Duke’s press release would prove extremely premature, his hope for a quick and easy recovery overly optimistic. The Navy might have found the bomb, but it had no way to lift it.
On March 16, McCamis and Wilson piloted Alvin back to the contact to relieve Aluminaut. Alvin, now outfitted with a transponder, could be guided by the Mizar almost directly to the target.
Aluminaut had been down for twenty-two hours, babysitting the parachute- covered object. As they approached the larger sub, the Alvin pilots could see that it had parked itself at an angle, with its nose toward the bottom and its stern floating upward. The Alvin pilots approached the Aluminaut slowly, finally stopping just behind its elevated stern. At that moment, someone in the Aluminaut decided to walk to the back of the sub in order to use the urinal. As he did, the sub dipped its rear end toward Alvin, whose pilots squawked with alarm. McCamis grabbed the joystick and scooted Alvin off to the right. Then Aluminaut took off for the surface, showering Alvin with steel shot and mud from her underside.
After recovering from these indignities, the Alvin pilots settled in for another shift. They had returned to keep an eye on the object, not attempt a recovery. Alvin by now had a mechanical arm with a reach of six feet, a rotating wrist, and two pincers like a lobster claw. They used the arm to place a transponder near the bomb, so the Mizar could find the weapon when Alvin left. But the arm couldn’t lift the bomb. Outstretched, the arm could carry twenty- five to fifty pounds. Or it could hang on to two hundred pounds in the crook of the elbow. (Aluminaut would eventually have two arms with similar lifting ability, but they hadn’t arrived in Spain yet.) There was no way Alvin could lift a two-ton nuclear weapon.
Guest needed another way to raise the bomb. As McCamis and Wilson began their second vigil in the dark, the admiral’s staff began to lay their plans.
15. POODL versus the Bomb
On March 22, 1966, CBS News aired a thirty-minute special report called “Lost and Found, One H-Bomb.” The show opened with the anchor, Charles Kuralt, seated before a two-color map of Spain indicating only two cities: Madrid and Palomares. “We live in a world in which it is possible to mislay a hydrogen bomb,” intoned Kuralt. “That is the central fact of the drama in Spain.” He continued:
With thousands of men and millions of dollars and a flotilla of fifteen ships and with luck, we have apparently also found it, lying on the bottom of the sea. With the concurrence of the dark Mediterranean, it now seems likely that it will even be recovered and put in a safe place. But for the sixty days that one of our H-bombs was missing, worried people in the village of Palomares and thoughtful people everywhere asked, “Could it explode?” “Could it leak poisonous radiation?” “Could somebody else find it and put it to use?” Those are awesome questions but, considering the nature of the loss, not unreasonable ones.
Later in the report, CBS showed a long scene from the movie Thunderball, then cut to a shot of Deep Jeep being hoisted from the water. (The Navy had already sent Deep Jeep back to the United States, but the journalists were apparently unable to resist its photo-friendly bright yellow hull.)
“This is not a search for a fictional missing H-bomb, this is a search for a real one,” said Kuralt. “If it looks a little like Thunder-ball, that is a comment on how fantastic fact has become lately.” Kuralt wrapped up the program with a shot of the blue Mediterranean, the hills of Palomares rising in the distance. “The bomb has not yet been brought to the surface, but it must be,” he said solemnly.
“Because if we don’t recover it, there remains the nagging, distant possibility that someone else will.”
For about a week, Red Moody, now back on the task force, had been working on a plan. The key problem was getting a line down to the bottom, one heavy enough to support the weight of the bomb. Alvin or Aluminaut could carry a very light line. But if a submersible stretched a heavy line from a surface ship to the bomb, the force of the line in the current could overwhelm the sub’s engines and sweep it off course.
Working with two consultants to the task force, Ray Pitts and Jon Lindbergh (a diving expert and son of the famed aviator), Moody designed and built a gangly contraption called POODL. The curious name, a contraction of Pitts, Moody, and Lindbergh, had nothing to do with POODL’s appearance or duties. POODL looked nothing like a poodle; it was a seven-foot-tall steel frame shaped like a giant shuttlecock and mounted with a slew of items: several pingers and transponders so the Mizar could track the device, a strobe light, a bucket containing 190 feet of carefully coiled nylon line with a grapnel on the far end, and another 150 feet of coiled nylon line ending with a hook.
Aboard the Mizar, Moody and his team rigged up a length of 3?-inch nylon line with a breaking strength of 22,000 pounds. At the end they attached an anchor; thirty-eight feet above the anchor, they fastened POODL with a wire strap. In addition to the lines carried by POODL, they attached another 300-foot line, with a grapnel on the end, to the anchor itself. The plan was to lower the entire contraption-anchor, POODL, and all — into the water and, they hoped, land it near the bomb.
Then Alvin could swim over, pick up the three lines, and dig the hook and grapnels into the parachute.
That was the plan, anyway. Lieutenant Commander Malcolm MacKinnon, a naval engineer on Guest’s staff, took one look at the half-built POODL and winced. “Oh, my God,” he thought. “It was really a kludge.”
MacKinnon was not being overly critical. Even Moody admitted that they had “gypsy-engineered” the rig. But POODL was the best and quickest option they had. The weapon’s position was precarious, and the Navy worried that the bomb could slip down the slope into deeper water or fall into an underwater crevice and disappear forever. That fear overshadowed everything.
So on March 23, the captain of the Mizar positioned the ship over the bomb. Red Moody and his team dropped the anchor, with POODL attached, off the Mizar. Soon, the anchor and POODL hit bottom, their line stretching to the surface. Sailors grabbed the line, hooked it to a buoy, and floated it on top of the water. Then they waited to see what Alvin could do.
POODL was not the Navy’s first recovery plan. Soon after Alvin had found the bomb, it had carried a light line down to the bottom. The end of the line was tied to a fluke, which the Alvin pilots dug into the sediment near the bomb. The Navy planned to slide a heavier line down this messenger line, but when they tried, the fluke pulled out of the bottom. On March 19, the task force members tried another tactic: they coiled some lines on the Mizar’s instrument sled and tried to float the sled near the bomb. But the Mizar crew couldn’t hold the sled steady, and they abandoned that plan, too. After this attempt, McCamis and Wilson visited the bomb in Alvin and reported that it had slid twenty feet downslope. That evening, Admiral Guest wrote a pessimistic situation report to his superiors. He faced bad weather, untested equipment, experimental techniques, a precarious target position, and submersibles that needed constant maintenance. He warned that the recovery might take a while.
Other ideas arose. Art Markel thought Aluminaut could lift the bomb and devised a plan. On its hull, Aluminaut carried a camera mount that could pan and tilt, and Markel proposed building a makeshift arm by attaching a wooden or metal pole to the camera mount. The pole would carry a metal hook, which the pilot could loop into the parachute. The hook would be attached, via cable, to Aluminaut’s emergency ballast, a 4,400-pound lead weight on its belly. Then, with the bomb securely hooked to the ship, Aluminaut could blow its ballast tanks and rise to the surface, with enough buoyancy to pull the bomb with it.
Markel was excited about the plan, mentioning it in several letters to Reynolds. This was Aluminaut’ s chance, he wrote, to share some of
