The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

was very displeased with the equipment,” added Craven. “That I knew.”

10. Guest Charts a Course

In mid-February, Brad Mooney, the thirty-five-year-old Navy lieutenant who had helped search for the Thresher, arrived in Spain to join Admiral Guest’s task force. Mooney reported to the USS Boston, which had replaced Macdonough as the flagship, and tracked down Guest in the admiral’s stateroom. The young lieutenant entered the room and took a good look at the admiral. Clearly exhausted and ill, Guest sat bundled in a blue flannel shirt and leather flight jacket, with a white scarf wrapped around his neck. Every so often, a medical corpsman bustled into the room, took the admiral’s temperature, and tried to feed him medicine.

Guest had slept little since he had arrived on the scene. He now understood the enormity of the task before him. His determination had turned to despair, and he poured out his heart to Mooney. He told Mooney an odd story, one that stuck with the young man for decades. Two years earlier, said Guest, he had been in the Tonkin Gulf during a questionable exchange of fire between U.S. and Vietnamese boats. This incident had led, shortly thereafter, to the rapid escalation of the Vietnam War. Now, he said, someone in the Navy was out to get him. “They sent me here to fail,” he told Mooney. “I don’t know anything about deep-ocean search and recovery. I’m an aviator.” Guest’s remarks were curious. At the time of the Tonkin Gulf incident, Guest commanded an aircraft carrier, the USS Constellation, near the area. On August 2 and August 4, 1964, U.S. Navy destroyers in the gulf reported that Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked them. Admiral Guest, as commanded, sent fighter planes to retaliate. Years later, evidence emerged that the August 4 attack most likely had not happened; sailors, confused by rain and radar ghosts, had mistakenly thought they were under fire. Guest, however, was barely involved with the initial incident, except for retaliating as ordered. And by February 1966, questions about Tonkin Gulf had not yet reached the public. According to the historian Edwin Moise, Guest’s involvement was peripheral; no one could legitimately have blamed him for anything. Moise guesses that some in the Navy might have faulted him for not controlling the situation better, but this was hardly a major error.

Guest’s stepson Doug Kingsbery also finds it unlikely that the Navy sent Admiral Guest to Palomares as punishment. The bomb search “was an extremely important mission at that time in the Cold War,” said Kingsbery. “I can’t imagine that the president and the high military people would not have selected the best person available they thought could do the job.” Regardless of his exact role in the Gulf of Tonkin, Guest was deeply affected by his tour in Vietnam.

When he came home, his stepson Robert remembers him sleeping only two to four hours a night and smoking a carton of cigarettes a day. Faced with a seemingly impossible task in Palomares, it is not surprising that Guest grew despondent. It was not an easy assignment, even if he had not been set up to fail.

Brad Mooney listened to the admiral’s story and did his best to cheer him up. He told Guest that few people in the world knew anything about finding lost objects in the deep ocean. Mooney had some experience from his time with the Thresher and the Trieste and also knew a bit about Alvin and Aluminaut. He promised Admiral Guest that he would do his best.

Soon afterward, Admiral Guest reported that Brad Mooney’s arrival had been “like a ray of sunshine.” Finally he had someone who understood the deep ocean and knew what to do with these ridiculous submersibles. Red Moody was also impressed with the new lieutenant, even though their similar names caused confusion when read over the ship’s crackling intercom. “When Brad came aboard, he was a mover and a shaker,” said Moody. “I just said, ‘Here’s a guy who can get things done.’” When the accident happened, Mooney had orders to report to Pearl Harbor and then take command of a submarine. During the mission in Spain, the Navy twice attempted to send Lieutenant Mooney to his original duties. Both times, Admiral Guest arranged to keep him on.

With Red Moody overseeing the divers, Brad Mooney tackling the submersibles, and the rest of his team and gear in place, Guest hunkered down and made a plan. On February 17, 1966, he laid it out in a long letter to the chief of naval operations.

First, Guest reviewed the current situation, which was not stellar. The Decca navigation system, which was supposed to have been up and running twenty-four hours after it arrived, still wasn’t fully functional. The Ocean Bottom Scanning Sonar was scanning hundreds of contacts but couldn’t tell if any particular contact was a lost bomb or a school of fish. (The ships of Task Force 65 didn’t help matters by regularly dumping their garbage overboard in the search area, adding paint cans, soup cans, and machine shop shavings to the sonar contacts.) Deep Jeep was useless and had been sent back to the United States. Aluminaut had battery trouble, Alvin had sonar problems, and neither could navigate easily. Cubmarine was great, but only down to 600 feet. All in all, summarized Guest, “We enter this phase with equipment largely R&D and of marginal reliability and ruggedness.”

Then Guest laid out his four search areas. Two were top priority: Alfa 1 and Alfa 2. One, a semicircle adjacent to the beach, extended the aircraft debris pattern into the ocean. For the other, Guest located the point where Simo had seen the “dead man” and his parachute hit the ocean, then noted eleven sonar contacts nearby. He averaged those sonar hits, noted that point on the chart, and drew a one-mile-radius circle around it. Guest also identified two other areas based on Sandia calculations. These, large rectangles stretching into the sea, were named Bravo and Charlie.

Altogether, the four search areas encompassed about twenty-seven square miles of ocean. Guest had narrowed down the search area from two Manhattans to just over one. His task force would now have to sweep every inch of it for the missing bomb.

To divide these four large areas into searchable zones, Guest’s team created a 132-square-mile grid system that they could lay over his charts. They first divided the area into lettered two-by-four-mile rectangles, then divided each of those into thirty-two numbered squares, each measuring 1,000 by 1,000 yards.

Guest depended on divers, sonar, and Cubmarine to handle the areas close to shore. Then, with Brad Mooney’s advice, he made a plan for the submersibles. The more maneuverable Alvin got the deeper areas near Simo’s sighting, where the underwater terrain rose and fell with rugged ridges and trenches. Aluminaut was sent to cover shallower, smoother areas, a plan that irritated her crew. Like almost everyone else, they thought that Simo Orts had seen the bomb fall and wanted to search there.

Mooney understood the crew’s feelings, but he had reservations about Aluminaut. Aluminum, if exposed to salt water, can suffer catastrophic failures. So, for protection, builders coated Aluminaut with several layers of colored paint. After almost every dive, the submersible’s support crew checked the hull for scratches or scars that might expose the aluminum to salt water. This vulnerability “probably scared a lot of people from using her very much,” said Mooney. “Did me.” Such concerns annoyed the Aluminaut crew to no end. Art Markel, the manager of the Aluminaut team, thought his ship was far more capable than the Navy gave it credit for, and certainly more adept at deepwater searching than Alvin. Aluminaut was outfitted with search sonars that could read out to 800 feet, as well as a sweeping sonar that could see 2,000 feet. Alvin had nothing so elaborate.

“They were using eyeballs,” said Markel. “When you used an eyeball, you could see about fifty feet at the most. Fifty feet, that’s all. The rest of it’s black.” On one of their first dives, the Aluminaut sonars picked up a sunken Spanish ship, which appeared to be quite old. Markel suggested that his bosses at Reynolds contact the Spanish government regarding salvage rights. Perhaps Aluminaut could retrieve a cannon from the “ship of antiquity,” as he called it, or even a treasure chest full of gold. He also suggested to Guest that they go back into the area and use the sunken ship as a target for calibrating Aluminaut’s sonar. Markel’s request irked the admiral. Stop fooling around with Spanish galleons, he told Markel. We’re looking for a hydrogen bomb.

Guest had little time to worry about the Aluminaut crew’s bruised feelings. The Soviets had just cranked the international tension up a notch, putting the lost bomb into the middle of the fray. On