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

When Wendorf's plane exploded, the other bomber, with its own companion tanker plane, was a couple of miles ahead, completing its own midair refueling. This gave the boom operator — the only man with a backward-facing window — a view of the explosion. The boomer shouted the news to the cockpit, and the tanker crew radioed the news to their base in Morón. At 10:27 a.m., the Morón Command Post radioed the Sixteenth Air Force headquarters at Torrejón Air Base near Madrid with the first news of the crash. The call sign for the undamaged tanker was “Troubador One Two”: Morón: We just received a call from Troubador One Two. He reports smoke and flames aircraft behind him, and he has no contact with aircraft. We're getting coordinates now.

Torrejón: Roger, thank you very much.

Torrejón: (Two minutes later) Was that in his aircraft or in the aircraft behind him?

Morón: That was the aircraft behind him. Troubador One Two says they have not made contact with the number two bomber. Reported sighted smoke and flames behind their refueling formation.

The tanker, after finishing the refueling, wheeled back to survey the scene. Flying at 4,000 feet, the crew reported what appeared to be the tail section of the B-52 in a dry riverbed, burning wreckage about a mile inland, and still more aircraft debris farther toward the hills. Meanwhile, Morón reported the incident to SAC:

Morón: Believe possible mid-air collision KC-135 and airborne alert B-52. It is not confirmed at this time. Was reported from Troubador One Two. The boomer sighted a burning aircraft spinning behind him in the formation. They have been unable to contact either the bomber or the tanker. The KC-135 from Morón Tanker Task Force … The B-52 from Seymour. Of course, weapons aboard.

As the news crisscrossed Spain and the Atlantic, the phone rang on the desk of a twenty-nine-year-old Air Force lawyer named Joe Ramirez. Ramirez worked in the staff judge advocate's office at the U.S. Air Force base at Torrejón. The person on the phone told Ramirez to get over to headquarters on the double.

Ramirez grabbed a notebook, told his boss about the call, and hustled across the street to headquarters. In the war room, things were humming. “The general was there, and people were running around back and forth,” said Ramirez. “We had sketchy information at the time, but I did learn that there had been a crash between a B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker.” Ramirez knew that those were big planes and that the tanker had been full of fuel. A crash between them could be catastrophic.

Ramirez had never heard of Chrome Dome and had never seen a nuclear weapon. He worried more about damage from falling aircraft debris. He learned that the crash had happened over a remote part of Spain and was told to be ready to fly down there soon, probably within an hour, to help assess the damage on the ground. Ramirez went back to his office, grabbed a “claims kit” full of forms, and called his wife. He told her that there had been a crash and he had to go somewhere in southern Spain but would probably be back that evening or the next day. Around 12:30 p.m., he boarded a cargo plane with thirty-five other members of the disaster control team and headed for a town that nobody had ever heard of. He still had the keys to the family car in his pocket.

Though Joe Ramirez probably couldn't tell a nuclear bomb from a hot water heater, he proved to be one of the Air Force's most useful men in Palomares. As a lawyer, he was used to gathering spotty information from witnesses. In addition, Ramirez was the only airman deployed to Palomares that day who spoke Spanish fluently.

Ramirez had grown up in a small south Texas town, and his parents spoke both Spanish and English at home. His father was a tall, handsome man who had taught himself auto mechanics and eventually ran his own garage. Though Joe and his brother spent plenty of time working in the shop — the two of them could overhaul an engine in a day — their father pushed them to excel in school, telling them that education was the ticket to getting out of south Texas and seeing the world. Buoyed by his teachers and his close-knit family and encouraged by success in language arts and public speaking, Ramirez went to college and then law school, joining Air Force ROTC along the way.