The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

Looking at the fisherman’s drawings, it was obvious that Simo’s “dead man” was a bomb, or part of a bomb, falling into the sea underneath the sixty-four-foot parachute. And the “half man”? That was clearly the empty canvas bag of the large parachute, hanging from the sixteen-foot ribbon chute and trailing its “entrails”—the packing lines — behind. Simo had sketched it with uncanny accuracy.

“Before I left the mayor’s office,” Maydew said later, “I was convinced absolutely that he had seen number 4 go into the sea.”

By the time Maydew reported his findings to General Wilson and Admiral Guest a few days later, however, he had decided to hedge his bets. In their calculations, Maydew’s team took all information into account: Simo’s report; the testimony of the B-52 airmen who had seen parachutes after the crash; the location of the other bombs; the tailplate from bomb number four; and other important pieces of wreckage. They also noted another new piece of information regarding the B-52’s tail section: someone had found four scratches on the upper surface of the tail, which appeared to have been made by a radioactive object.

On February 5, Maydew’s team briefed General Wilson and Admiral Guest on their findings. It was certainly possible, they said, that Simo had seen the intact weapon fall into the ocean. But the more likely scenario was this: After the explosion, weapon number four had collided with falling debris (possibly scratching and contaminating the B-52 tail section) and broken up in midair. The heavy nuclear warhead had probably fallen onto land and buried itself five to twenty feet below the surface. The bomb casing had drifted out to sea, where Simo had seen it fall.

Maydew’s team advised the Navy to center its search on the area pinpointed by Simo. The Air Force, meanwhile, should continue its search on land, centering their efforts on a 10,000-foot-diameter circle calculated by the engineers. Air Force searchers had already combed this area, but this time they should look for a shallow depression about three to eight feet in diameter. The nuclear warhead would likely be buried below. Maydew’s team printed copies of their report and distributed them on February 7. Then they returned to America, leaving a handful of replacements to continue the work.

It is unclear whether Admiral Guest didn’t like Maydew’s team or didn’t trust their calculations, but he didn’t entirely buy their conclusions. Over the next few days, as more Navy men interviewed Simo, Guest became more convinced that the fisherman had seen the whole bomb fall into the sea.

On February 7, the USS Pinnacle again carried Roldan and Simo out to sea, where they again showed the Navy where the parachutes had hit the water. This time, Simo placed the chutes about five hundred yards west of his previous position, but the Navy men were still impressed by his story and navigation skills.

A few days later, Red Moody, who now berthed aboard the admiral’s flagship, went ashore to visit Simo himself. Red spent the afternoon with Simo reviewing the story, then joined him for a late dinner. Moody, already inclined to trust the instincts of locals, found the fisherman credible. By the end of the evening, Moody thought that Simo might have seen the bomb, but he couldn’t be sure.

“What does a weapon look like to a person that’s never seen one, when it’s coming down and you’re kind of busy?” wondered Moody. “Everybody on the scene was questioning: Is it intact? Is it not intact? If it’s not intact, how much? If it came apart, what would happen?” Moody drove back to Camp Wilson that evening, mulling over these questions. When he arrived at camp, he found that a storm was brewing and all boat traffic had been canceled. Marooned onshore, Red spent a miserable night in a wind whipped tent. He tried to sleep, but his cot had no sheets or blankets. Blowing sand scoured his face all night. It was the worst birthday he’d ever had.

On the night of the big storm, Red Moody had it bad, but Mac McCamis had it far worse. First of all, he was stuck inside Alvin with Val Wilson, or “Slick Willie,” as Mac liked to call him. Wilson, another Alvin pilot, always rubbed Mac the wrong way. Both men had served on Navy submarines, but Mac had spent his time with tools in hand, wrenching machinery into submission. Wilson had worked as a quartermaster, managing a submarine’s operations and handling copious paperwork. On the Alvin team, Wilson was known for his ability to push paper through Washington, an important skill but one of little interest to Mac. McCamis called him the “clock winder.” That was Wilson’s greatest mechanical skill, he said — winding clocks on a ship.

Being stuck inside Alvin with Slick Willie the Clock Winder was bad enough, but even worse, Alvin was trapped on the water’s surface off the coast of Palomares, moored to a buoy and rocking on the high waves. The previous day, the USS Plymouth Rock had arrived in Rota to pick up Alvin and her crew. The Plymouth Rock was a type of vessel called a landing ship dock, designed to transport marines and their amphibious landing craft to battle. The center of the ship contained a well deck, a cavernous compartment the size of a warehouse that flooded with water, allowing small boats to sail in and out. After the Alvin crew patched the sub together at Rota, they putted the craft into the Plymouth Rock’s well deck, parked it next to another submersible named Aluminaut, and set sail for Palomares. They arrived the following day.

The Plymouth Rock had to leave for other duties, so they prepared to transfer the Alvin and Aluminaut to another landing ship dock, the Fort Snelling. Wilson and McCamis sailed Alvin out of the well deck and tied the sub to a buoy. Nearby, the Aluminaut crew did the same. They planned to wait there for a couple of hours as the Fort Snelling moved into position and prepared to take them on. It was about 2 p.m., bright and sunny. For a while, the subs rocked placidly on the waves. Then, around 5:30 p.m., the wind began to blow.

The Navy captain Lewis Melson was sitting down to supper on the admiral’s flagship with Cliff Page, Admiral Guest’s chief of staff, when Page, whose seat faced out the door, suddenly stiffened and said, “Good gosh, look at that.” Melson turned to see a wall of flying sand bearing down on the ship. What happened next was so dramatic that Melson recorded it in a letter home: We rushed out onto the main deck and were greeted with a blast of wind that almost knocked us down. Later on, we found out the gust recorded 63 knots. We couldn’t see more than a few feet to seawards and the other ships had disappeared from sight. Out of the gloom came a small boat that was bearing down on our side and obviously out of control. As the boat neared us, we could see the coxswain struggling with his helm, then the canopy blew off and began to batter the passengers in the boat. The slight shelter from the side of the cruiser was enough to allow the coxswain to regain control and the boat slammed into our sides but did not capsize.

The thick cloud finally lifted and we could see the submersibles were still riding at their moorings.

With the wind howling above 50 knots, all we could do was sit back and wait. We knew there were men on the subs.

When the wind picked up, Wilson and McCamis closed the hatch and hunkered down inside the tiny sub. Underwater, Alvin swam so smoothly that passengers could barely tell they were moving. But on the surface, especially in rough seas, it rocked and bobbed like a toy boat in a tempest. With no windows and no fresh air, it was a nauseating ride.

Wilson and McCamis spent the night in the sub, rolling in the waves and undoubtedly grating on each other’s nerves. The next day, after twenty-one hours at sea, they managed to sail Alvin back into the Plymouth Rock, despite forty-knot winds and heavy seas. The two men emerged exhausted, as the crew inspected the tiny sub. Luckily, Alvin had suffered only minor damage, but it would still take days to repair.

Admiral Guest and the members of his staff had high expectations for Alvin when it arrived in Spain.

Guest was eager to investigate the promising sonar hits around the area of Simo’s sighting, and Alvin was one of the few tools he could use in such deep water. But the little sub wasn’t the admiral’s only hope. In addition to Alvin, the Technical Advisory Group in Washington had sent a few other gadgets. One was an unmanned device called the Westinghouse Ocean Bottom Scanning Sonar, or OBSS.

The OBSS, about the size of a sofa and weighing more than a thousand pounds, was a box of electronics with a propeller on one end. It was what Navy people call a “fish”: a device designed to be dragged underwater at the end of a long cable. A minesweeper towed the OBSS near the bottom, and the device scanned a lane about 200 yards wide. (The device did not, however, scan directly below itself. Once the OBSS swept a lane, the minesweeper