just another piece of bomb number three.
More clues appeared. That first week, a searcher found a round metal plate with two sides squared off. Experts identified it as a tail closing plate — the part that fits on the end of a bomb and holds the parachutes in place. They also discovered that it had come from bomb number four — the first identifiable bit of the weapon that anyone had found. But the plate was found about a hundred yards from the B-52’s tail section, an area that the Air Force had already searched exhaustively Surely it should have been seen earlier. Had someone put it there? For days, the Air Force asked around.
Finally they found the local man who had had originally discovered the tail plate. He had been away at his mother’s funeral. He said he had seen the plate fall on the day of the accident, picked it up, and given it to a member of the Guardia Civil, who had dropped it near the tail section. New information in hand, the Air Force stepped up the search in an area closer to the shoreline and shipped the tail plate back to the United States for examination.
Only a handful of people in the United States knew the full significance of this particular piece of metal, and they worked in a jumble of drab government buildings at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The engineers at Sandia didn’t design nuclear warheads; that job belonged to the physicists at Los Alamos. However, they engineered just about every other part of America’s nuclear bombs: the casing, the fusing mechanism, the arming and safing devices, and the parachutes. They knew the Mark 28 inside and out.
Sandia in the 1960s was a secret paradise for the slide rule set. Every engineer who worked there had graduated in the top of his or her college class. They had cutting-edge equipment, seemingly endless funding, and a fairly loose rein. They also worked with a deep sense of mission. Nuclear weapons, most of them believed, kept their country safe from the Soviets. Sandia engineers considered themselves to be not only the elite of Albuquerque but indispensable to the defense of the United States.
On this mission, Sandia’s marching orders trickled down from the top. As soon as President Johnson heard news of the crash, he called Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He first asked McNamara if the bombs might explode. When McNamara assured him that they would not, the president told him to “do everything possible to find them.” Word was passed to Jack Howard, McNamara’s assistant secretary of defense for atomic energy. A few days later, Howard dialed his friend Alan Pope, the director of Aero Projects at Sandia. He told Pope that bomb number four remained at large and asked for help in finding it. Right away, Pope called Randy Maydew, the manager of Sandia’s Aerodynamics Department. Maydew put down the phone, scrambled into the office, and got to work.
High-energy and hyperactive, Maydew, like many engineers, was a man of compulsive habits. Every morning, he sweated through a half-hour regimen of floor exercises; every Saturday, he wrote in his journal; every Sunday, he attended church. He liked to move fast and get things done quickly, and when he got the call about Palomares, he headed straight to Sandia and gathered a small team. They sat down to crunch some numbers and see if they could pinpoint the location of the missing bomb, or at least make an educated guess. The engineers knew the altitude, heading, and speed of the planes at the time of collision and had their own data on the aerodynamics of the bomb. They also had a state-of-the-art supercomputer, the IBM 7090, at their disposal. But they weren’t sure exactly where the accident had taken place and had only sketchy, conflicting meteorological data.
Furthermore, they didn’t know if the bomb was intact or broken to bits or which, if any, of the bomb’s parachutes had deployed.
The parachute question was critical. Stuffed into its back end, the Mark 28 carried a complicated multiparachute system that allowed pilots to drop nuclear bombs from a variety of altitudes. Pilots could, for instance, speed into enemy territory under the radar, drop bombs at an extremely low altitude — below 500 feet — and still clear out before the bomb exploded.
Sandia had developed this “laydown system” in the 1950s to help American planes evade Soviet air defenses, which had been specifically designed to shoot down small numbers of aircraft carrying nuclear weapons. According to intelligence experts, the Soviet defense missiles could hit planes flying as high as 60,000, maybe 80,000, feet. But the system could not hit very-low-flying planes, especially if they whizzed by faster than the speed of sound. However, a pilot dropping a nuclear bomb from a low altitude would surely be caught in the deadly blast — unless there was a way to delay the explosion. The Air Force called Sandia.
In 1953, Randy Maydew’s boss asked him to work on the project. The Air Force, at that time, wanted to drop nuclear bombs from 2,000 feet, at speeds greater than Mach 1. (Later, they requested drops under 200 feet.) The only way to do this and give the pilot time to escape, Maydew figured, was to slow the bomb down with parachutes. Knowing nothing about parachutes, he surveyed the literature and found that no parachute in the world could withstand the stress of being blown open at the speed of sound. So the Sandia engineers set out to design one that could. Along the way, they came up with other ways a weapon could survive a low-altitude drop: a bomb with a spike on its nose that stuck in the ground like a dart; a bomb with a metal honeycomb tip that could endure a bruising dent in the nose. In a couple of years, Sandia gave the Air Force plans for a laydown weapon. Maydew, meanwhile, became an expert on high-performance parachutes.
The Mark 28 bomb missing in Palomares packed an elaborate four-parachute system into its hind end. In a low-altitude drop, when the system worked correctly, three nylon parachutes would open in sequence — an elegant bit of fancy footwork in the sky. Soon after a bomb fell from the belly of a plane, a ring of explosive bolts fired on the back of the bomb, knocking the tail plate off. The inside of the tail plate had an eyebolt in the center, tied to a lanyard. The lanyard attached to a four-foot-diameter guide parachute. When the tail plate fell, it pulled the small chute out behind it. The pilot chute, in turn, heaved out a sixteen-foot-diameter ribbon parachute. This sixteen-foot chute slowed the bomb for two to three seconds, then cut itself loose. As it drifted away, it yanked another pack out of the bomb, pulling the cover off a sixty-four-foot chute. The sixteen-foot chute floated away, carrying the empty bag, as the larger chute finished the job. This monstrous canopy opened and slowed the bomb to about twenty-eight feet per second by the time it hit the ground, giving the pilots time to get away. To complicate matters for the bomb search, the Mark 28 was also designed to free-fall from a high altitude. In that case it would release only a small, thirty-inch chute, which would stabilize the bomb as it sailed down to its target.
Because bomb number four had been torn from its rack in an explosion, any — or none — of the parachutes might have opened. The three bombs found on land only emphasized the range of possibilities. The first bomb, which had hit the ground at about 140 feet per second, had deployed the sixteen-footer but nothing else, but that had been enough to keep the bomb intact. The second bomb had landed without deploying any chutes, smashing into the ground at about 325 feet per second. This high-speed impact had detonated the high explosive, scattering plutonium dust, case fragments, and remnants of parachute over the Spanish countryside. The third bomb had deployed the sixteen-foot chute, but because the chute was damaged, it hadn’t supplied enough drag. The bomb had hit the ground at about 225 feet per second, igniting its high explosive and scattering radio active debris.
There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of possible scenarios for bomb number four. But despite the dearth of data, the Sandia engineers made some quick calculations over the weekend. Since bomb number four’s tail plate had come off, it seemed likely that at least one of its parachutes had popped out behind it.
On January 27, General Wilson requested that Randy Maydew or his boss, Alan Pope, fly to Spain.
Wilson was building an advisory team to help define the search area, and he wanted someone from Sandia on board. Having experts on site, he had decided, would be better than “furnishing data to unseeing computers.” As the engineers in Albuquerque continued to hog the IBM 7090 for their calculations (ultimately generating a three- foot stack of paper printouts), Maydew prepared to jet off to Spain. As he was packing, a fellow engineer dropped by his office with a gift: a forked stick, like those used by diviners to search for hidden water.
While Maydew and his team were crunching numbers in Albuquerque, Joe Ramirez had been chasing leads up and down the coast of southern Spain. Soon he would have to begin the sticky work of settling claims, but for now, all focus remained on the search. Ramirez had another lead that seemed even more promising than Tarzan. One morning, a Spanish naval officer had shown up at camp with some pieces of aircraft debris he had collected at sea. He told Ramirez that some bigger pieces were still sitting on his ship and asked if the Americans could send
