Alvin and Aluminaut met, one final time, in 1969.
After Palomares, both subs received their share of good press, and John Craven predicted a boom in miniature submersibles. “Minisubs,” he told The Washington Post, “may some day be as common under the sea as planes streaking over it.” But, much as space colonies failed to flourish and astronauts never made it to Mars, this imagined world of minisubs and undersea habitats never emerged.
However, Alvin and Aluminaut both kept busy after Palomares, though their jobs were decidedly odd. In 1967 and 1968, Alvin dove along the continental slope for geology and biology studies and also surveyed the tops of seamounts for a new acoustic test range. By late 1968, it had completed 307 successful dives. Aluminaut, meanwhile, took scientists on expeditions, salvaged lost gear, made a film with Jacques Cousteau, and sampled outflow from a Miami sewage treatment plant.
Then, on October 16, 1968, a freak accident seemed to change the future of both subs. On that day, Alvin was preparing for a routine dive about ninety miles southeast of Nantucket. Its task was to dive near a deep-moored buoy to inspect the line holding it. During the launch, two cables securing Alvin’s bow snapped, and the sub plunged forward. As its nose dunked under water, water poured into the open hatch. A few seconds later, someone yelled that the ballast tanks had ruptured. Alvin’s three crewmen scrambled for the hatch and barely had time to escape before the sub went under. It sank in about sixty seconds.
Immediately, everyone on board Alvin’s mother ship, Lulu, began to throw objects overboard — scrap metal, aluminum lawn chairs, a fifty- five-gallon barrel — to mark the spot. Lulu and her escort ship, Gosnold, took bearings and swept the area with sonar, trying desperately to pinpoint the spot where Alvin had come to rest.
The ships left the area with a pretty good sense of where Alvin had landed. But because neither ship could photograph Alvin on the bottom, nobody knew if the sub had landed intact or broken to bits.
WHOI eventually persuaded the Navy to send the USNS Mizar to sweep the ocean floor for Alvin.
In June 1969, Mizar found and photographed Alvin. The little sub sat upright on the bottom, about 5,000 feet deep, slightly embedded in the soft mud. It was intact except for a broken aft propeller.
Alvin, fully flooded, was estimated to weigh about 8,800 pounds in water. WHOI wanted its sub back, but no object as big or heavy as Alvin had ever been recovered from such depths. The salvage operation would be difficult and costly, and the Navy wasn’t sure if it wanted to bother. When a team at the Office of Naval Research met to decide whether or not to salvage Alvin, the chief of naval research reportedly grumbled, “Leave that damn toy on the bottom of the ocean.” But eventually Alvin’s advocates persuaded the Navy to fund the recovery.
Salvage experts agreed that the best way to recover Alvin was to place a spring- loaded nine-foot toggle bar in its open hatch. The bar would then be hooked to a lift line, which Mizar could winch to the surface. Experts considered all the submersibles that could dive below five thousand feet and plant the toggle bar and then chose Aluminaut for the job. The assignment was a coup for the Aluminaut team. It got them a fat government contract and allowed them to rescue the sub that had upstaged them in Spain.
On August 27, 1969, Aluminaut submerged about three miles from Alvin and was guided to the sunken sub by Mizar. In addition to her crew, Aluminaut carried a Navy observer and Mac McCamis. Still part of the Alvin crew, Mac had helped design the toggle bar. Since he knew Alvin as well as anybody, he was a good man to have along.
The job proved difficult. Aluminaut, not especially maneuverable, faced a delicate job while fighting a steady current. Also, the toggle bar, which was slightly buoyant, was difficult to handle. Bob Canary, the Aluminaut pilot, said that getting the bar into Alvin was like trying to thread a wet noodle into a soda bottle in a half-knot current. Time after time, Aluminaut carefully climbed the side of Alvin and its crew tried to maneuver the toggle into the open hatch. Time after time, they failed. Mac McCamis, watching from the wings, grew increasingly frustrated. He wanted to grab the controls and do the job himself. (Some Alvin veterans say he did just that, an account flatly denied by the Aluminaut crew) But finally Aluminaut managed to drop the toggle bar into Alvin’s hatch, trip the release, and back away.
The bar was connected to a twenty-five-foot length of line with a snap hook at its end. The Aluminaut grasped the snap hook in one of its claws, carried it to a ring at the end of the lift line, and snapped it in. Mizar raised Alvin and towed the crippled sub to a fishing ground off Martha’s Vineyard, where a crane lifted Alvin onto a barge. Alvin, it turned out, was in remarkably good condition. Scientists and engineers flushed and cleaned every system, replaced the broken parts, and, by 1971, had her back on the job.
But just as Alvin got back to work, government funding for deep-sea exploration dried to a trickle.
Aluminaut, despite its great success recovering Alvin, grew desperate for work, accepting projects that embarrassed the crew. The most famous, and perhaps the one for which Aluminaut is best remembered, was a television commercial for Simoniz Wax. Producers coated one side of a Ford Falcon with Simoniz, the other with Brand X, then tied the car to Aluminaut and submerged it under water. (“I don’t even like to think about it,” said one crew member.) But such exploits failed to cover Aluminaut’s operating costs, and in 1971 Reynolds canceled the Aluminaut program and put the sub into storage. It planned to put it back into the water when it would prove profitable. That day never came.
Alvin, on the other hand, managed to survive the lean years despite its saltwater dunking and went on to a long and prosperous career of scientific discovery. The sub is probably best known for exploring the wreck of the Titanic in 1986 and aiding the discovery of “black smokers,” hydrothermal vents off the Galapagos Islands teeming with bizarre marine life. Over the years, WHOI has replaced individual parts of the sub in piecemeal fashion. All that remains of the original Alvin is three metal plates circling the entry hatch. The sub will retire by 2015, after nearly fifty years of service.
Palomares was not the last major nuclear weapons accident.
On January 21, 1968, almost exactly two years after the accident over Palomares, a SAC B-52 on airborne alert was circling 33,000 feet above Thule Air Base, Greenland. At around 3:30 p.m., the copilot, feeling chilly, cranked the cabin heater up to maximum. Shortly afterward, when other crew members complained about the heat, the copilot started to turn it down. A few minutes later, one crew member smelled burning rubber. As the fumes grew stronger, the aircraft commander told the crew to put on oxygen masks. The crew searched the plane and discovered a small fire in the lower cabin. The navigator fought the fire with two extinguishers, but the flames grew out of control, filling the plane with dense smoke. The pilot reported the fire to the ground, requested an emergency landing at Thule Air Base, and began his descent. Soon afterward, the electrical power on the plane blinked out. The pilot gave the order to eject. Six of the crew members bailed out into the darkness and landed safely in the snow. The seventh was killed.
The pilotless B-52, carrying four Mark 28 hydrogen bombs, continued its descent. The plane glided over the air base, banked left, then crashed into the ice seven miles away. When it hit, the plane was flying more than five hundred miles per hour. The jet fuel on board exploded into a massive fireball, detonating the high explosive in all four hydrogen bombs and spreading radioactive debris over miles of ice. U.S. personnel took four months to clean up the contamination, eventually removing 237,000 cubic feet of ice, snow, and aircraft parts.
By the time of the Thule accident, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had concluded that airborne alert was not necessary for national security. In 1966, using the Palomares accident for leverage, McNamara had
