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

At one point during the meetings, the Americans asked to issue a statement of gratitude for Spain's help in the search-and-rescue effort. Sagáz and other Spanish officials shot the idea down. The story was already dying in the press, they said, and they certainly didn't want it resurrected. Duke pushed the point: if, by some chance, the story rekindled, it would be good to have a statement ready. Sagáz agreed, and Duke drafted a seven-paragraph statement providing some basic details of the crash and thanking Spanish officials for their help.

Although the meeting went well, hints of trouble emerged. Some lower-level Foreign Office officials expressed surprise that these risky refueling operations were taking place over land. Around the same time, Spanish Vice President Agustín Muñoz Grandes met with U.S. Air Force General Stanley Donovan, head of the Joint U.S. Military Group and Ambassador's Duke's chief military contact, to suggest that the refuelings take place over water, rather than Spanish territory. Muñoz Grandes also posed an uncomfortable question: Did the United States have any nuclear devices stored on Spanish territory? Although the U.S. military had stored nuclear weapons in Spain since 1958, its policy was strict and unyielding: never tell anyone exactly where the weapons were. “The subject was still very touchy,” said the former embassy staffer Joseph Smith. “It doesn't surprise me that Muñoz Grandes didn't know — or didn't know for certain.” General Donovan was a blunt, plainspoken man who emulated Curtis LeMay, in both his cigar-chomping demeanor and his direct speech. “He was not dumb,” said Smith. “I can't believe that Donovan would have told him anything.”

Despite these diplomatic bumps, Duke told Washington that tension remained low and both sides were cooperating. Military and government officials in Madrid felt good about the situation. On January 19, a secret cable to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington rang with optimism: “American Embassy officials report Spanish Foreign Office is of the opinion that coverage has reached its peak and will now decline,” it read. “Queries from American news bureaus in Madrid have diminished appreciably.”

The optimism would not last. A young reporter named Andró del Amo was about to upset Ambassador Duke's delicately balanced diplomacy. The previous evening, del Amo, a twenty-five-year-old UPI reporter, had left for Palomares with Leo White, a London Daily Mirror reporter, to investigate the scene firsthand.

They drove all night, arriving at the dirt road into Palomares about 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday, January 19. As they headed into town, they saw some wreckage — what looked like airplane engines — lying on a hillside. They stopped the car, took some photos, and continued on. In the center of town, they saw some guardias civiles on patrol, but nobody gave the two reporters a second glance. Del Amo asked a villager where he could find the Americans and was directed toward the camp in the dry riverbed. The most complete account of what happened next is recorded in Tad Szulc's book The Bombs of Palomares:

Driving up the road, del Amo suddenly slammed on his brakes. As he said later, he became “very excited” by what he saw. Long lines of American airmen in fatigues or bright yellow coveralls were moving through the fields, beating the bushes, tomato vines, and clumps of vegetation with long sticks and canes. They were doing it with extreme thoroughness, del Amo thought, as they slowly advanced almost shoulder to shoulder. Other airmen, closer to the road, were checking the ground with portable instruments del Amo and White assumed to be Geiger counters.

The two men continued on to the camp and saw a frenzy of activity. The tail section of the B-52 still sat in the riverbed, with the blue Air Force buses that had carried the airmen from Morón and Torrejón scattered around it. American officers, airmen, and guardias civiles buzzed around the camp. In the center of activity stood General Wilson in his blue greatcoat, issuing orders and receiving reports. The two reporters asked some questions but received little information. But del Amo had enough for an initial report. He drove to Vera to call in his first story to Madrid. After lunch, the two reporters returned to the riverbed camp to track down the Sixteenth Air Force's information director, Colonel Barnett Young, who told them that the airmen in the fields were simply looking for wreckage. When the reporters asked if the planes had carried nuclear weapons, Young “exploded with anger,” according to del Amo, shouting, “This is not a place for scandal stories or outrageous hypotheses!” Young warned the reporters to stop nosing around.