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

“I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”

The Deep Submergence Systems Program is a viable organization. It is here —today—to serve both the Navy and the national interest.

Less than a week after Baldwin's speech, two planes crashed over Spain and four bombs fell toward Palomares. In contrast to Baldwin's rousing speech, the DSSP was not exactly ready to leap in with both feet. The DSSP had moved forward in some areas but had postponed or neglected others. The program called Object Location and Small Object Recovery, which could have come in quite handy in Spain, was scheduled for “accomplishment” in 1968 and later estimated for completion in 1970.

The Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle, which could have swum down to search for the bomb, had not yet been built. The DSSP did have the Trieste, but at the time of the accident, it was undergoing a major overhaul, sitting in bits and pieces in San Diego, and couldn't be readied for a mission.

The DSSP, created in 1964 for something exactly like the Palomares accident, simply was not ready.

We had “almost nothing,” said Craven. “No assignments had gone on, nothing,” said Brad Mooney, a thirty-five-year-old Navy lieutenant who had piloted the Trieste during the exploration of the Thresher wreckage and remained with the Trieste group afterward. “Then, before DSSP really gets its act together, the bomb goes down. So all that they could do was get a pickup team to go over there. And it was a ragtag pickup team.” Brad Mooney and other veterans of the Thresher search were sent to Spain, along with a handful of SEALAB divers. But if people expected the DSSP to provide a detailed recovery plan, a crack team of searchers, and lots of shiny new gear, they would be sorely disappointed. “The Navy had achieved no interim readiness for search and recovery,” said the Navy's final report on Palomares. “The entire operation, from its initial inception to its termination, was improvised.”

9. The Fisherman's Clue

Back on dry land, the Air Force continued its tedious search for bomb number four. Joe Ramirez spent his days talking to locals, collecting data for damage claims, and listening for clues about the bomb. Conflicting information, possible leads, and various complaints whizzed around the young lawyer with dizzying speed. To keep track, he started jotting notes in a narrow notebook.

Other pages held more interesting notes. One page read, “Antonio Alarcon Alarcon — House is next one over to south of La Torre. Have been moved out. Pig with litter of pigs — litter has to be fed.

Why can't they move the pigs?” Another page listed two names already well known to many searchers: Roldán Martínez and Simó Orts.

One person who hadn't yet heard of the two fishermen was Randy Maydew, the Sandia engineer who had overseen the computer calculations suggesting that bomb number four might have landed in the sea. At the request of General Wilson, Maydew had flown to Spain to help narrow down the search area. He was surprised by how much the Almería desert resembled Albuquerque, “except for that blue, blue Mediterranean out there.” But when he walked into Camp Wilson, he found that Air Force staffers didn't have much regard for eggheads like him. This changed when General Wilson discovered that Maydew had also served in the Pacific during World War II. As a navigator in a B-29 bomber, Maydew had flown thirty bombing missions, including LeMay's famous firebombing of Tokyo. The missions did more to establish Maydew's credibility with General Wilson than his engineering degrees or his years of research on bombs and parachutes.

Though Maydew had won over General Wilson, by early February he was little closer to pinpointing bomb number four. Then, one morning, Joe Ramirez stopped by Maydew's tent and told him about his interview with the Spanish fishermen. Ramirez knew that Roldán and Simó had seen something significant. Perhaps Maydew, with his engineering expertise, could put the pieces together. The engineer agreed to talk to Simó.

On the evening of February 2, Maydew and Ramirez drove to Aguilas and interviewed Simó in the mayor's office. Simó told the men his story. He told them about the small parachute carrying a half man with his insides trailing. And he told them about the dead man, floating from a bigger chute, who had sunk before he could reach him. Maydew asked the fisherman how much the objects hanging from the chutes had swung in the sky. Moving his hand in the air, Simó indicated that the “half man” below the small chute hadn't swung much, maybe about 10 degrees. But the “dead man” under the larger chute had oscillated about 30 degrees.