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

Ramirez reported this latest bit of news back to Camp Wilson. A day or two later, on January 22, he found himself on the USS Pinnacle with Simó, Roldán, and a handful of U.S. Navy officers. The Pinnacle, along with the USS Sagacity, both minesweepers, had arrived the previous day to search the area with mine-detecting sonar. The Navy officers asked Simó to show them where he had seen the larger parachute enter the water. He guided them to the spot without a compass, using only his seaman's eye to align various landmarks on shore. When the Pinnacle arrived at the specified point, their sonar got two hits. The water was just over two thousand feet deep.

The Pinnacle then moved away, and the officers, testing Simó's navigation skills, asked him to guide them back. Simó fixed the position again. The Pinnacle found the same two sonar hits. Then the Navy officers asked Simó and Roldán to show them another area where debris had fallen. The fishermen guided the Navy men to the spot. More hits blipped onto the Pinnacle's sonar. The Navy men were impressed by the fishermen's navigation skills, but the sonar hits were vague. One report described them as both “sharp and hazy” and guessed that they could be “either a school of fish or a parachute partially filled with air bubbles.” Nonetheless, the blips were duly noted, and the Spanish fishermen returned to shore.

On the evening of Simó's boat ride, in Washington, President Johnson sat down in the White House screening room to watch a movie with several guests, including Lady Bird, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and McNamara's wife. The movie was the new James Bond thriller Thunderball, released a few weeks earlier and now at the top of the box office. In the film, an international ring of evildoers called “SPECTRE” hatches a sinister plan. An agent of SPECTRE, disguised as a NATO

commandant, hijacks a fighter plane loaded with two nuclear bombs, kills the crew with poison gas, and crash-lands the plane in the ocean. After the plane settles gently to the bottom, a group of scuba divers appears, driving a futuristic underwater craft that looks like a giant orange stingray. The divers snatch the nuclear bombs and squirrel them away aboard a pleasure craft. SPECTRE demands

£1 million in flawless diamonds, or it will detonate the bombs in a city. James Bond, braving spear guns, shark attacks, and a duplicitous redhead, saves the day.

During the week after the Palomares accident, everyone was talking about the movie. When Jack Howard called Alan Pope at Sandia, he told the engineer that the nation was facing a real-life Thunderball. And now a handful of people, led by a Spanish fisherman, an Air Force lawyer, and a few computer nerds, was starting to realize that a real nuclear weapon might now be lost under a real sea. And early reports noted that real Soviets — not the caricatured evildoers of SPECTRE — were circling in the waters. The bomb saga was about to shift from the parched Almería desert to the cold Spanish sea. James Bond, sadly, was nowhere in sight.

6. Call In the Navy

Red Moody sat in the cockpit of a KC-135, looking out the window at the driving snow and thanking his lucky stars he was a diver, not a pilot. He and his dive team had been scheduled to land at Andrews Air Force Base that morning, but a snowstorm had buried the runways and air traffic control had diverted the plane to Dulles. Sitting in the jump seat just behind the pilots, Moody listened now as they discussed whether they could land in a blizzard with thirty-five-knot gusts. The pilots decided to go for it. Moody watched, with alarmed fascination, as the pilots cranked up the power and turned the plane almost sideways to approach the runway. Down they went, the snow whirring and whistling by the windows, Dulles barely visible below. Wheels touched tarmac, and the plane skidded out straight. Moody and the divers in the back breathed a sigh of relief.

Moody had been up for hours, ever since the late-night call from the duty captain at the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). On January 22, still less than a week after the accident, Assistant Secretary of Defense Jack Howard had called the Navy. The following day, the CNO had established a task force, known as Task Force 65, to help the Air Force recover its lost bomb. Then the Navy had ordered men and ships to Spain. Lieutenant Commander Moody oversaw a group of Navy divers in Charleston, South Carolina, who specialized in explosive ordnance disposal, or EOD. Moody's divers handled all sorts of dangerous jobs: they defused floating mines, found missiles lost in offshore testing ranges, and tracked down planes that crashed into swamps. The duty captain called Moody around midnight on January 22 and asked when Moody could get a dive team to Palomares.

Moody said they'd be at the airport, with their gear, by 9 a.m.