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

As a teenager, Mac had dropped out of high school, enlisted in the Navy, and trained as an electrician. He spent twenty years in Navy submarines and developed a deep, innate understanding of underwater mechanics. But despite his long service and experience he remained prickly and temperamental. He had little respect for, or patience with, people who lacked mechanical skill and who failed to see things his way. “He was totally uneducated and unpolished,” said Chuck Porembski, an electronics engineer who worked with McCamis. “That's why he often got into trouble.”

The Office of Naval Research, which owned Alvin, had called Mac's group on January 22, asking them to join the search in Spain. By that point, the Navy knew that the fourth bomb might have fallen into the Mediterranean. The water at Simó's sighting was just over 2,000 feet deep, unreachable to divers. Minesweepers had scored plenty of sonar hits in the area but couldn't identify them further. The Navy hoped that Alvin could dive deep and investigate the sonar contacts.

At the time of the call, the Alvin crew had been finishing its annual “teardown,” taking every last bit of the little sub apart, checking and cleaning every component, and screwing it all back together.

The group was based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, called WHOI (pronounced “who-ee”) for short. But that winter, they worked in an empty airplane hangar at nearby Otis Air Force Base, which offered more space than WHOI. They had been tearing Alvin apart since November, freezing their tails off in the cavernous hangar. An adjoining building, which housed the bathrooms, had the only running water. The Alvin crew ran hoses from that building, across the frozen ground, to get water into the hangar. Often the hoses would split and leak, the spurting water freezing into fantastic ice formations. The crew kept warm, or tried to, with sweaters and space heaters.

Earl Hays, the senior scientist of the Alvin group, called the crew together and told them about the situation in Palomares. The Navy wanted Alvin in Spain, he said, but this was strictly a volunteer mission. Anyone could back out if he wished.

This was not an idle question. Alvin was an experimental sub. It had first submerged to its test depth — 6,000 feet — the previous summer, under the critical watch of Navy observers. On that dive, all three of Alvin's propellers had failed, leaving the sub deep in the ocean with no propulsion. But Alvin could float even if she couldn't be steered, and she had made it to the surface safely. Prior to the test, Earl Hays had wisely created a set of code words so he and the pilots could discuss mechanical problems without the Navy brass understanding. The Alvin crew had played it cool, and the Navy was impressed. The next month, the sub had had her first (and only) real mission, inspecting a secret array of Navy hydrophones near Bermuda. But Hurricane Betsey had stormed through, allowing Alvin to make only three dives. When she had actually managed to get below 3,000 feet, her propellers had stopped without warning, then inexplicably started, then stopped again. Before heading home, the crew had managed one additional dive, to 6,000 feet. This time, the propellers had worked but the underwater telephone had not. The sub was a work in progress.

Diving in Alvin was a risky endeavor, and now Earl Hays was asking the group to fly to Spain, to find — of all things — a hydrogen bomb. He asked if anyone wanted to back out. Nobody did.

“We knew the country had a big problem and had to clean it up,” said McCamis. “Alvin had never done a project like this before. And we had no idea what we was getting into, but we was willing to try.” McCamis also hoped the mission would all ow Alvin to strut her stuff in front of skeptics. “It hadn't proven itself to the scientific parties or the military,” he said. “No one was really paying any attention to it.” Art Bartlett, another electronics engineer on Alvin, agreed. He thought, “This is it. If we can go pull this off, we're in good shape.”

Bartlett had another reason to volunteer for the trip to Spain — he wanted to get off Cape Cod and out of the freezing airplane hangar. The crew scrambled to prepare Alvin and pack their gear. On February 1, a cargo plane carrying seven Alvin crew members and 35,346 pounds of gear took off from cold, windy Otis Air Force Base and headed toward Spain. The next day, the plane carrying McCamis, Wilson, and Alvin followed. Bartlett stepped off the plane at Rota and smiled up at the blue, 70-degree sky and the shining sun. Woods Hole had given him $500 spending money, and the young engineer felt as if he had hit the lottery. His colleague Chuck Porembski had brought a half bottle of scotch along for the mission. He said later that he should have brought more.