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

Once airborne, the lieutenant colonel asked where the shepherd had been working at the time of the accident. By the time the question and answer traveled back and forth, the group had overshot the point by several miles. This would never do. The lieutenant colonel ordered the pilot to hover until they established where the shepherd had been standing and where he had seen the parachute and object fall. Information in hand, they headed back to the village. Pleased with the whole adventure, the mayor leapt out of the chopper with a flourish. His brother just looked relieved to be back on solid ground.

Returning to camp, Ramirez gave the new information to his superiors, who dispatched a search team to the shepherd's hills. Less than a week into the search, the Air Force was still chasing every lead. Searchers, scouring the area, had found the combat mission folder. The heat of the explosion had melted the folder's plastic coverings together, sealing the top secret codes securely inside.

Searchers also found the box containing additional classified documents, still locked tight. These finds gave the Air Force some measure of relief. But there was still no sign of bomb number four.

Some people began to suspect that the bomb might have exploded in the air, buried itself underground, or fallen into the sea. But it had been only a few days, and the chances remained high that bomb number four had fallen on land near the other three. Perhaps Tarzan's clue marked the spot. A team headed to the mountains to search the area. They returned without the bomb.

By January 20—the Thursday after the accident — General Wilson realized that finding the bomb and cleaning up the mess would take longer than he originally thought, and he relayed the news to SAC headquarters in Omaha. General John D. Ryan, who had succeeded Tommy Power as SAC's commander in chief, directed Wilson to use all available resources to find the missing bomb. “Until every avenue of search is exhausted,” he said, “we do not have much of a leg to stand on.” Hundreds of searchers had arrived from Morón and Torrejón the day after the accident and were camping in the dry riverbed near the B-52's tail section. The first night, the men slept in the open air or under the buses. The next day, as tents and gear arrived, the men set up a rudimentary camp. They called the area “Camp Wilson.” Conditions were rough. Phil Durbin, an airman who arrived from Torrejón, remembers the desert nights as cold and damp. He and his friends, seeing a small wooden bridge in the nearby hills, tore it down and burned it for warmth. Robert Finkel, a squadron commander, slept under a bus with his head in a cardboard box to keep the sand out of his face. The men ate cold C-rations out of metal cans. There were no bathrooms or showers except the Mediterranean Sea.

After a few days of searching with no maps or strategic plan, Wilson's men got organized. Bombs numbers one, two, and three had fallen in a jagged line along the doomed planes' flight path, with bomb number one near the water, bomb number three about a mile inland, and bomb number two a mile or so inland from that. Wilson assumed — or at least hoped — that they would find bomb number four somewhere along the same path. Each day, coordinators — soon supplied with photomosaic maps from U.S. Air Force reconnaissance planes — mapped out areas to search. At daybreak, the searchers rumbled out in buses to their assigned patch of desert scrub or tomato farm. The men spread out in a line and walked shoulder to shoulder, eyes glued to the ground, looking for any sign of the bomb. After a certain amount of trudging under the merciless desert sun, the men “ wheeled” the line and walked back to their starting point.

If the searchers saw anything of interest, they marked it with a flag on a pole, a piece of string, or a bit of colored toilet paper. If they found small bits of metal, they placed them in bags for inspection back at camp. Durbin found a chunk of the boom nozzle nearly as long as his arm. Nobody knew which piece of scrap might lead them to bomb number four. Those who thought the bomb had disintegrated in midair found some evidence for their theory: a reservoir — a piece of a bomb mechanism — lying 1,500 feet from bomb number three. Perhaps it was a remnant of the missing weapon. The Air Force sent the scrap to Los Alamos for identification. The verdict: the reservoir was just another piece of bomb number three.