The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

aluminum suitcase to display twelve neatly packed bottles of Gilbey’s gin, lined up square like soldiers at attention. “Herman!” said MacKinnon. “What the hell are you doing?” Both men knew that liquor — especially that much liquor was not allowed on a Navy ship. The ensigns looked over, undoubtedly with a mixture of interest and alarm. Kunz shrugged. “I thought I might have to spend time on the beach.”

Before leaving for Spain, MacKinnon and Kunz had visited the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) in Pasadena. The supervisor of salvage had told MacKinnon about a torpedo recovery device called CURV, which might be useful in Palomares, and asked him to check it out.

MacKinnon visited CURV and realized that the Navy might need this device in Spain. He told the technicians to prepare CURV for the mission and then headed to Palomares himself.

The engineers and technicians at NOTS had built CURV, which stood for Cable-controlled Underwater Research Vehicle, two years earlier because the Navy needed a better way to recover prototype torpedoes. To test a new torpedo, the Navy used a real weapon but removed the warhead and replaced it with an “exercise head” containing lead weights and pingers. Then it took the modified weapon to the test range off Long Beach and shot it at a target. If all went well, the torpedo completed its full run, using up all its fuel, and then dropped its lead weights. The loss of fuel and weights made the torpedo buoyant. Spent, it floated to the surface, where the Navy could recover it easily.

But test torpedoes didn’t always work as planned. Often they sputtered before finishing their test run and, carrying their heavy load of fuel, sank to the bottom. With each sunken torpedo costing close to $100,000—and holding important information about the failure — the Navy couldn’t just leave them there and so developed a crude way to recover them. It tracked the torpedo’s pinger and, when it located its resting place, sailed a barge to the site. The barge had a moon pool in the center and four mooring winches, one on each corner. When the barge arrived at the torpedo, searchers moored the ship directly over it with three or four anchors. Then they lowered a rectangular frame containing lights, sonar, a wire noose, and a TV camera and looked for the lost torpedo. To move the dangling frame, the captain had to motor the entire barge back and forth. Eventually, if the searchers were in the right place, they would see the torpedo and try to snare it with the noose. The process was long, slow, and awkward; it could take days to recover one torpedo.

CURV resembled this old system in some ways. It consisted of a frame of aluminum tubing, which held sonar equipment, lights, cameras, and three propellers. On top rested four oblong buoyancy tanks, and off the front jutted an arm holding a metal hydraulic claw lined with rubber. The whole contraption measured about five feet high, six feet wide, and thirteen feet long.

To recover a torpedo, the Navy steered a ship to the site and lowered CURV into the water. But CURV didn’t just dangle there as the barge swayed overhead. CURV was remote-controlled, attached to the surface ship with a thick umbilical cord. A surface operator, sitting at a console, could see the bottom through CURV’s TV and sonar and direct its propellers with joysticks. The operator flew CURV to the lost torpedo, grasped it around the middle with CURV’s claw, then carried it to the surface. If the torpedo was too heavy, the operator could jettison the claw and back away. The claw, attached to a lift line, could then be raised to the surface. Early in its career, CURV managed to recover an unheard-of four torpedoes in one day.

By the time the Air Force dropped four bombs over Palomares, CURV had been operating for about two years and had plucked up fifty-two torpedoes from as deep as 2,000 feet. The CURV team had mastered their job, but the device itself was still a work in progress, and the CURV group remained a small-scale, low-budget operation.

When the Navy requested CURV’s services in Spain, the team welcomed another opportunity to show off their skills. If they were successful, it would mean more recognition and money for their project. An H-bomb, to them, was just a big torpedo, and they certainly knew how to recover those.

There was only one problem — the tether was too short.

CURV’s umbilical cord, an inch-and-a-half-diameter cable that fed power and commands to the device, was about 2,000 feet long. But by March 15, when Alvin found the bomb at 2,500 feet, the Navy knew that CURV would have to go deeper. So the CURV team embarked on a crash program to lengthen its lifeline by splicing in an additional 1,000 feet of cable.

The splicing was tedious work. The cable contained fifty-five separate conductors, each of which had to be spliced individually. The team staggered the splices over about four feet of cable, then covered the wounded area with a gray, pliable goo used for sealing air ducts. (The team dubbed the material “monkey shit.”) Then they wrapped the area in black electrical tape, sealing the splices as well as they could. Larry Brady and George Stephenson, the CURV operators, spent several days on the splicing operation. When they finished, the splice was an ugly black blob. “It looked like a python had swallowed a dog,” said Brady. “Or a couple of dogs.” Dragging the device to a NOTS range, the CURV team ran a few test dives. The ugly splice held.

The cable now stretched 3,100 feet long — long enough for the job — but they couldn’t go much below 2,800 feet and still maneuver. There were some other bugs as well: CURV’s depth gauge didn’t work well below 2,000 feet, and its altimeter, which measured CURV’s distance from the bottom, didn’t work at all. But on March 24, as soon as Task Force 65’s first lift attempt failed and the bomb fell back into the Mediterranean, Admiral Swanson ordered CURV to Spain. On March 26, the team packed up the CURV system, loaded it onto a cargo plane, and headed to Palomares.

The CURV team set up shop on the USS Petrel, a submarine rescue ship, on March 29. The Petrel and her commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Max Harrell, were old hands at Navy salvage, having worked on such operations for years, and the ship proved a good home for CURV. The CURV team set up their gear but had little to do; the bomb was still missing after the failed lift attempt. So for a couple of days, they ran tests. The Navy dropped a dummy bomb into the water with the same dimensions as the missing weapon and sent CURV off to find it.

The CURV team operated the device from a small control shack on the deck of the Petrel. It took two people to run the device: one to operate the sonar and read the compass, the other to move the switches and levers that spun CURV’s three propellers and sent it swimming. When it came to “flying” CURV, Larry Brady was the undisputed master. He just imagined himself sitting on the device, sailing happily underwater, and the moves came naturally. Once he found the target, Brady grabbed it with the claw, like a kid in an arcade grabbing cheap toys from a bin.

A couple of days after his arrival on the Petrel, Brady dove CURV to 1,050 feet, found the dummy bomb, and recovered it with a special claw the team had built in California. The next day, CURV dove to 2,400 feet and recovered a pinger hidden inside a barrel. The team could have continued performing ever- more-elaborate circus tricks for weeks, but on April 2, Alvin found the bomb resting on the gray bottom 2,800 feet below the surface, just within CURV’s reach. As the parachute had wrapped itself completely around the weapon, however, CURV couldn’t grab it with its claw. The crew needed another way to snare the bomb.

Robert Pace, CURV’s project engineer, came up with an idea. Sketching a grapnel that would fit onto CURV’s arm, Pace brought the drawing to the Albany’s tender and asked the men in the machine shop to build it. Pace envisioned a grapnel with softly curving spring-loaded tines that couldn’t accidentally slice the parachute shrouds and wouldn’t let go once they hooked in. The chief who ran the machine shop looked at the drawing skeptically. Another grapnel? They had already made a bunch of these things for Alvin and Aluminaut, all of which had never been used or had ended up somewhere on the bottom of the sea. And his crew had already been at sea ninety days longer than planned, with no end in sight. It was really too much. And now they wanted another grapnel? The chief complained until he ran out of steam. Then, realizing that Pace wasn’t going anywhere without his grapnel, he ordered his men to get to work. In the end, they made him three.

On April 3, the day after relocating the bomb, Alvin rendezvoused with Aluminaut, and Aluminaut surfaced. Alvin, left alone with the bomb (now code-named “Robert” after Admiral Guest’s stepson), tried to pull the parachute aside to examine the weapon. The parachute and bomb lay tightly tangled, however, and the Alvin crew couldn’t get a good look at it. They attached two pingers to the parachute, placed a transponder nearby, and headed to the surface, leaving the bomb alone.

As Alvin worked beneath the sea, the CURV team prepared for their first dive on the bomb. With the weapon resting at 2,800 feet and CURV’s cable just 300 feet longer, the device would practically be hanging on the end of the line, with little room to maneuver. CURV would literally be at the end of its