very far or push their way through obstacles. An alpha particle shot into the air won’t usually travel much farther than an inch and can be blocked by a sheet of paper.
If alpha particles land on human skin, they won’t penetrate the dead layer of cells on the surface and will sit there until scrubbed off. When, however, alpha particles get into the bloodstream — usually because someone inhales them — they can be lethal. The large particles barge through the body’s cells like a bull through a china shop, breaking DNA and causing genetic mutations that can lead to cancer. They are especially dangerous when inhaled into the delicate tissue of the lungs. There, alpha particles can come into direct contact with cells, wreaking havoc.
Ramirez, standing on the edge of the crater, didn’t know any of this. He called to the rest of the crew, and they came running over. One man got to work with something that looked like a Geiger counter.
Ramirez stayed out of the way.
If he had looked up into the sky right around that time, Ramirez would have seen two thin vapor trails appear far overhead, converge, and separate. The morning’s Chrome Dome rendezvous went off without incident. The Cold War was proceeding on schedule.
Around 10:30 a.m., just after Ramirez found bomb number two, other airmen spotted a third. Bomb number three lay in a plowed field at the base of a wall, near the house of a shopkeeper named Jose Lopez Flores, “Pepe” to his friends. At least three different stories tell who found this bomb and how. The first story says that the Guardia Civil had told Sergeant Howe — the first airman to see bomb number one the previous day — about a bomb lying near a garden wall, which Howe then tracked down. The second story tells of an unidentified airman, stopping to urinate near a stone wall, who happened to look left and saw a bomb protruding from a crater.
Both of the stories were hogwash to Pepe Lopez himself, who knew that
Removing the parachute, he found a “monster of a bomb” busted open like a watermelon. “I knew it was a bomb, because when it fell from the airplane it cracked open,” he said later. “It was cracked open in the back part where the metal is white and I could see inside, the powder. I immediately knew this was a bomb. There was some fire burning around it and I stamped it out, because of course I knew it wasn’t safe to have a fire around a bomb.” According to some accounts, Pepe Lopez also gave the bomb a good kick, for reasons known only to him. Later, when he told the men at the bar what he had done, they laughed. “If that bomb had gone off,” they said, “Pepe would be a little speck of dust in New York.” The bomb lay in its crater by the wall until the Americans found it the following day. As Lopez had observed, the weapon was badly damaged. Like bomb number two, some of its high explosive had detonated, gashing a crater in the dirt and scattering shards of weapon in all directions. Some major parts were fairly intact: the secondary lay in the crater, which measured four feet across and three feet deep; the afterbody was dented but still in one piece. But the rest of the weapon case and innards were badly broken up. A bottle of tritium — a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that boosts the fission reaction — was found mashed and ruptured about 1,500 feet away. Eighty pounds of high explosive and plastics lay within a hundred feet of the crater, and weapon parts were scattered up to four hundred yards away. SAC’s final report of the accident said that most of the weapon was so mangled “that you couldn’t tell what it was or where it came from.” Despite the conditions of bombs numbers two and three, the U.S. Air Force felt optimistic. Just a day after the accident, searchers had found three of the four bombs. No one on the ground had been harmed, and the villagers, far from turning into an angry mob and demanding vengeance, were friendly and anxious to help. The Air Force was still missing one bomb, as well as a combat mission folder and a box containing top secret codes and documents, but men were combing the area and more searchers were on the way.
There was some contamination to clean up, but even that didn’t seem too bad. A situation report was sent to the secretary of defense, the White House, and others. Its tone was cautiously optimistic. The memo explained that high explosive had detonated in two bombs, which “could involve local plutonium scattering with related radiation hazard.” However, if the detonation had been small enough, there might have been no plutonium scattering at all. “It is not believed,” said the memo,
“that there is any basis for undue concern over the low order detonation of the two weapons.” And, to the great relief of everyone concerned with U.S.-Spain relations, the memo reported, “Impact on populace practically nil.”
4. The Ambassador
On the morning of the accident, the one person most concerned with Spanish-American relations sat at lunch in Madrid, stoically fulfilling one of his more mundane job requirements. Being an American ambassador had its moments. Sometimes the nights were filled with glitz and glamour: dining at elegant tables, sipping champagne, conversing with kings. Other days swelled with political intrigue: wheeling and dealing, carving treaties, molding history alongside statesmen. But much of the time, the job sagged under the weight of duty. Today the ambassador was spending the afternoon at a luncheon for the American Management Association in Madrid: sitting in a banquet hall, steeling himself for a dismal lunch, and discussing President Johnson’s recent efforts to reduce the United States’ dollar outflow. That was where Angier Biddle Duke, the U.S. ambassador to Spain, was trapped on January 17, 1966. Then something caught his eye.
Duke sat with five other men at the head table, on a dais at the front of the banquet hall. As he listened to a speech by the Spanish industry minister, he saw someone familiar standing in the wings. Duke glanced over, then looked back to the speaker. Then he did a double take. Joseph Smith, a young Foreign Service officer from the embassy, stood on the side of the stage, trying desperately to get his boss’s attention. Duke quickly excused himself and joined Smith in the wings.
The two men went somewhere quiet to talk. Smith, the manager of the embassy’s political-military affairs, said he had received a call at 11:05 a.m. informing him that two American military planes had crashed; there were several survivors and one plane had carried unarmed nuclear weapons.
The ambassador listened to the news. He asked Smith a couple of questions, then decided to head back to the embassy. The two men slipped out of the hall and climbed into the ambassador’s limousine. After a block or two, Duke changed his mind, redirecting the driver to the Spanish Foreign Ministry.
Ten minutes later Duke and Smith went inside the ministry and spoke to an usher. Duke asked to speak with Angel Sagaz, the director of North American affairs, but Sagaz was out of the office. So was his deputy, the foreign minister himself, and almost everyone else, as far as they could tell.
Many were attending a funeral for a colleague’s mother; the rest were eating lunch.
The two Americans finally made contact with an undersecretary for foreign affairs, a man Smith regarded as “not particularly friendly” and “not terribly fond of Americans.” It was not ideal, but Duke had to make
If America had to choose someone to deliver bad news to a grumpy foreign official, Angier Biddle Duke was the perfect man for the job. “Angie,” as everyone called the ambassador, was charming and urbane, with flawless manners, a voice smooth as velvet, and a way of easing uncomfortable situations. He never lost his temper. “Even,” said his wife, “when people were behaving badly.” Duke had been born and bred into gentility, with a family tree reaching and branching through a century of American aristocracy. His grandfather Benjamin Duke helped found the American Tobacco Company, a Duke family business that dominated the cigarette industry until it was trust-busted in 1911. Grandfather Duke also helped found Duke University. On the other side of the family, Angie could list ancestors such as Nicholas Biddle, the first editor of Lewis and Clark’s journals, and Brigadier General Anthony
