After the press and VIPs left the scene on April 8, the EOD team finished dismantling the weapon.
That afternoon, they placed its parts into an aircraft engine container, packed sand around them, and sealed the lid. General Wilson had proposed that the bomb be taken ashore, trucked to San Javier, flown to Torrejón, and then shipped back to the United States. Spanish Vice President Agustín Muñoz Grandes nixed this idea, saying he didn’t want the bomb to touch Spanish soil. So, after dismantling the bomb, the Navy loaded it onto the USS Cascade, which carried the weapon back to the United States and handed it over to the Air Force.
The Air Force sent bomb number four to join its three siblings at the Pantex Ordnance Plant in Amarillo, Texas. Weapons experts disassembled the bombs, buried the most contaminated parts, and salvaged the valuable nuclear material. Then they sent the fuses, firing sets, and weapon bodies from bombs one and four to Sandia for analysis. The plutonium pits went to Los Alamos.
The engineers learned some lessons from Palomares that prompted them to change the design of weapons. The accident proved that high explosive could detonate in an accident, as it had in bombs two and three, scattering dangerous plutonium. After Palomares, Los Alamos developed an insensitive nuclear explosive that would not detonate on impact. It eventually incorporated it into most nuclear weapons.
The USNS Boyce arrived in Charleston on April 5, carrying 4,810 barrels of contaminated Spanish soil. Under the watchful eyes of two AEC couriers and the JEN scientist Emilio Iranzo, workers lifted all the barrels, except two, off the Boyce and loaded them into twenty-six railroad cars. The two AEC couriers stayed with the barrels on their train ride to the Savannah River Site, traveling in the caboose, and Iranzo met them there. At Savannah River, Iranzo watched as 4,808 barrels were placed into a massive, muddy trench. Satisfied, he returned to Spain.
The other two barrels were shipped to Wright Langham, “Mr. Plutonium,” at Los Alamos for tests.
He said he planned to grow tomatoes with the soil.
For all its searching, bomb recovery, and soil transport, the Navy billed the Air Force $6.5 million.
However, the Navy calculated that its total cost was actually much higher: $10,230,744, or $126,305 per day. It was the most expensive salvage operation in history.
On April 7, 1967, exactly one year after the recovery, George Martin, who had been in Alvin when they refound the bomb, held a Task Force 65 reunion at his home in Maryland. Tony Richardson composed a poem for the occasion:
After the Boyce sailed off, the remaining airmen at Camp Wilson tidied up Palomares the best they could: replacing topsoil, repairing ditches, and building new concrete fences to replace the cactus fencing they had destroyed. The legal staff drew up official “certificates of decontamination” to give to the villagers.
By the end of March, Camp Wilson had dwindled to 144 people. On March 20, a delegation consisting of the mayors of Palomares, Villaricos, and Cuevas de Almanzora, along with eighty townspeople, visited the camp for a ceremony to mark the near closing of operations. General Wilson gave a speech and handed $1,000 to the local priest for repairs to the church in Palomares and $200 for the people of Villaricos. Officers and airmen had donated the money in appreciation for the hospitality of the local citizens.
By early April, Camp Wilson was gone, but a skeleton crew of lawyers — including Joe Ramirez — lingered. By September 26, Ramirez and the legal team had interviewed more than five hundred claimants and paid $555,456.45 in damages. A few sticky claims remained, including that of Francisco Simó Orts.
For his help in rescuing the downed fliers and pinpointing the spot where bomb number four had hit the water, the U.S. military had given Simó $4,565.56—reimbursement for his time and expertise and the use of his boat. In April, in a ceremony in Madrid, Ambassador Duke presented Simó with a medallion and a scroll. The medallion carried a picture of Lyndon Johnson. The scroll read: As testimony and admiration of the exceptional talents and profound knowledge of the sea of DON FRANCISCO SIMO ORTS which led to the finding of the nuclear bomb which fell into the sea on the coast of Palomares, and as a symbol of gratitude on behalf of my country, I make this document in Madrid, Today, April 15, 1966.
Simó, however, wanted more than plaudits. He wanted cash. In June, he presented his own claim to the U.S. Air Force, asking for $5 million. To most Americans (and some Spaniards), Simó’s claim seemed outrageous. But, as he told CBS News, Simó guessed he had saved the military at least five days of searching, which he valued at about $1 million a day. He didn’t want the money for himself, he added. He would use it to educate the children of fishermen and aid the local fishing industry.
The claim, too big for the Air Force lawyers in Torrejón, went to Washington, where the U.S. government rejected it. Simó hired a New York law firm to represent him, and the case was finally settled in Admiralty Court in 1971. He was awarded $10,000.
In the spring and summer of 1966, the Spanish government, through various meetings and public statements, made it clear that the upcoming base negotiations would not be easy. It refused to reinstate America’s nuclear overflights and started to flex its newfound muscle in other ways. It wanted the United States to help it gain control of Gibraltar and push for Spain’s membership in the EEC, and it planned to use the base negotiations as leverage. In May, The New York Times reported that Franco would not renew the thirteen-year-old defense agreement, at least not in its present form.
“Now, with its economy and its political ties in Europe both steadily expanding, the Spanish Government is said to be tiring of its ‘equal but separate role,’” reported the Times. Even more worrisome, there were reports that Franco might open the military bases — built largely by the United States — to multinational use.
The base negotiations got under way in late 1967, and Duke placed himself in the thick of them.
Finally, he had a chance to shape U.S. foreign policy. He had been lobbying hard for a water desalinization plant for Palomares, a goodwill gift from America to soothe the psychological pain of the accident. If he could announce the gift as soon as possible, preferably before the two-year anniversary of the accident, it would improve the atmosphere for the base negotiations. The American diplomats had to remember, said Duke, that “The accident brought home to the Spanish, in a most dramatic way, that the American military presence in Spain was not without serious risks.” On January 6, 1968, Duke was dining at the embassy in Madrid when President Johnson called.
Johnson handed Duke some surprising news: he wanted Angie to leave his post as ambassador and return to Washington. Johnson faced a tough reelection battle, and he wanted Angie at his side as his director of protocol. Dismayed, Duke saw his policy-making ambitions vanishing in a puff of presidential whimsy. He protested: he couldn’t leave now. He was in the middle of touchy base negotiations with the Spanish, which wouldn’t wrap up until September. But Johnson insisted; he needed Angie back in Washington before then.
Duke was bitterly disappointed. But if the president needed him, he had to obey. For the next few months, he sped around Spain, tying up loose ends and making farewell calls. On March 31, 1968, Duke and his family climbed onto a military airplane in Madrid and flew to the United States. They arrived in Washington exhausted. They checked into the Watergate Hotel, ordered room service, and turned on the television. President Johnson would be speaking at 8 p.m., and Duke, with his wife and children, gathered to watch the broadcast. President Johnson appeared on the screen and told the nation that he would not seek reelection.
Duke sat stunned in front of the television. He had been yanked away from Spain for nothing. Soon after, Duke was sworn in as director of protocol, a job that now seemed more frivolous than ever.
The president did not attend the ceremony, sending Lady Bird instead. “He must have known,” said Duke, “how disappointed I was.”
During his famous swim, Duke predicted a bright future for the gritty beaches of Costa Bomba.
Time eventually proved him right. Today, the once barren coast is crammed with beachfront condominiums and beet-faced British tourists. The Garrucha waterfront, once a working wharf packed with fishing boats, now sports a tony marina and a stylish promenade lined with palm trees.
Two miles inland from Palomares sits a luxury golf resort called Desert Springs, its emerald links flanked by dramatic sculptures of rearing horses. The resort looks as if it had been carved out of Tucson, airlifted across the Atlantic, and plunked down in the Spanish desert. Closer to Palomares, Playa de Quitapellejos, the former site of Camp Wilson, remains much the same. The sand is rough and rocky, scattered with black slag. But there have been some changes. Two miles south, on what used to be a barren beach, is a thriving nudist colony.
In Palomares itself, there are few remnants of the dusty farming village that grabbed the world’s attention in 1966. Palomares is now a modern, prosperous town, thanks to industrial agriculture and tourism. Modern greenhouses blanket the fields, and produce-processing centers the size of airplane hangars squat on the outskirts of town. The village square boasts a community center resembling a suburban library. The modern building faces a wide tiled plaza and new three-story condos, built for vacationing Europeans. The skyline of Palomares — the town now has a skyline — bristles with cranes lifting steel beams. The only memorial to the accident is a small street near the central plaza marked with a sign reading “Calle de 17 de enero de 1966”—January 17, 1966, Street.
Manolo and Dolores González still live in Palomares, in a small but comfortable apartment in the center of town. (They also own a gracious hacienda on the outskirts.) Like the rest of the town, Manolo and Dolores have prospered. Instead of a Citroën pickup truck, Manolo now drives a luxury-model silver Mercedes. As upbeat and enthusiastic as ever, Manolo says the town is no worse off from the accident. There is an endless supply of British tourists, with their bottomless, deep-seated craving for the Spanish sun. Plutonium or no plutonium, the building boom was inevitable.
As the town sprawls outward, however, the echoes of the past are making themselves heard. In 1966, during the initial cleanup, the Spanish and American governments created a program to monitor the air and soil of Palomares, as well as the health of its people. They named the program
“Project Indalo” and put Emilio Iranzo, the JEN scientist, in charge. (The name “Indalo” comes from a petroglyph found in nearby caves, showing a stick figure of a man holding an arc over his head. Indalo is an omnipresent tourist symbol for Almería, visible on place mats, key chains, and shot glasses throughout the area.) From the beginning, the U.S. government has funded part of the program, though it refuses to say publicly how much it has contributed.
In 1966, JEN set up air monitors in and around the town and has regularly checked the contamination levels since then. It has also tested chickens, rabbits, tomatoes, and other crops. Every year, about 150 residents of Palomares travel to Madrid — all expenses paid — for complete physical examinations, including urine testing for plutonium. So far, at least 1,029 people have received more than 4,000 medical and dosimetric examinations. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, these tests show that about 5 percent of the people studied carry plutonium in their bodies. However, say the authorities, the increased plutonium causes no health risk. This is proven, they say, by the fact that the residents of Palomares have shown no increase in illnesses or deaths that might be caused by plutonium ingestion.
Unfortunately, neither CIEMAT — the successor to JEN — nor the DOE has made these medical results public. Villagers who visit Madrid for screenings are given detailed printouts listing their weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol but are never told anything about the plutonium that may or may not be in their bodies. Only one small study examining the villagers’ long-term cancer rates has been published. It found that the cancer rates in Palomares were no higher than those in another Spanish town with a similar population.
Nevertheless, the accident continues to haunt the village. In the late 1970s, a large irrigation pool was built next to the area where bomb number two fell and cracked open. This area, which also served as the staging ground for loading the contaminated soil into barrels, remains the most contaminated zone. The heavy digging for the pool resuspended some of the buried plutonium, spiking contamination levels. Iranzo, who still ran the program at the time, insists that the levels, even at their highest, remained safe for the villagers.
In 2002, because of development encroaching on this same area, CIEMAT purchased about twenty-three acres of contaminated land in order to restrict use. It forbade farmers to plant in the area and eventually enclosed it with a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. (“Now they put a fence around it!” said Dolores González, rolling her eyes.) Around the same time, DOE and CIEMAT created a new program to survey, once again, the contaminated areas around Palomares.
Between November 21, 2006, and February 22, 2007, CIEMAT technicians swept 71 million square feet of land — the equivalent of 660 soccer fields — in and around Palomares with radiation meters, collecting 63,000 measurements. The preliminary results, released in the summer of 2007, surprised the scientists. The plutonium contamination was higher and more widespread than they had suspected, and several areas they had considered clean were contaminated with americium, a product of plutonium disintegration. In April 2008, CIEMAT announced another surprise: the discovery of two trenches, about ten yards long and thirty yards wide, containing radioactive debris.
Little information on the trenches is available, though they appear to contain many “small radioactive metal objects” left by the Americans. Though the U.S. and Spanish governments had long known of the trenches’ existence, they had not known their exact location.
The scientists insist that the radiation levels, though higher than expected, are still safe for residents.
But as a result of the 2007 findings, they widened the “contaminated” zone from 107,000 square yards to almost 360,000. They have also restricted construction in and the sale of produce from the most contaminated areas. They have not yet established a plan for remediation.
The townspeople, who stand to gain or lose much from land use restrictions, are not happy with the increased attention. Manolo and Dolores González consider the new rules ridiculous. Manolo is not worried about the plutonium; after the accident, he says, he took a piece of the melted wreckage and used it for a paperweight, and he is healthy as a horse. “Everybody is healthy, no one is sick. The death rate in Palomares is below the national average,” said Manolo. Everyone just needs to be tranquilo.
Alvin and Aluminaut met, one final time, in 1969.
After Palomares, both subs received their share of good press, and John Craven predicted a boom in miniature submersibles. “Minisubs,” he told The Washington Post, “may some day be as common under the sea as planes streaking over it.” But, much as space colonies failed to flourish and astronauts never made it to Mars, this imagined world of minisubs and undersea habitats never emerged.
However, Alvin and Aluminaut both kept busy after Palomares, though their jobs were decidedly odd. In 1967 and 1968, Alvin dove along the continental slope for geology and biology studies and also surveyed the tops of seamounts for a new acoustic test range. By late 1968, it had completed 307 successful dives. Aluminaut, meanwhile, took scientists on expeditions, salvaged lost gear, made a film with Jacques Cousteau, and sampled outflow from a Miami sewage treatment plant.
Then, on October 16, 1968, a freak accident seemed to change the future of both subs. On that day, Alvin was preparing for a routine dive about ninety miles southeast of Nantucket. Its task was to dive near a deep-moored buoy to inspect the line holding it. During the launch, two cables securing Alvin’s bow snapped, and the sub plunged forward. As its nose dunked under water, water poured into the open hatch. A few seconds later, someone yelled that the ballast tanks had ruptured. Alvin’s three crewmen scrambled for the hatch and barely had time to escape before the sub went under. It sank in about sixty seconds.
Immediately, everyone on board Alvin’s mother ship, Lulu, began to throw objects overboard — scrap metal, aluminum lawn chairs, a fifty-five-gallon barrel — to mark the spot. Lulu and her escort ship, Gosnold, took bearings and swept the area with sonar, trying desperately to pinpoint the spot where Alvin had come to rest.
The ships left the area with a pretty good sense of where Alvin had landed. But because neither ship could photograph Alvin on the bottom, nobody knew if the sub had landed intact or broken to bits.
WHOI eventually persuaded the Navy to send the USNS Mizar to sweep the ocean floor for Alvin.
In June 1969, Mizar found and photographed Alvin. The little sub sat upright on the bottom, about 5,000 feet deep, slightly embedded in the soft mud. It was intact except for a broken aft propeller.
Alvin, fully flooded, was estimated to weigh about 8,800 pounds in water. WHOI wanted its sub back, but no object as big or heavy as Alvin had ever been recovered from such depths. The salvage operation would be difficult and costly, and the Navy wasn’t sure if it wanted to bother. When a team at the Office of Naval Research met to decide whether or not to salvage Alvin, the chief of naval research reportedly grumbled, “Leave that damn toy on the bottom of the ocean.” But eventually Alvin’s advocates persuaded the Navy to fund the recovery.
Salvage experts agreed that the best way to recover Alvin was to place a spring-loaded nine-foot toggle bar in its open hatch. The bar would then be hooked to a lift line, which Mizar could winch to the surface. Experts considered all the submersibles that could dive below five thousand feet and plant the toggle bar and then chose Aluminaut for the job. The assignment was a coup for the Aluminaut team. It got them a fat government contract and allowed them to rescue the sub that had upstaged them in Spain.
On August 27, 1969, Aluminaut submerged about three miles from Alvin and was guided to the sunken sub by Mizar. In addition to her crew, Aluminaut carried a Navy observer and Mac McCamis. Still part of the Alvin crew, Mac had helped design the toggle bar. Since he knew Alvin as well as anybody, he was a good man to have along.
The job proved difficult. Aluminaut, not especially maneuverable, faced a delicate job while fighting a steady current. Also, the toggle bar, which was slightly buoyant, was difficult to handle. Bob Canary, the Aluminaut pilot, said that getting the bar into Alvin was like trying to thread a wet noodle into a soda bottle in a half-knot current. Time after time, Aluminaut carefully climbed the side of Alvin and its crew tried to maneuver the toggle into the open hatch. Time after time, they failed. Mac McCamis, watching from the wings, grew increasingly frustrated. He wanted to grab the controls and do the job himself. (Some Alvin veterans say he did just that, an account flatly denied by the Aluminaut crew) But finally Aluminaut managed to drop the toggle bar into Alvin’s hatch, trip the release, and back away.
The bar was connected to a twenty-five-foot length of line with a snap hook at its end. The Aluminaut grasped the snap hook in one of its claws, carried it to a ring at the end of the lift line, and snapped it in. Mizar raised Alvin and towed the crippled sub to a fishing ground off Martha’s Vineyard, where a crane lifted Alvin onto a barge. Alvin, it turned out, was in remarkably good condition. Scientists and engineers flushed and cleaned every system, replaced the broken parts, and, by 1971, had her back on the job.
But just as Alvin got back to work, government funding for deep-sea exploration dried to a trickle.
Aluminaut, despite its great success recovering Alvin, grew desperate for work, accepting projects that embarrassed the crew. The most famous, and perhaps the one for which Aluminaut is best remembered, was a television commercial for Simoniz Wax. Producers coated one side of a Ford Falcon with Simoniz, the other with Brand X, then tied the car to Aluminaut and submerged it under water. (“I don’t even like to think about it,” said one crew member.) But such exploits failed to cover Aluminaut’s operating costs, and in 1971 Reynolds canceled the Aluminaut program and put the sub into storage. It planned to put it back into the water when it would prove profitable. That day never came.
Alvin, on the other hand, managed to survive the lean years despite its saltwater dunking and went on to a long and prosperous career of scientific discovery. The sub is probably best known for exploring the wreck of the Titanic in 1986 and aiding the discovery of “black smokers,” hydrothermal vents off the Galápagos Islands teeming with bizarre marine life. Over the years, WHOI has replaced individual parts of the sub in piecemeal fashion. All that remains of the original Alvin is three metal plates circling the entry hatch. The sub will retire by 2015, after nearly fifty years of service.
Palomares was not the last major nuclear weapons accident.
On January 21, 1968, almost exactly two years after the accident over Palomares, a SAC B-52 on airborne alert was circling 33,000 feet above Thule Air Base, Greenland. At around 3:30 p.m., the copilot, feeling chilly, cranked the cabin heater up to maximum. Shortly afterward, when other crew members complained about the heat, the copilot started to turn it down. A few minutes later, one crew member smelled burning rubber. As the fumes grew stronger, the aircraft commander told the crew to put on oxygen masks. The crew searched the plane and discovered a small fire in the lower cabin. The navigator fought the fire with two extinguishers, but the flames grew out of control, filling the plane with dense smoke. The pilot reported the fire to the ground, requested an emergency landing at Thule Air Base, and began his descent. Soon afterward, the electrical power on the plane blinked out. The pilot gave the order to eject. Six of the crew members bailed out into the darkness and landed safely in the snow. The seventh was killed.
The pilotless B-52, carrying four Mark 28 hydrogen bombs, continued its descent. The plane glided over the air base, banked left, then crashed into the ice seven miles away. When it hit, the plane was flying more than five hundred miles per hour. The jet fuel on board exploded into a massive fireball, detonating the high explosive in all four hydrogen bombs and spreading radioactive debris over miles of ice. U.S. personnel took four months to clean up the contamination, eventually removing 237,000 cubic feet of ice, snow, and aircraft parts.
By the time of the Thule accident, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had concluded that airborne alert was not necessary for national security. In 1966, using the Palomares accident for leverage, McNamara had proposed canceling the program. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and SAC objected to McNamara’s plan. Eventually, the two sides compromised. In June 1966, President Johnson approved a curtailed program, allowing only four nuclear-armed bombers on airborne alert each day. It was one of these bombers that crashed in Greenland.
After the Thule accident, McNamara had had enough. He ordered SAC to stop carrying nuclear weapons on airborne alert. Within a day, the weapons had been removed. SAC continued to fly the missions with unarmed bombers, buying time as it continued to lobby for airborne alert. Its arguments, however, failed to persuade civilian authorities, who were tired of cleaning up diplomatic messes left by SAC’s accidents. The program was canceled by the end of 1968.
The Strategic Air Command, the most powerful military force ever built, gradually diminished in power as the Navy and Army gained more nuclear weapons and the need for conventional weaponry increased. In 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. government closed down SAC, divvying up its resources among other commands. Even then, with the USSR disintegrated into fifteen separate countries, SAC veterans were shocked by the decision. In their view, SAC remained the key deterrent of nuclear war; it was impossible to imagine the world without it. One pilot said he couldn’t sleep for days, sure that the Russians were simply lying in wait to attack America the moment she let her guard down.
In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that the Russian air force would begin regular long-range bomber patrols over the world’s oceans. The Russian bombers are capable of carrying nuclear weapons, but Putin did not say whether the flights would be armed. In August of that year, Russian bombers flew so near the American military base on Guam that the United States scrambled fighter jets to shadow them. The American fighters flew so close to the Russians that the pilots could see one another’s faces. According to Russian authorities, there was no altercation. The pilots smiled at one another and then went their separate ways.