Though Joe Ramirez probably couldn’t tell a nuclear bomb from a hot water heater, he proved to be one of the Air Force’s most useful men in Palomares. As a lawyer, he was used to gathering spotty information from witnesses. In addition, Ramirez was the only airman deployed to Palomares that day who spoke Spanish fluently.
Ramirez had grown up in a small south Texas town, and his parents spoke both Spanish and English at home. His father was a tall, handsome man who had taught himself auto mechanics and eventually ran his own garage. Though Joe and his brother spent plenty of time working in the shop — the two of them could overhaul an engine in a day — their father pushed them to excel in school, telling them that education was the ticket to getting out of south Texas and seeing the world. Buoyed by his teachers and his close-knit family and encouraged by success in language arts and public speaking, Ramirez went to college and then law school, joining Air Force ROTC along the way.
Ramirez loved the Air Force. Soon after he was commissioned, he and his young wife, Sylvia, were stationed at Homestead Air Force Base, a SAC base outside Miami. Homestead often hosted Latin American politicians and dignitaries, and Ramirez was regularly asked to deliver briefings to top Spanish-speaking officials. He and Sylvia were often invited to important formal dinners, seated between Latin American generals and governors, and asked to make conversation and translate. This was heady stuff for the young couple, who were almost always the lowest-ranking people in the room. Because they spoke Spanish — and because he and Sylvia were gracious, charming, and discreet — the couple were given an entree into a different world.
Ramirez enjoyed his work, but by 1965 he and Sylvia had two children, with another on the way.
With college tuition looming ahead, he had been thinking about going into private practice. To entice him to stay, the Air Force offered him a plum posting at Torrejon Air Base. Joe and Sylvia, who had never been to Europe, decided to take them up on it.
Joe, Sylvia, and the two kids arrived in Madrid in the summer of 1965 and had a dramatic welcome to Spain. They flew overnight and arrived, exhausted, in the early afternoon. The Air Force had arranged for them to stay in a hotel in the center of town, on the main avenue called, at the time, Avenida del Generalissimo. They arrived at the hotel, climbed up to their room, closed the blinds, and collapsed into bed.
Shortly before 5 p.m., Ramirez woke up. Careful not to disturb his sleeping wife and children, he tiptoed to the windows and peeked through the shutters. He was on a high floor and could see the roof of the adjoining building. Looking in that direction, he was startled to see uniformed men in strange black hats, armed with machine guns, running around on the roof. He looked across the street and saw more men, also heavily armed, on rooftops across the way. “My God!” Ramirez remembers thinking. “We’ve landed in the middle of a coup!” He woke Sylvia, then called the reception desk and asked what was going on. They said not to worry, it was just a soccer game. This didn’t make a lot of sense until the desk clerk explained further: Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the ruler of Spain, loved soccer and would be attending today’s match at the nearby stadium. The armed men were members of the Guardia Civil, Franco’s paramilitary police force. The guardias civiles on the rooftops were advance guards. If you look out the window, said the clerk, you’ll see the generalissimo himself in a few minutes. And sure enough, a bit later came the motorcade, with motorcycles and an escort car and Franco himself, with all the pomp and clatter befitting a military dictator. And watching from a hotel window high above was a young American family, enjoying the spectacle below.
About twenty minutes before 2 p.m. on the day of the accident, less than four hours after the bomber and tanker had exploded in the sky, the plane carrying Joe Ramirez and the rest of the disaster control team landed at a Spanish air base in San Javier, north of Cartegena. They were met there by General Delmar Wilson, who had flown down from Torrejon with his staff a bit earlier and had circled above the wreckage on the way.
Wilson was the commander of the Sixteenth Air Force, the SAC wing that supervised Torrejon and the other Spanish bases. He was a steady, capable leader, with the expected look of an Air Force general: tall, silver-haired, trim, and distinguished. More than one person described him as “straight out of Central Casting.”
Wilson also had a unique link to the nation’s nuclear history. Late in World War II, the Air Force had created the 509th Composite Group, a special unit of B-29s on Tinian Island that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan. Wilson, then a young colonel, was Curtis LeMay’s liaison to the Atom Bomb Project. But since the project was top secret, LeMay couldn’t actually tell Wilson why he was sending him to Tinian. When Wilson arrived, the staff at Tinian wasn’t thrilled to have him there.
“They looked on me as a spy for LeMay,” he said. “They ignored me.” Eventually a Navy captain took pity and clued Wilson in, starting off by asking “Have you ever heard of an atom?” Now, two decades later, Wilson had a big atomic problem on his hands. He had seen the tail section from the B-52 slumped in a dry riverbed and other wreckage spread over a wide area of desert, farms, and hills. Somewhere among that debris were four hydrogen bombs. At San Javier, he learned that three of the injured airmen lay in hospital beds in a town called Aguilas. He decided that he and his close advisers would visit them first. Wilson briefed the assembled disaster control team and sent them to Palomares, with orders to assemble at the tail section later.
Ramirez climbed into the lead car of the caravan. Until now, most of Ramirez’s legal work at Torrejon had involved young American servicemen who had gotten themselves into trouble, usually involving large American cars, narrow Spanish roads, and cheap alcohol. He had never investigated an accident of this magnitude, and on the long drive to Palomares, he had plenty of time to fret. He knew that the tanker had been filled with fuel and the bomber loaded with weapons. Had the wreckage set a town on fire and killed hundreds? Would the ground be littered with charred bodies?
Would the townspeople attack them in a furious mob? Ramirez looked out the window at the desert landscape and worried.
After a couple of hours of driving, the caravan pulled into Vera to get gas and ask for directions to Palomares. Ramirez asked the locals for news from the village and was relieved to hear that there were no tales of widespread death and destruction. Still, he was anxious.
The group finally pulled into Palomares about an hour and a half before sundown. Outside the village, Ramirez saw a dirt road leading up a hill past a whitewashed wall and a lot of activity in the area just beyond. With a handful of others, he approached the wall, which bordered a cemetery. He saw smoldering debris, burned branches, and a man’s hand lying on the ground, severed at the wrist and swollen from the fire. A number of villagers approached, with Manolo’s father, the Mayor of Palomares, among them. When they realized that Ramirez could speak Spanish, they clustered around him, excited and agitated.
“What I noticed immediately,” said Ramirez, “was that there was no hostility.” Instead, there was a massive gush of sympathy and concern. The villagers wanted to help. They wanted to tell what they had seen. They wanted to know how the accident had happened, if the dead airmen had any children.
They pointed out a row of simple wooden caskets on the dirt road by the cemetery and explained that they had collected charred remains and placed them inside.
Ramirez questioned the assembled villagers: “Anybody killed or injured on the ground?” he asked.
No, no, no, no. “Any animals?” No, no, no, no. “Any homes destroyed?” No, no, no, no. Ramirez was amazed. “You could see still smoldering debris in backyards, in alleys, in dirt roads, in a ditch, in a field, all around. But none on any structure.” January 17 was the feast day of Saint Anthony the Abbot, the patron saint of the village. Many said that the saint had sheltered Palomares from ruin.
The local priest disagreed. “This miracle is too big for any one saint,” he said. “It was the work of God himself.”
A member of the Guardia Civil approached and spoke to Ramirez. He had seen something odd in the nearby hills.
Pulling himself away from the crowd, Ramirez found an Air Force colonel and told him about the torpedo. The colonel’s ears perked up. Ramirez ran to find the guardia who had told him about it, and the three of them set off to search the hills.
Night had fallen by then. The colonel and the guardia each had a tiny flashlight; Ramirez had none.
The three men walked into a rocky, uninhabited area outside Palomares. As they stumbled through the hills, the two feeble flashlight beams barely pierced the darkness. They could see rocks and scrub a few yards ahead, but the rest of the world was black.
The guardia led them toward the spot where he thought he had seen the torpedo. But all the dirt paths and
