, trying to remember how many parachutes they had seen after ejecting from the plane. As Wendorf replayed the scene in his mind, he recalled seeing a couple of survival chutes and then remembered something else. Survival chutes, which carry people, are orange and white, so they can be easily found. Bomb chutes are more of an off white or dirty yellow.

Wendorf had seen an off white chute. Suddenly he realized that it must have been one of the bombs falling to the ocean. Messinger, startled, told him about the giant circle he had seen on the water.

The two men looked at each other. Each one went into a separate room. Someone ran and got a couple of maps of the Spanish coastline. Separately, each man marked the map where he thought a bomb might have hit the water. When they compared marks, they were about a mile apart.

An Air Force aide took the maps and “ran off like he discovered gold,” said Wendorf. A couple of days later, the survivors boarded a plane home to North Carolina. Rooney had bought a new copy of Thy Tears Might Cease but decided not to read it in the air.

At 7:05 a.m. Washington time on January 17, just about the time that Spanish fishermen were plucking Wendorf, Messinger, and Rooney from the cold Spanish sea, Lyndon Johnson sat in his bedroom eating a breakfast of melon, chipped beef, and hot tea. A messenger from the White House Situation Room walked in and handed the president his daily security briefing. The first page of the memo offered dismal news from Vietnam: a series of Viet Cong attacks against government installations; a mine explosion under a bus that had killed twenty-six civilians; a deadly raid on an infantry school. The second page held only one item: an early report of the accident, peppered with inaccuracies. It read: