The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

The fishermen pulled Rooney aboard; he was bleeding badly from a gash in his leg. As they wrapped him in blankets and gave him hot coffee, Francisco Simo—the fisherman who had tried and failed to rescue the unconscious man — approached in the Manuela Orts. The captains agreed that the Dorita should hustle the injured men back to shore while Simo looked for more survivors.

Simo headed toward his brother, who was steering the Agustin y Rosa toward a floating parachute some five miles distant. The Dorita headed to Aguilas.

As they motored toward shore, Rooney and Wendorf lay on the deck, shivering under a pile of blankets. Wendorf turned to Rooney and tried to make a joke. “The only thing that could complete this day,” he said, “is if this was a Russian trawler.” Rooney doesn’t remember laughing.

The shore was crowded with curious onlookers. In his excitement, the Dorita’s captain crashed into the dock, giving the passengers a good knock and badly damaging the boat. Two bread trucks were waiting nearby to take the injured airmen to the local infirmary. Rooney remembers lying on a wooden bench in the back as the truck struggled up a windy mountain road. “Every time I looked up, the driver’s looking back at me to see how I’m doing,” Rooney said. “And I’m turning to him saying ‘Look at the goddam road!’ I’ve already been in a plane crash and a boat wreck, and if they get me in a car wreck, that’s going to be three strikes and I’m out.” Larry Messinger had a longer journey to safety. As he ejected from the exploding B-52, he knocked his head hard enough to make him woozy. Disoriented, he pulled his rip cord immediately, opening his parachute at 31,000 feet. “I shouldn’t have done that,” Messinger recalled. “I should have free-falled and the parachute would open automatically at fourteen thousand feet. But I opened mine anyway, because of the fact that I got hit in the head, I imagine.” Messinger, fighting the strong wind, drifted out to sea. Helplessly, he watched the coastline dwindle as he sailed farther and farther over the Mediterranean, miles past the spot where Wendorf and Rooney landed. Finally he splashed into the sea, about eight miles from land. Messinger inflated his life raft and climbed in. He floated for about forty-five minutes, riding huge swells and shivering from the cold. Eventually two fishing boats approached. Simo’s brother, in the Agustin y Rosa, got to him first. The crew pulled him aboard, stripped off his soaking wet clothes, and wrapped him in a blanket. Then they gave him a shot of brandy and headed to shore.

When Air Force officials visited his bed in the Aguilas infirmary, Messinger remembered something important. Drifting over the ocean below his parachute, he had seen something odd in the water below, off to the side. It was a huge ripple on the surface of the sea, “like when you drop something in the water and it makes a big circle,” he said. Messinger told the officials about the huge circle in the water. As far as he knows, they never did a thing about it.

That evening, a helicopter took the survivors to nearby San Javier. There they boarded a plane for the U.S. air base in Torrejon, near Madrid. The next day, the accident board convened at the air base.

The investigators questioned the men separately and told them not to discuss the accident among themselves. Wendorf recalls no one asking him about the four nuclear bombs missing from his plane, and he didn’t venture any guesses. The interrogation continued for two days. Then the investigators took the survivors’ statements and left.

The survivors stayed at Torrejon Air Base for two weeks to recuperate. One day, a week or so after the accident, Wendorf, Messinger, and some other Air Force personnel were shooting the bull. They started talking about the accident, trying to remember how many parachutes they had seen after ejecting from the plane. As Wendorf replayed the scene in his mind, he recalled seeing a couple of survival chutes and then remembered something else. Survival chutes, which carry people, are orange and white, so they can be easily found. Bomb chutes are more of an off white or dirty yellow.

Wendorf had seen an off white chute. Suddenly he realized that it must have been one of the bombs falling to the ocean. Messinger, startled, told him about the giant circle he had seen on the water.

The two men looked at each other. Each one went into a separate room. Someone ran and got a couple of maps of the Spanish coastline. Separately, each man marked the map where he thought a bomb might have hit the water. When they compared marks, they were about a mile apart.

An Air Force aide took the maps and “ran off like he discovered gold,” said Wendorf. A couple of days later, the survivors boarded a plane home to North Carolina. Rooney had bought a new copy of Thy Tears Might Cease but decided not to read it in the air.

At 7:05 a.m. Washington time on January 17, just about the time that Spanish fishermen were plucking Wendorf, Messinger, and Rooney from the cold Spanish sea, Lyndon Johnson sat in his bedroom eating a breakfast of melon, chipped beef, and hot tea. A messenger from the White House Situation Room walked in and handed the president his daily security briefing. The first page of the memo offered dismal news from Vietnam: a series of Viet Cong attacks against government installations; a mine explosion under a bus that had killed twenty-six civilians; a deadly raid on an infantry school. The second page held only one item: an early report of the accident, peppered with inaccuracies. It read:

B-52 CRASH

A B-52 and a KC-135 Tanker collided while conducting a refueling operation 180 miles from Gibraltar. The B-52 crashed on the shore in Spain and the Tanker went down in the sea. Four survivors have been picked up, and three additional life rafts have been sighted. The B-52 was carrying four Mark 28 thermonuclear bombs. The 16th Nuclear Disaster team has been dispatched to the area.

President Johnson picked up the phone and asked for Bob McNamara.

3. The First Twenty-four Hours

Manolo Gonzalez Navarro believed in fate. He believed in visions. As a boy, he had sometimes seen a plane flying far overhead — a strange and wonderful sight. Since that time he had experienced a specific, recurring premonition. In it, he saw an airplane crash and went to look at the wreckage.

Over the years, the thought came again and again, until it seared into his mind’s eye with the permanence of memory.

Gonzalez did not find the premonition disturbing; he simply accepted it. But even he would have to admit that the vision was an odd one, given that he had grown up in the tiny farming village of Palomares, far from any airport or air base. In recent years, however, he had had a daily, fleeting encounter with the U.S. Air Force. Each morning, just after 10 a.m., a set of American jets passed high over his town. They had not inspired his vision, but they would certainly fulfill it.

At 10:22 a.m. on January 17, 1966, Gonzalez was sitting on his motorcycle talking to his father. The white contrails marking the paths of the American planes appeared overhead, just as they did every morning, and the two men looked up. They saw the contrails in the sky and then an explosion.

Fiery debris rained onto Palomares. A section of landing gear smashed through a transformer in the center of town, cutting off electricity to a handful of homes. The B-52’s right wing crashed into a tomato field, the fuel inside igniting and blazing orange. The tanker’s jet engines, filled with fuel, screamed down to earth, thudded into the dry hills, and burst into flame. Black smoke hung in the air; twisted shards of metal lay everywhere.

Gonzalez and his father watched in horror. Immediately Manolo’s thoughts turned to his young wife, Dolores. Five months pregnant with their first child, she was teaching at a local school that morning.

Worried that debris would hit the school, he sped to his wife on his motorcycle.

Dolores had just opened the school doors when the windows started to rattle. At first she thought a small earthquake was shaking the building. Then one of the students shouted that fire was falling from the sky. Everyone ran to the windows, watching the fire and smoke. Soon the storm passed, leaving the school unscathed. A passel of worried mothers arrived to collect their children, and Manolo roared up on his motorcycle. He made sure that his wife wasn’t hurt, then rode off to see if anyone else needed help.

Gonzalez dropped off his motorcycle, climbed into his Citroen pickup truck, and rumbled off to the hills surrounding the town. The village had no paved roads, making travel slow and dusty. Even the main road into town