The Day We Lost the H-Bomb: Cold War, Hot Nukes, and the Worst Nuclear Weapons Disaster in History

shark attacks, and a duplicitous redhead, saves the day.

During the week after the Palomares accident, everyone was talking about the movie. When Jack Howard called Alan Pope at Sandia, he told the engineer that the nation was facing a real-life Thunderball. And now a handful of people, led by a Spanish fisherman, an Air Force lawyer, and a few computer nerds, was starting to realize that a real nuclear weapon might now be lost under a real sea. And early reports noted that real Soviets — not the caricatured evildoers of SPECTRE — were circling in the waters. The bomb saga was about to shift from the parched Almeria desert to the cold Spanish sea. James Bond, sadly, was nowhere in sight.

6. Call In the Navy

Red Moody sat in the cockpit of a KC-135, looking out the window at the driving snow and thanking his lucky stars he was a diver, not a pilot. He and his dive team had been scheduled to land at Andrews Air Force Base that morning, but a snowstorm had buried the runways and air traffic control had diverted the plane to Dulles. Sitting in the jump seat just behind the pilots, Moody listened now as they discussed whether they could land in a blizzard with thirty-five-knot gusts. The pilots decided to go for it. Moody watched, with alarmed fascination, as the pilots cranked up the power and turned the plane almost sideways to approach the runway. Down they went, the snow whirring and whistling by the windows, Dulles barely visible below. Wheels touched tarmac, and the plane skidded out straight. Moody and the divers in the back breathed a sigh of relief.

Moody had been up for hours, ever since the late-night call from the duty captain at the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). On January 22, still less than a week after the accident, Assistant Secretary of Defense Jack Howard had called the Navy. The following day, the CNO had established a task force, known as Task Force 65, to help the Air Force recover its lost bomb. Then the Navy had ordered men and ships to Spain. Lieutenant Commander Moody oversaw a group of Navy divers in Charleston, South Carolina, who specialized in explosive ordnance disposal, or EOD. Moody's divers handled all sorts of dangerous jobs: they defused floating mines, found missiles lost in offshore testing ranges, and tracked down planes that crashed into swamps. The duty captain called Moody around midnight on January 22 and asked when Moody could get a dive team to Palomares.

Moody said they'd be at the airport, with their gear, by 9 a.m.

After surviving their landing at Dulles, the divers sacked out while the maintenance crews scrambled to find fuel for the plane. The snow slowed everything down, and the divers were stuck at Dulles for hours. They finally took off for Spain that evening and landed at Torrejon the following day. They ate lunch, flew to southern Spain, and took a bus to a small Spanish town. By this point Moody and his divers had been awake for nearly forty-eight hours.

After a few hours of sleep, Moody went out to find a local tavern. As he drank at the bar, a man in a business suit sat down next to him and introduced himself as Captain Page. Cliff Page, it turned out, had just been appointed chief of staff to Admiral William S. Guest, the man who would oversee Task Force 65. The two men chatted for a while. Then Page asked Moody why his divers were still here, zonked out in the hotel, instead of reporting for duty at Camp Wilson. Red bristled at the question but played it cool. He patiently explained that his men had been awake for almost two days and were in no condition to dive. They would get a decent night's sleep and report for duty the next day. Page backed off quickly and offered to arrange a bus for the divers in the morning. Moody accepted.

On Tuesday, January 25, Red Moody, eleven divers, and about 14,000 pounds of diving gear arrived at Camp Wilson to join the growing Navy contingent. Four U.S. Navy minesweepers, an oceanographic ship, and a destroyer already sailed offshore, with a handful of tankers, tugs, and other ships on the way. A small team of EOD divers from Rota, led by Lieutenant Oliver Andersen, was setting up shop on the beach when Moody's team joined them. A young ensign followed on Moody's heels. “His sole purpose in life,” recalled Andersen, “was to follow behind Red and write down everything that was happening.” Andersen, curious, asked the kid for his notebook and flipped through it. “Closer we get to the scene,” the ensign had written, “the more outstanding the confusion.”

Moody spoke with an Air Force colonel to get a rundown of the situation. Afterward, Moody and Andersen talked for a few minutes, sharing what little information they had. Then Moody made an announcement: he was heading out — uninvited — to the USS Macdonough, the admiral's flagship, to see what the Navy brass could tell him. Commandeering an inflatable seven-man rubber boat, he left Andersen in charge of his divers and puttered out into the waves.

DeWitt “Red” Moody was a tall, fit, broad-shouldered man with a commanding presence and a thick Texas accent. Everyone called him “Red” because he had once sported a full head of copper-colored hair. Now, at age thirty-eight, most of his hair was long gone, his forehead rising high and bald as a bullet above his face. The nickname, however, had stuck.

Moody was a freshman in high school when the United States entered World War II, too young to join the military. He waited, impatiently, and then enlisted in the Navy in 1944, the day after his seventeenth birthday. He went to sonar school and served in the Pacific on the USS Strong but saw little action. When the war ended, he decided to stay in the Navy. He came from a broken family with little money, and the Navy offered him a camaraderie and security he had never experienced before. Stationed on an aircraft carrier, he met some Navy EOD divers and saw them at work. The men impressed him with their teamwork and “can-do” attitude. He decided that diving was the job for him.

EOD divers are a special breed. The job throws them into dirty, difficult situations with no obvious solution. They must solve problems in a limited amount of time — before their air runs out or something explodes — so they get used to working quickly with improvised tools. Because divers need to make snap decisions, the relationship between officers and enlisted men differs from that in other parts of the Navy. Divers speak out, show little deference, and are willing to accept ideas from the lowest man on the totem pole.

Moody excelled in this world. EOD diving became his life. After eleven years, he earned an officer's commission, one of the rare “mustang” officers in the Navy who had risen from the ranks of the enlisted. At the time of the Palomares crash, he was overseeing a team of forty-seven at his headquarters in Charleston. When an accident happened, Moody usually dispatched a three-man team to cover it. Sometimes, after a high-profile accident, he sent a larger team and went along himself. This was one of those occasions.

Red Moody steered his rubber boat alongside the Macdonough, chuckling to himself as he wondered what the sailors on the destroyer thought of his tiny raft bobbing in the waves. Moody jumped on board, introduced himself to the deck officer, and asked to speak with Admiral Guest. But the ship's executive officer had left word: anybody coming to see the admiral had to go through him first. The deck officer sent a messenger off to find the XO while Moody cooled his heels. After some time the messenger returned, empty- handed.

The deck officer started to send the messenger off in another direction when Moody spoke up. “I've been waiting here for quite a while,” he said. “I'll just go with him.” No, no, no, said the deck officer. Bad idea. You really ought to wait here. But Red Moody was done waiting. “You tell the exec where I am if you find him,” he said and took off with the messenger. A few minutes later, the two men were climbing the ladder by the wardroom — the officers' mess. Moody suspected that Admiral Guest might be inside. He told the messenger to go on ahead. “You go find the XO,” he said. “I'll be in here.”

Moody slipped into the wardroom and saw a clutch of Navy officers, including Admiral Guest, huddled over a secret message from Washington. He moved closer to listen to the discussion. The message listed various pieces of gear that were being sent to aid the search. There was something called OBSS — ocean bottom scanning sonar — a Decca navigation system, and a couple of underwater vehicles. All the gear was familiar to Moody. In fact, it had been destined for a diving mission in the Gulf of Mexico, where one of Moody's teams needed it to recover a Bullpup missile from the Air Force test range off Elgin Air Force Base. But the Navy had diverted the equipment to the more critical mission in Spain. After listening for a few minutes to the officers puzzling over this list of strange machines, Moody realized that they didn't know much.

He piped up. “Excuse me,” he said, “but that equipment was actually slated for one of my operations down in the Gulf of Mexico.” As the group grew silent, Moody explained what each piece of equipment did, how it worked, and what to use it for. He stayed for lunch. Then, around 2 p.m., he asked permission to leave. Permission was