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

April 7, 1966. The log of the USS Petrel reads, “0846: Weapon on deck with parachute.”

^{U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph}

An EOD technician begins to render the bomb safe. Everything went smoothly until the team reached the battery. U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph General Wilson (left, hands on knees), Red Moody (center), Cliff Page, and Admiral Guest examine bomb number four. Lieutenant Walter Funston, who safed the bomb, is in the foreground. CURV is in the background.

^{U.S. Naval Historical Center photograph}

Aerial shot of the USS Petrel during the press review. The bomb and CURV are visible on the fantail as Alvin and Aluminaut pass by. This was the first time that the United States displayed a nuclear weapon in public.

^{Courtesy of Brad Mooney}

After finding the ship and collecting the debris, Ramirez stopped to chat with some of the Spanish officers. One of them asked Ramirez if he had spoken to the fishermen who had rescued the bomber pilots. No, said Ramirez. He hadn't even heard about the fishermen. The navy officer told him that they lived in Aguilas, a port city thirty miles up the coast from Palomares.

The paved road to Aguilas, winding along the beautiful Spanish coastline, proved far less grueling than the narrow path to Tarzan's mountain home. Ramirez and a major from Camp Wilson arrived in the evening and found the port authority office on the second floor of a small, two-story building.

The port captain greeted them warmly and asked them to wait while he called the fishermen. He told Ramirez their names: Francisco Simó Orts and Bartolomé Roldán Martínez.

As the winter night deepened, the officers chatted with the port captain, waiting for the fishermen.

Around 8 p.m., Simó and Roldán arrived. The fishermen, especially Simó, impressed Ramirez.

Businesslike and straightforward, Simó—who did most of the talking — clearly understood the sea.

“He did not appear to me to be a charlatan,” said Ramirez. “Whatever he said, he meant. There was no fooling around.”

Simó told Ramirez about that bright morning on his shrimp boat, about the explosion and the many parachutes. Ramirez, who had just recently learned that some nuclear bombs have parachutes, asked the fisherman to describe them. Simó did. And then he said something that Ramirez found strange: he apologized for not saving the other flyer. “What other flyer?” asked Ramirez, puzzled. He knew that all the airmen had been accounted for. Simó explained that he had seen all the airmen drifting down to the sea, and he knew they were alive because their arms and legs were moving. But this other person, the man who had fallen near him, hadn't been moving at all, so he must have been unconscious or maybe dead. Simó apologized profusely for not having reached the motionless man in time. When the flyer hit the water, he said, he had turned his boat and tried to rescue him. But his nets had still hung deep, and had slowed the boat; the man had sunk before he arrived.

Simó added one more twist: another, smaller parachute had fallen near his fishing boat. “I saw a parachute smaller than the others, which carried what seemed like the chest of a man,” said Simó. “I didn't see legs or a waist. Something was hanging from the bottom.” Then Simó added a gory detail: what he had seen dangling from the torso, he said, were the man's intestines.

Ramirez didn't know what to think. Simó insisted that he had seen a dead man — maybe two — but that couldn't be true. Or could it? Had Ramirez been misinformed about the number of airmen in the planes? Or could Simó have seen the bomb dangling from a parachute? Ramirez wasn't sure. “I came out of that meeting convinced that there was something substantive there,” he said. “But I knew that someone with more knowledge than I had to talk to him.” Ramirez wrapped up the meeting and asked if the fishermen could show the Americans where the parachutes had fallen. Of course, they said.