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

undersea cable connected the hydrophones to listening stations on land. With all those hydrophones and snaking cables, Vine saw an opportunity. A deep-diving minisub would be perfect for inspecting and repairing the system. “Manned submersibles are badly needed,” Vine wrote in 1960, “to carry out on the job survey, supervision of equipment, and trouble shooting.” The Office of Naval Research, swayed by Vine's arguments, signed a contract in 1962 for the sub that would become Alvin. Alvin's curious name caused some consternation. Many suspected it was named for the irksome Alvin and the Chipmunks and considered it too frivolous for such a technological wonder. But the truth is that “Alvin” was a contraction of “Allyn Vine,” the name of the man who had first imagined the sub and had had the persistence to bring it to life. A year later, a national tragedy — one with direct bearing on the events in Spain — would prove him prescient.

On the morning of April 9, 1963, the USS Thresher slipped from its berth at Portsmouth Naval Yard and sailed into the Atlantic. The Thresher rendezvoused with the USS Skylark, a submarine rescue ship, and together they sailed toward an operating area off the coast of Boston. The Thresher was the lead ship in a new class of nuclear submarines that would dive deeper, faster, and more quietly than any before and carry a more formidable payload. The ship had completed various sea trials in 1961 and 1962, and then spent nearly nine months in Portsmouth for inspection, repairs, and alterations.

Now she was ready for a round of deep-diving trials.

On the morning of April 10, the Thresher, sailing about 220 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, dove to four hundred feet and reported to Skylark that it was proceeding to test depth. (A nuclear submarine's

“test depth” is the depth at which she is designed to operate and fight; in this case, 1,300 feet.) The sea was calm; no other ships sailed nearby. Ten minutes later, at 9:13 a.m., the Thresher sent another message: “Experiencing minor difficulties, have positive up angle, attempting to blow.” At 9:17 a.m., Skylark received a garbled message, which seemed to include the words “test depth.” One minute later, Skylark heard the words “nine hundred north.” That was the last message Skylark received from Thresher.

By that evening, rescue ships had discovered an oil slick, as well as floating cork and heavy yellow plastic, all common materials on nuclear submarines. Searchers knew that the Thresher couldn't survive much below her test depth, and the floating debris signaled a catastrophic failure. Within a day, the Navy knew the grim truth: Thresher was gone and all 129 men aboard had died, the worst death toll for a submarine accident in history. The Navy couldn't save the men, but it had to find the wreckage. The Thresher was the first in a new class of sub, and three more like it were already sailing at sea. The Navy had to learn why the Thresher had sunk, to keep the other ships out of danger. They also wanted to ensure that the Thresher's nuclear reactor hadn't leaked and contaminated the ocean and to dispel Soviet propaganda on the subject.

The Navy quickly organized a task force to find the wreckage, and put Captain Frank Andrews in charge. During the search, Captain Andrews had several Navy ships and submarines at his disposal, including a deep-diving vessel called the Trieste, purchased from the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard several years before. But because few tools existed for deep-ocean work, the search was slow, frustrating, and improvised. (At one point, the crew of the Atlantis II, a WHOI vessel helping with the search, built a small dredge from baling wire and coat hangers and dragged it from their underwater camera rig.) It took two summers for the task force to locate the debris, photograph it, and bring back a definitive piece of the sub. “One of the many lessons learned from this tragedy,” Andrews wrote later, “was the U.S. Navy's inability to locate and study any object which was bottomed in the deep ocean.”

Frank Andrews was not the only person to come to this conclusion. In April 1963, soon after the accident, the secretary of the Navy formed a committee called the Deep Submergence Systems Review Group. The group's mission was to examine the Navy's capabilities for deep-ocean search and rescue and recommend changes. The group, chaired by Rear Admiral Edward C. Stephan, the oceanographer of the Navy, became known as the Stephan Committee.

The Stephan Committee released its report in 1964, advising the Navy to focus research in several key areas. The Navy should be able to locate and recover both large objects, such as a nuclear submarine, and small objects, such as a missile nose cone. It should train divers to assist in salvage and recovery operations anywhere on the continental shelf. Finally and most urgently, concluded the Stephan Committee, the Navy must develop a Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle (DSRV) to rescue submariners trapped in sunken ships. To make the Stephan Committee's recommendations a reality, the Navy created a group called the Deep Submergence Systems Project, or DSSP.

The Deep Submergence Systems Project landed on the desk of John Craven, chief scientist of the Navy's Special Projects Office, which had overseen the development of the Polaris nuclear submarine. Craven knew that the DSSP was supposed to advance ocean search and recovery operations, not military intelligence or combat. But according to Craven, the intelligence community soon saw a role for the DSSP far beyond what the Stephan Committee had envisioned. Instead of just search, rescue, and recovery, the new technology created for DSSP could be used to gather information on the Soviets, investigating their lost submarines and missiles. Craven considered this a fine idea, though it ran counter to the original spirit of the mission.

To staff the DSSP, Craven inherited a jumble of existing projects, such as SEALAB, a Navy program to build an underwater habitat where divers could live and work for months. Craven also inherited the Trieste and its crew. Because of the DSSP's newfound intelligence-gathering role, much of its work was quickly classified, so that money seemed to disappear down a black hole.

Senator William Proxmire awarded the project a “Golden Fleece” award for its monumental cost overruns, most of which, according to Craven, were simply being diverted to secret projects.

Nearly three years after the Thresher disaster, on January 11 and 12, 1966, a conference called “Man's Extension into the Sea” convened in Washington, D.C., to review the progress of the DSSP.

In his keynote address, Under Secretary of the Navy Robert H. B. Baldwin said that this program, while chiefly serving the needs of the Navy, would also advance civilian science, engineering, and shipbuilding, and the general understanding of the ocean. Furthermore, he emphasized, DSSP was not just another money-sinking bureaucracy. Rather, it stood ready for action: I want to stress that we have no intention of building a paper organization with empty boxes and unfilled billets. Over 2,000 years ago, Petronius Arbiter stated:

“I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”

The Deep Submergence Systems Program is a viable organization. It is here — today—to serve both the Navy and the national interest.

Less than a week after Baldwin's speech, two planes crashed over Spain and four bombs fell toward Palomares. In contrast to Baldwin's rousing speech, the DSSP was not exactly ready to leap in with both feet. The DSSP had moved forward in some areas but had postponed or neglected others. The program called Object Location and Small Object Recovery, which could have come in quite handy in Spain, was scheduled for “accomplishment” in 1968 and later estimated for completion in 1970.

The Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle, which could have swum down to search for the bomb, had not yet been built. The DSSP did have the Trieste, but at the time of the accident, it was undergoing a major overhaul, sitting in bits and pieces in San Diego, and couldn't be readied for a mission.

The DSSP, created in 1964 for something exactly like the Palomares accident, simply was not ready.

We had “almost nothing,” said Craven. “No assignments had gone on, nothing,” said Brad Mooney, a thirty- five-year-old Navy lieutenant who had piloted the Trieste during the exploration of the Thresher wreckage and remained with the Trieste group afterward. “Then, before DSSP really gets its act together, the bomb goes down. So all that they could do was get a pickup team to go over there. And it was a ragtag pickup team.” Brad Mooney and other veterans of the Thresher search were sent to Spain, along with a handful of SEALAB divers. But if people expected the DSSP to provide a detailed recovery plan, a crack team of searchers, and lots of shiny new gear, they would be sorely disappointed. “The Navy had achieved no interim readiness for search and recovery,” said the Navy's final report on Palomares. “The entire operation, from its initial inception to its termination, was