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

Divers who search for lost objects are perpetually annoyed by people who expect the search to go faster. As Ervin explained, “It's not like walking through a parking lot. You have very little visibility — you're really just putting out your hands and hoping you run into it. If the thing has any surface area, it's going to float off, and if there's current, it's going to go even further. It's like trying to look for something on land and having someone pushing you all the time.”

“That's what pisses you off,” said Ervin. “When people who never dive are saying ‘I dropped it right there, why can't you find it?’ Or even worse, ‘I could have found it myself by now.’” It makes you want to say, ‘Okay, go ahead. I'm taking my toys and going home.’” In Palomares, Andersen's divers had few toys to begin with. At one point early on, the divers needed a way to see how far they were from shore. They didn't have enough line to reel off five hundred yards here and five hundred yards there. So they used toilet paper. “We found out that a roll of toilet paper was about yea so long,” said Andersen. “One guy would walk over to the beach and he would hold on to a roll of toilet paper, and we would get in our boat and we'd steam out at right angles to that little beach mark until we ran out of the roll of toilet paper.” At that point, Andersen dropped a buoy, marking that they were exactly one roll of toilet paper from shore. It wasn't precise, but it was better than nothing.

Back aboard the USS Macdonough and cruising far offshore, Admiral Guest was quickly realizing the enormity of his task. For one thing, the Costa Bomba — as people had quickly started to call this stretch of Spain — was an enigma: nobody knew much about the underwater terrain or currents, and there were no decent charts of the offshore waters. Guest had one large-scale Navy chart of the area, drawn in 1935 from old Spanish charts and slightly revised in 1962. A note on the chart read, “Some features on this chart may be displaced as much as one-half mile from their true position.” Navigators soon found that this caveat was the rule rather than the exception. Someone dug up another chart that actually showed Palomares, as well as nearby Villaricos and Garrucha, but it contained so little sounding data or landmarks that navigators found it equally useless. One Navy captain named Lewis Melson had the foresight to grab an issue of National Geographic featuring Spain as he left for Palomares. For a while, the National Geographic pullout map was the best the task force had.

This would never do. Admiral Guest told the Navy he needed some real charts. On January 27, the USS Kiowa arrived with a device called the Decca hi-fix. The hi-fix involved three radio transmitters set up on shore. The transmitters broadcast overlapping radio waves, creating a “net” that could be read by a ship's receiver. The ship could use the radio waves to calculate its location, but only relative to the transmitters. The Navy had a grander plan: once the system was operational, the USNS Dutton, an oceanographic survey ship, would use the Decca net to create proper charts.

The plan made perfect sense, but it soon butted up against military bureaucracy. When the Decca hi-fix arrived in Palomares, it sat in its crates. Nobody knew how to set it up. Even worse, some of the Decca technicians were foreign nationals, from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Holland, whom the Navy wouldn't allow on site without clearance. It would be several weeks before technicians got the system up and running, several more before the Dutton could deliver accurate charts to Admiral Guest.

Salvage operations never run smoothly, and Admiral Guest was not a salvage expert. He was an aviator whose brain brimmed with knowledge of fighter planes and aircraft carriers. And this particular salvage operation was tougher than most, both physically and politically. The United States had lost a top secret nuclear weapon somewhere over the territory of a key Cold War ally.

There was a chance that the twelve-foot bomb had fallen somewhere into the vast, dark Mediterranean Sea, a terrain filled with unknown canyons and currents. General Wilson had sent hundreds of men walking across the Spanish desert to look for the bomb, but Admiral Guest could do no such thing. If the bomb had fallen into the deep ocean, Guest had few means to search for it, much less pick it up. The bomb might as well have been on the moon.

The impossibility of the search was surpassed only by the metaphors dreamed up to describe it.