Press briefings were maddening.
Reporter: Tell me, any sign of the bomb?
Air Force Spokesman: What bomb?
Reporter: Well, you know, the thing you're looking for …
Air Force Spokesman: You know perfectly well we're not looking for any bomb. Just looking for debris.
Reporter: All right, any signs of the thing that you say is not the bomb?
Air Force Spokesman: If you put it that way, I can tell you that there is no sign of the thing that is not the bomb….
Even the Spanish reporters, no strangers to official secrecy, were impressed. They started calling Air Force spokesman Barnett Young “Senor No Comment.”
The information vacuum quickly filled with misinformation and propaganda. London papers reported that Palomares had been sealed off and evacuated. The
But sometimes reports carried lengthy features, such as poems and songs sent in by listeners, interviews with authorities on radiation, and surveys of local farmers. (All of whom, of course, wanted the Yankee imperialists to get out of Spain and Vietnam.) The REI stories, reporting mass hysteria and poisoned produce, sounded shrill and absurd to many.
But in the absence of real information, they held power and resonance. Palomares was fertile ground for propaganda. Many of the villagers were illiterate, and the Americans told them little. For many of them, news came from gossip, and gossip often started with the radio. The radio said that the bombs had contaminated Almeria with dangerous radiation, and the Americans offered little information to counter that. In fact, some Americans were walking around in masks, gloves, and sterile suits, talking about radioactivity and alpha particles. No wonder many of the villagers soon became worried.
At Camp Wilson, life for most of the enlisted men settled into a routine. The men woke at dawn, climbed into buses, and bumped across the countryside. At the appointed patch of desert, they stumbled out of the bus for another day of searching. According to the SAC final report, “It was a long, and a very trying and tiring task. Day after day, the entries in the daily operations log at the accident site simply stated: ‘Ground search continued.’” Walter Vornbrock, the base comptroller at Torrejon who helped organize the search parties, estimated that searchers covered about thirty-five square miles on foot, much of it two or three times. Despite the drudgery, the SAC report said, about 20 percent of the men “found they liked the outdoor life and volunteered to remain.” Of course, this meant that 80 percent did not.
Colonel Alton “Bud” White, the director of civil engineering for the Sixteenth Air Force, arrived in Palomares on January 22 to start clearing aircraft debris from the fields and hills around the village.
White had two flatbed trucks from Moron and Torrejon and soon added seven Spanish dump trucks to his fleet. Because most of the Air Force personnel were searching for bomb number four, White hired ten Spanish laborers. The Spanish were, however, leery of picking up chunks of radioactive debris. Ever since the accident, Spanish and American officials had been chasing them out of the tomato fields, warning them about
White soon supplemented his labor pool with forty-two fishermen from the nearby village of Villaricos. The Spanish navy had declared their fishing grounds off-limits, not out of fear of possible contamination but because their boats might interfere with the search for aircraft debris in the water.
The fishermen, according to White, proved “a pretty tough crew.” They were used to hard labor, long days, and handling rough fishing nets with their bare hands. White put them on the payroll, and they stayed for the entire operation.
White and his crew worked from dawn until dark. In just nine days, they cleared about 150 tons of scrap metal from the mountains and valleys around Palomares, heaping it on a junk pile just down the beach from Camp Wilson.
His men having cleared the bulk of the debris, White prepared to return to Madrid. That same day, General Wilson and the Spanish military liaison, Brigadier General Arturo Montel Touzet, arranged an assembly at the small movie house in the center of Palomares to calm the fears of the villagers.
Wilson and Montel spoke to a crowd of about 250 heads of local families. The Air Force banned members of the press from attending, physically barring at least one at the door. Speaking through a translator, Wilson thanked the villagers for their help and thanked God that nobody in Palomares had been injured. “On behalf of my Government, I would like to publicly express my most heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you,” said Wilson. “As Comrades-in-Arms in the defense against Communism, I know that the mutual admiration and high respect existing between the people of our two countries will continue in the future as in the past.” Wilson assured the villagers that the Air Force would clear the land of debris and pay the villagers for damages. He avoided mention of nuclear weapons, lost bombs, or radioactivity.
Wilson knew, however, that he had a major contamination problem on his hands. When Bud White reported that his team had cleared the major debris and his job was done, he was surprised — and a bit shocked — to learn that he was not going back to Madrid but would instead take over the “detection and decontamination division,” tracking down and cleaning up the scattered plutonium.
White knew next to nothing about radiation. He had grown up on a farm and held a degree in agriculture. But the next day, he took charge of the cleanup effort.
White did have some expert help. A team of scientists from the Spanish nuclear agency, Junta de Energia Nuclear (JEN), had been in Palomares since a day or two after the accident. Emilio Iranzo, one of the Spanish scientists, said that when he arrived and learned that two of the bombs had broken open, he worried that they would have to evacuate the village. But after some quick air measurements, the Spanish scientists decided that the air contamination was not bad enough to warrant an evacuation. Then they tested the crops and soil and found that much of the land had received a fine dusting of alpha particles. They ordered the villagers to stop harvesting tomatoes, and the Guardia Civil enforced the rule. The villagers watched in dismay as their tomatoes ripened, rotted, and fell off the vine.
Now White's job was to calculate how far contaminated dust had spread from the two broken bombs and to map the contamination. Starting at each bomb's impact point, White drew a series of lines leading away from the crater, each line angling about fifteen degrees from the next. White's team, using a handheld alpha-measuring device called a PAC-1S, walked along each line, measuring the alpha contamination until it reached zero. They used this information to draw “zero lines”—giant squiggly circles around the contaminated areas.
Work proceeded slowly. Because alpha radiation travels such a short distance in air, PAC-1S
operators — most of whom were trained on the spot — had to hold the face of the counter close to the ground to get a reading. But the PAC-1S had been designed for laboratory use; the measurement face was thin and fragile as paper and tore easily on the jagged rocks.
Despite the equipment problems, White and his team managed to run zero lines around the two bomb craters and the town itself. Their results were daunting. The contaminated area inside the circles included about 640 acres of hillside, village, and farmland. Of the 640 acres, 319 were cultivated farmland. In Oklahoma, 319 acres might add up to a couple of flat, level fields of soybeans — a tractor could plow it under in two or three days. But in Palomares, farmers had chopped the land into a patchwork of 854 separate plots, almost all of them smaller than four acres, some smaller than an acre. To separate their tiny, uneven fields, villagers had built stone walls and tangled cactus fences. Through this maze ran irrigation ditches, carrying water to the ripening tomatoes. In some fields, the crops stood thick; the tomato plants, especially, climbed high and sagged under their heavy fruit. The U.S. and Spanish governments wanted this maze of land cleared — and somehow cleaned of radioactivity — by April 1, so farmers could plant their next rotation of crops. “In twenty-four years of Air Force experience,” said Bud
