The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

a tiny amount in a glass of water.) At the time, the “maximum permissible body burden,” the total amount of plutonium that a person can carry safely in his or her body, was judged to be six tenths of one millionth of a gram, about the weight of a dust particle. (Current limits, based on annual uptake, are more restrictive.) The maximum permissible air concentration was.00003 millionth of a gram per cubic meter of air, an amount akin to a grain of salt in four cubic yards of soil.

Plutonium-239, the material used in the Mark 28 weapon, has a half-life of 24,360 years. So if the Americans left any traces in Palomares, the villagers would have to live with it for a long, long time.

Operation Roller Coaster was designed to study the long-term effects of plutonium ingestion, as well as the problem of resuspension — what happens when the heavy plutonium settles in the soil but then wind, weather, or people send it back into the air. But the tests had been conducted only four years before. Despite Langham’s confidence, nobody in 1966 knew what the effects of such an accident would be in twenty or thirty years. But Langham, together with a team of Spanish and American scientists, plus military and government officials, had to invent a decontamination plan for Palomares now.

Studying Bud White’s maps of the contaminated land, Langham calculated how much soil and vegetation the Air Force would have to remove in order to clean up the plutonium. Then, to be absolutely safe, he applied the standard “factor of ten,” setting the safe levels ten times below his calculations, and created a proposal for cleanup. The Spanish officials looked at his numbers and shook their heads. They wanted more assurance that the area would be safe — that tourists would keep coming to Spain’s sunny coasts, that real estate values would keep climbing, and that the farmers of Palomares could sell their next tomato crop. The Spanish drew up a counterproposal and gave it to Langham’s team. They wanted the Americans to remove topsoil from more than one hundred acres of land, replacing it with uncontaminated dirt.

The Air Force considered this excessive. If the accident had happened on American soil, it would never agree to this level of decontamination. Eventually the two sides reached a compromise. The Air Force would remove any topsoil reading above 400 micrograms of plutonium per square meter.

Areas with less contamination would be watered and/or plowed under to a depth of ten inches, diluting the plutonium to a safe level. This meant that Bud White’s team would have to remove topsoil from only 5.5 acres of land. They would have to plow or water more than five hundred acres more.

The area around the site of bomb number two posed its own set of problems. The ground there was too steep and rocky to plow, but it was also the most contaminated. The Air Force agreed to turn the area by hand, with picks and shovels, until the radiation count dropped below the level of detection.

They also agreed to work with the Spanish government to create a long-term monitoring program of Palomares and its people.

The Strategic Air Command had actually been through similar situations before. According to the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy, there had been at least twenty-eight nuclear accidents before the one in Spain. Here are a few examples, paraphrased from official DOD/DOE records:

March 11, 1958: A B-47 left Hunter Air Force Base, Georgia, en route to an overseas base. After leveling off at 15,000 feet, the plane accidentally jettisoned an unarmed nuclear weapon, which landed in a sparsely populated area 6? miles east of Florence, South Carolina. The bomb’s high explosive detonated on impact, causing property damage and several injuries on the ground.

October 15, 1959: A B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker were refueling in the air, 32,000 feet over Hardinsburg, Kentucky. Shortly after the B-52 began refueling, the two planes collided. Four members of the B-52 crew ejected from the plane, but four did not. All four men aboard the KC-135 tanker were killed. The B- 52’s two unarmed nuclear weapons were recovered intact. One had been partially burned but did not disperse any nuclear material.

January 24, 1961: During an airborne alert mission, a B-52 suffered a structural failure of the right wing. The B-52 broke up in the air, dropping two weapons near Goldsboro, North Carolina. Five of the eight crew members survived. One bomb’s parachute deployed, and the weapon received little damage. The other bomb fell free and broke apart upon impact. No explosion occurred, but a portion of one bomb containing uranium landed in a waterlogged field. Despite excavation to fifty feet, the bomb section was not recovered. The Air Force purchased an easement, requiring permission for anyone to dig there. There is no detectable radiation in the area.

These accidents were public knowledge. And many Americans, accepting the logic of deterrence, also accepted that accidents could and would happen. But they assumed that the people in control of nuclear weapons were, in fact, in control. Others were not so sure.

By the early 1960s, a public debate began to take shape, as Americans started to wonder whether they were more likely to be killed, injured, or contaminated by American nuclear weapons, set off by accident, rather than a Soviet attack. As the United States’ nuclear arsenal continued to grow, this possibility seemed increasingly likely. With thousands of warheads stuffed into silos, trundled onto planes, and exploded in countless tests, it seemed inevitable that someday something would go terribly wrong.

Even President Kennedy grew worried. Reportedly he found the 1961 Goldsboro accident, which occurred four days after his inauguration, especially alarming. Although the Air Force never admitted this publicly, a nuclear physicist named Ralph Lapp later claimed that the bomb jettisoned over Goldsboro had been equipped with six interlocking safety mechanisms, all of which had to be triggered in sequence to detonate the bomb. “When Air Force experts rushed to the North Carolina farm to examine the weapon after the accident,” wrote Lapp, “they found that five of the six interlocks had been set off by the fall.” President Kennedy, shocked by this close call (and reportedly by his limited control of SAC planes during the Cuban Missile Crisis), ordered that nuclear weapons safeguards be reexamined to reduce the possibility of an accident. His order led weapon designers to equip bombs with electronic locks called permissive action links, or PALs, ensuring that only the president could launch a nuclear attack.

Yet public fears remained, played out in popular books and films of the early 1960s such as the drama Fail-Safe and the dark comedy Dr. Strangelove. Dr. Strangelove, in particular, openly parodied the Strategic Air Command. In the 1964 film, Colonel Jack D. Ripper (widely rumored to be based on Curtis LeMay) is a SAC wing commander at the fictional Burpleson Air Force Base.

Ripper goes bonkers, overrides presidential authority, and sends an armada of B-52s on airborne alert toward the USSR. The president orders the Army to seize control of Burpleson and take Colonel Ripper into custody. This leads to several ironic battle scenes, as soldiers exchange heavy gunfire near billboards bearing SAC’s motto: “Peace is our profession.” Eventually, one B-52 makes it to a Soviet target and is able to drop one nuclear bomb. This is enough to trigger war.

Within the military, however, SAC was widely considered one of the strictest and safest commands.

Safety was almost a religion in SAC, and its straitlaced in-house magazine, Combat Crew, reflected this zeal. Combat Crew was notable for its utter lack of levity. One regular feature was “Pilot Error,” a grim comic strip demonstrating how sloppy flying technique led to deadly accidents. Another regular item, “Safety Bird Is Watching,” contained a “gotcha” photograph of an airman engaged in unsafe behavior, such as wearing a wedding ring while working on a plane. The “Safety Bird” photos, most of which seemed to be taken with a telephoto lens, gave the impression that any slip would be noted and punished. Some airmen thrived in this rigid environment, but others found it oppressive. One pilot, who eventually left SAC to fly fighter planes in another command, described SAC as uptight. “You needed a checklist to take a shit” was how he put it. In many officers’ clubs, pilots replaced the SAC insignia, which featured an armored fist gripping lightning bolts and a laurel of peace, with a caricature: an armored fist crushing a man’s genitals.

Both those who feared and those who lauded nuclear weapons used the Palomares accident to bolster their arguments. Some said that Palomares proved how dangerous the nuclear arms race had become, endangering lives even in peacetime. Others pointed out that, until the accident in Palomares, 18,340 KC-135 tankers had safely launched to refuel 8,209 airborne-alert B-52s over Spain. One accident, out of all those refuelings, was a pretty good record. Furthermore, some boasted that the Palomares accident had actually proved how safe nuclear weapons were, because the bombs had endured such stress but still had not detonated.

Still, everyone could agree that losing a nuke in another country — and doing it publicly, over civilian territory — complicated matters. Operation Roller Coaster and similar tests in the late 1950s had led the U.S. Air