The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

someone to pick them up.

Ramirez grabbed an airman and headed to Garrucha, a fishing port just south of Palomares, where the Spanish navy ship was anchored.

After finding the ship and collecting the debris, Ramirez stopped to chat with some of the Spanish officers. One of them asked Ramirez if he had spoken to the fishermen who had rescued the bomber pilots. No, said Ramirez. He hadn’t even heard about the fishermen. The navy officer told him that they lived in Aguilas, a port city thirty miles up the coast from Palomares.

The paved road to Aguilas, winding along the beautiful Spanish coastline, proved far less grueling than the narrow path to Tarzan’s mountain home. Ramirez and a major from Camp Wilson arrived in the evening and found the port authority office on the second floor of a small, two-story building.

The port captain greeted them warmly and asked them to wait while he called the fishermen. He told Ramirez their names: Francisco Simo Orts and Bartolome Roldan Martinez.

As the winter night deepened, the officers chatted with the port captain, waiting for the fishermen.

Around 8 p.m., Simo and Roldan arrived. The fishermen, especially Simo, impressed Ramirez.

Businesslike and straightforward, Simo—who did most of the talking — clearly understood the sea.

“He did not appear to me to be a charlatan,” said Ramirez. “Whatever he said, he meant. There was no fooling around.”

Simo told Ramirez about that bright morning on his shrimp boat, about the explosion and the many parachutes. Ramirez, who had just recently learned that some nuclear bombs have parachutes, asked the fisherman to describe them. Simo did. And then he said something that Ramirez found strange: he apologized for not saving the other flyer. “What other flyer?” asked Ramirez, puzzled. He knew that all the airmen had been accounted for. Simo explained that he had seen all the airmen drifting down to the sea, and he knew they were alive because their arms and legs were moving. But this other person, the man who had fallen near him, hadn’t been moving at all, so he must have been unconscious or maybe dead. Simo apologized profusely for not having reached the motionless man in time. When the flyer hit the water, he said, he had turned his boat and tried to rescue him. But his nets had still hung deep, and had slowed the boat; the man had sunk before he arrived.

Simo added one more twist: another, smaller parachute had fallen near his fishing boat. “I saw a parachute smaller than the others, which carried what seemed like the chest of a man,” said Simo. “I didn’t see legs or a waist. Something was hanging from the bottom.” Then Simo added a gory detail: what he had seen dangling from the torso, he said, were the man’s intestines.

Ramirez didn’t know what to think. Simo insisted that he had seen a dead man — maybe two — but that couldn’t be true. Or could it? Had Ramirez been misinformed about the number of airmen in the planes? Or could Simo have seen the bomb dangling from a parachute? Ramirez wasn’t sure. “I came out of that meeting convinced that there was something substantive there,” he said. “But I knew that someone with more knowledge than I had to talk to him.” Ramirez wrapped up the meeting and asked if the fishermen could show the Americans where the parachutes had fallen. Of course, they said.

Ramirez reported this latest bit of news back to Camp Wilson. A day or two later, on January 22, he found himself on the USS Pinnacle with Simo, Roldan, and a handful of U.S. Navy officers. The Pinnacle, along with the USS Sagacity, both minesweepers, had arrived the previous day to search the area with mine-detecting sonar. The Navy officers asked Simo to show them where he had seen the larger parachute enter the water. He guided them to the spot without a compass, using only his seaman’s eye to align various landmarks on shore. When the Pinnacle arrived at the specified point, their sonar got two hits. The water was just over two thousand feet deep.

The Pinnacle then moved away, and the officers, testing Simo’s navigation skills, asked him to guide them back. Simo fixed the position again. The Pinnacle found the same two sonar hits. Then the Navy officers asked Simo and Roldan to show them another area where debris had fallen. The fishermen guided the Navy men to the spot. More hits blipped onto the Pinnacle’s sonar. The Navy men were impressed by the fishermen’s navigation skills, but the sonar hits were vague. One report described them as both “sharp and hazy” and guessed that they could be “either a school of fish or a parachute partially filled with air bubbles.” Nonetheless, the blips were duly noted, and the Spanish fishermen returned to shore.

On the evening of Simo’s boat ride, in Washington, President Johnson sat down in the White House screening room to watch a movie with several guests, including Lady Bird, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and McNamara’s wife. The movie was the new James Bond thriller Thunderball, released a few weeks earlier and now at the top of the box office. In the film, an international ring of evildoers called “SPECTRE” hatches a sinister plan. An agent of SPECTRE, disguised as a NATO commandant, hijacks a fighter plane loaded with two nuclear bombs, kills the crew with poison gas, and crash-lands the plane in the ocean. After the plane settles gently to the bottom, a group of scuba divers appears, driving a futuristic underwater craft that looks like a giant orange stingray. The divers snatch the nuclear bombs and squirrel them away aboard a pleasure craft. SPECTRE demands ?1 million in flawless diamonds, or it will detonate the bombs in a city. James Bond, braving spear guns, shark attacks, and a duplicitous redhead, saves the day.

During the week after the Palomares accident, everyone was talking about the movie. When Jack Howard called Alan Pope at Sandia, he told the engineer that the nation was facing a real-life Thunderball. And now a handful of people, led by a Spanish fisherman, an Air Force lawyer, and a few computer nerds, was starting to realize that a real nuclear weapon might now be lost under a real sea. And early reports noted that real Soviets — not the caricatured evildoers of SPECTRE — were circling in the waters. The bomb saga was about to shift from the parched Almeria desert to the cold Spanish sea. James Bond, sadly, was nowhere in sight.

6. Call In the Navy

Red Moody sat in the cockpit of a KC-135, looking out the window at the driving snow and thanking his lucky stars he was a diver, not a pilot. He and his dive team had been scheduled to land at Andrews Air Force Base that morning, but a snowstorm had buried the runways and air traffic control had diverted the plane to Dulles. Sitting in the jump seat just behind the pilots, Moody listened now as they discussed whether they could land in a blizzard with thirty-five-knot gusts. The pilots decided to go for it. Moody watched, with alarmed fascination, as the pilots cranked up the power and turned the plane almost sideways to approach the runway. Down they went, the snow whirring and whistling by the windows, Dulles barely visible below. Wheels touched tarmac, and the plane skidded out straight. Moody and the divers in the back breathed a sigh of relief.

Moody had been up for hours, ever since the late-night call from the duty captain at the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). On January 22, still less than a week after the accident, Assistant Secretary of Defense Jack Howard had called the Navy. The following day, the CNO had established a task force, known as Task Force 65, to help the Air Force recover its lost bomb. Then the Navy had ordered men and ships to Spain. Lieutenant Commander Moody oversaw a group of Navy divers in Charleston, South Carolina, who specialized in explosive ordnance disposal, or EOD. Moody’s divers handled all sorts of dangerous jobs: they defused floating mines, found missiles lost in offshore testing ranges, and tracked down planes that crashed into swamps. The duty captain called Moody around midnight on January 22 and asked when Moody could get a dive team to Palomares.

Moody said they’d be at the airport, with their gear, by 9 a.m.

After surviving their landing at Dulles, the divers sacked out while the maintenance crews scrambled to find fuel for the plane. The snow slowed everything down, and the divers were stuck at Dulles for hours. They finally took off for Spain that evening and landed at Torrejon the following day. They ate lunch, flew to southern Spain, and took a bus to a small Spanish town. By this point Moody and his divers had been awake for nearly forty-eight hours.

After a few hours of sleep, Moody went out to find a local tavern. As he drank at the bar, a man in a business suit sat down next to him and introduced himself as Captain Page. Cliff Page, it turned out, had just been appointed chief of staff to Admiral William S. Guest, the man who would oversee Task Force 65. The two men chatted for a while. Then Page asked Moody why his divers were still here, zonked out in the hotel, instead of