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

operators — most of whom were trained on the spot — had to hold the face of the counter close to the ground to get a reading. But the PAC-1S had been designed for laboratory use; the measurement face was thin and fragile as paper and tore easily on the jagged rocks.

Despite the equipment problems, White and his team managed to run zero lines around the two bomb craters and the town itself. Their results were daunting. The contaminated area inside the circles included about 640 acres of hillside, village, and farmland. Of the 640 acres, 319 were cultivated farmland. In Oklahoma, 319 acres might add up to a couple of flat, level fields of soybeans — a tractor could plow it under in two or three days. But in Palomares, farmers had chopped the land into a patchwork of 854 separate plots, almost all of them smaller than four acres, some smaller than an acre. To separate their tiny, uneven fields, villagers had built stone walls and tangled cactus fences. Through this maze ran irrigation ditches, carrying water to the ripening tomatoes. In some fields, the crops stood thick; the tomato plants, especially, climbed high and sagged under their heavy fruit. The U.S. and Spanish governments wanted this maze of land cleared — and somehow cleaned of radioactivity — by April 1, so farmers could plant their next rotation of crops. “In twenty-four years of Air Force experience,” said Bud White, “I have never, never had a challenge like this one.”

While Bud White worked on a cleanup plan, something had to be done about the tomatoes. In Palomares, farmers used thin, flexible, six-to-eight-foot poles to support their tomato plants, forming dense thickets in the fields. The majority of poles and plants showed no contamination. But plutonium dust had settled in the soil around the plants, so the Air Force decided to clear the fields to the ground. “The only way you could treat that land,” said White, “was to get rid of those cane poles, because you couldn't get the plow in there.”

The job of chief tomato plant chopper fell to Bob Finkel. His superiors gave him a handful of men and a bucketful of machetes. Every day, he faced a new patch of tomatoes. From dawn until dusk, he and his men hacked tomato plants until the fields lay clear. Someone nicknamed the group “Finkel's Farmers,” but he thought they looked more like a chain gang. By the end of a day in the blazing sun, Finkel and his crew were filthy with sweat and dirt and sticky with rotten tomatoes.

Finkel's Farmers piled the cane poles and green plants at the far end of each field for mulching and disposal. The ripe tomatoes, on the other hand, were gathered into gleaming red heaps. One news reporter wrote that most of the crop was dumped at sea, in an operation quickly dubbed “the Boston Tomato Party.” But residents of Camp Wilson knew that many ended up in the mess hall.

As a gesture of goodwill, and to help support the desperate tomato farmers, the Air Force had decided to buy the contaminated tomatoes, wash off any alpha contamination, and feed them to the airmen. At the peak of the harvest, it bought 250 pounds of tomatoes a day. “Anywhere you turned around, there was a bucket of tomatoes,” said Walter Vornbrock. “We could eat tomatoes all day and all night, for that matter. If you loved them, you were in Heaven.” A bit farther down the beach from Camp Wilson, somewhat aloof from the Air Force men, sat the Navy divers' tent, sometimes marked by a cardboard sign over the door reading “EOD Command Post.” The divers took pride in being a bit rougher, a bit wilder, than their Air Force brethren. “The Air Force is okay,” said Gaylord White, a diver who came to Palomares from Rota. “I mean, they live in nice, clean, dry places; they eat good food. But we're not used to that crap.” Noting strong winds on the beach, the divers set up their tent, holding the corners down with concrete clumps — the ubiquitous diving tools used to secure buoys and search lines — then watched smugly as other tents blew down. Inside the tent, the divers built a wooden workbench for mapping out search patterns. Underneath the desk, they dug a deep hole and buried an empty oil drum with the top cut off. They filled the drum with beer, fitted a plywood lid on top, and covered it with sand.