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

After surviving their landing at Dulles, the divers sacked out while the maintenance crews scrambled to find fuel for the plane. The snow slowed everything down, and the divers were stuck at Dulles for hours. They finally took off for Spain that evening and landed at Torrejón the following day. They ate lunch, flew to southern Spain, and took a bus to a small Spanish town. By this point Moody and his divers had been awake for nearly forty-eight hours.

After a few hours of sleep, Moody went out to find a local tavern. As he drank at the bar, a man in a business suit sat down next to him and introduced himself as Captain Page. Cliff Page, it turned out, had just been appointed chief of staff to Admiral William S. Guest, the man who would oversee Task Force 65. The two men chatted for a while. Then Page asked Moody why his divers were still here, zonked out in the hotel, instead of reporting for duty at Camp Wilson. Red bristled at the question but played it cool. He patiently explained that his men had been awake for almost two days and were in no condition to dive. They would get a decent night's sleep and report for duty the next day. Page backed off quickly and offered to arrange a bus for the divers in the morning. Moody accepted.

On Tuesday, January 25, Red Moody, eleven divers, and about 14,000 pounds of diving gear arrived at Camp Wilson to join the growing Navy contingent. Four U.S. Navy minesweepers, an oceanographic ship, and a destroyer already sailed offshore, with a handful of tankers, tugs, and other ships on the way. A small team of EOD divers from Rota, led by Lieutenant Oliver Andersen, was setting up shop on the beach when Moody's team joined them. A young ensign followed on Moody's heels. “His sole purpose in life,” recalled Andersen, “was to follow behind Red and write down everything that was happening.” Andersen, curious, asked the kid for his notebook and flipped through it. “Closer we get to the scene,” the ensign had written, “the more outstanding the confusion.”

Moody spoke with an Air Force colonel to get a rundown of the situation. Afterward, Moody and Andersen talked for a few minutes, sharing what little information they had. Then Moody made an announcement: he was heading out — uninvited — to the USS Macdonough, the admiral's flagship, to see what the Navy brass could tell him. Commandeering an inflatable seven-man rubber boat, he left Andersen in charge of his divers and puttered out into the waves.

DeWitt “Red” Moody was a tall, fit, broad-shouldered man with a commanding presence and a thick Texas accent. Everyone called him “Red” because he had once sported a full head of copper-colored hair. Now, at age thirty-eight, most of his hair was long gone, his forehead rising high and bald as a bullet above his face. The nickname, however, had stuck.

Moody was a freshman in high school when the United States entered World War II, too young to join the military. He waited, impatiently, and then enlisted in the Navy in 1944, the day after his seventeenth birthday. He went to sonar school and served in the Pacific on the USS Strong but saw little action. When the war ended, he decided to stay in the Navy. He came from a broken family with little money, and the Navy offered him a camaraderie and security he had never experienced before. Stationed on an aircraft carrier, he met some Navy EOD divers and saw them at work. The men impressed him with their teamwork and “can-do” attitude. He decided that diving was the job for him.

EOD divers are a special breed. The job throws them into dirty, difficult situations with no obvious solution. They must solve problems in a limited amount of time — before their air runs out or something explodes — so they get used to working quickly with improvised tools. Because divers need to make snap decisions, the relationship between officers and enlisted men differs from that in other parts of the Navy. Divers speak out, show little deference, and are willing to accept ideas from the lowest man on the totem pole.

Moody excelled in this world. EOD diving became his life. After eleven years, he earned an officer's commission, one of the rare “mustang” officers in the Navy who had risen from the ranks of the enlisted. At the time of the Palomares crash, he was overseeing a team of forty-seven at his headquarters in Charleston. When an accident happened, Moody usually dispatched a three-man team to cover it. Sometimes, after a high-profile accident, he sent a larger team and went along himself. This was one of those occasions.