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

The Plymouth Rock had to leave for other duties, so they prepared to transfer the Alvin and Aluminaut to another landing ship dock, the Fort Snelling. Wilson and McCamis sailed Alvin out of the well deck and tied the sub to a buoy. Nearby, the Aluminaut crew did the same. They planned to wait there for a couple of hours as the Fort Snelling moved into position and prepared to take them on. It was about 2 p.m., bright and sunny. For a while, the subs rocked placidly on the waves. Then, around 5:30 p.m., the wind began to blow.

The Navy captain Lewis Melson was sitting down to supper on the admiral's flagship with Cliff Page, Admiral Guest's chief of staff, when Page, whose seat faced out the door, suddenly stiffened and said, “Good gosh, look at that.” Melson turned to see a wall of flying sand bearing down on the ship. What happened next was so dramatic that Melson recorded it in a letter home: We rushed out onto the main deck and were greeted with a blast of wind that almost knocked us down. Later on, we found out the gust recorded 63 knots. We couldn't see more than a few feet to seawards and the other ships had disappeared from sight. Out of the gloom came a small boat that was bearing down on our side and obviously out of control. As the boat neared us, we could see the coxswain struggling with his helm, then the canopy blew off and began to batter the passengers in the boat. The slight shelter from the side of the cruiser was enough to allow the coxswain to regain control and the boat slammed into our sides but did not capsize.

The thick cloud finally lifted and we could see the submersibles were still riding at their moorings.

With the wind howling above 50 knots, all we could do was sit back and wait. We knew there were men on the subs.

When the wind picked up, Wilson and McCamis closed the hatch and hunkered down inside the tiny sub. Underwater, Alvin swam so smoothly that passengers could barely tell they were moving. But on the surface, especially in rough seas, it rocked and bobbed like a toy boat in a tempest. With no windows and no fresh air, it was a nauseating ride.

Wilson and McCamis spent the night in the sub, rolling in the waves and undoubtedly grating on each other's nerves. The next day, after twenty-one hours at sea, they managed to sail Alvin back into the Plymouth Rock, despite forty-knot winds and heavy seas. The two men emerged exhausted, as the crew inspected the tiny sub. Luckily, Alvin had suffered only minor damage, but it would still take days to repair.

Admiral Guest and the members of his staff had high expectations for Alvin when it arrived in Spain.

Guest was eager to investigate the promising sonar hits around the area of Simo's sighting, and Alvin was one of the few tools he could use in such deep water. But the little sub wasn't the admiral's only hope. In addition to Alvin, the Technical Advisory Group in Washington had sent a few other gadgets. One was an unmanned device called the Westinghouse Ocean Bottom Scanning Sonar, or OBSS.

The OBSS, about the size of a sofa and weighing more than a thousand pounds, was a box of electronics with a propeller on one end. It was what Navy people call a “fish”: a device designed to be dragged underwater at the end of a long cable. A minesweeper towed the OBSS near the bottom, and the device scanned a lane about 200 yards wide. (The device did not, however, scan directly below itself. Once the OBSS swept a lane, the minesweeper had to drag it back to overlap this blind spot.) The OBSS could work as deep as 20,000 feet, but in Spain it generally operated with a cable about 3,000 feet long.

A problem immediately emerged: the OBSS often got snagged on the rugged seafloor contours.

When the OBSS sensed an undersea outcrop ahead, operators could winch it in or ask the minesweeper to speed up, either of which would raise the fish and hopefully spare it from harm. But both these tactics had a lag time, and by the time a minesweeper tried to raise the OBSS, it could be snagged, trapped, or lost. The Westinghouse technical representative in charge of the system decreed that operators could not tow the fish closer than 100 feet from the sea floor. Unfortunately, the device worked best at 20 to 30 feet off the bottom. The Navy eventually obtained three OBSS

devices, so operators had some choices: they could tow low and accept a certain number of casualties, or they could tow higher and accept that the OBSS wasn't going to work very well. Or they could attempt to fix a high-speed winch to the back of a minesweeper. They needed to figure out something, because the OBSS was the only deep water unmanned system the task force had.

The Washington group also sent Guest a handful of manned submersibles. The first to arrive was Deep Jeep, a two-man Navy sub that could dive to 2,000 feet but had dim underwater lights and insufficient power to fight the currents. After a few days, one of its electric motors failed.

Another sub, called Cubmarine, was twenty-two feet long, six feet high, and painted a bright banana yellow. It looked almost cartoonish, resembling the Beatles' vessel in Yellow Submarine, but was reliable and maneuvered well. The little sub held two people and could stay underwater for up to eight hours. But it could dive to only 600 feet, putting the fisherman's tantalizing search area out of its reach.

The Navy's hope therefore rested on the only deep-diving submersibles cleared for classified work and immediately available: Alvin and Aluminaut. Both vehicles were odd ducks. “Alvin was decidedly mongrel,” wrote Victoria Kaharl in her book Water Baby, “a cross between aircraft, spacecraft and submarine.” With its white, bulbous body, it reminded people of a fishing lure, a pregnant guppy, a washing machine, or a bottle of Clorox bleach. “When people see it for the first time, they're sort of let down,” said the longtime Alvin mechanic George Broderson. “They have this feeling it should be a long black sleek thing. Instead they see what looks like a big white toilet.” At Alvin's core sat the personnel sphere, 6 feet, 10 inches in diameter, just big enough to squish three people inside and built of a new steel alloy that made the sphere thin and light enough to float on its own. The sphere rested in a metal frame that held batteries, ballast tanks, electric motors, and hydraulics. To make the contraption float, engineers designed a streamlined fiberglass hull and packed every nook and cranny with syntactic foam, a buoyant material made of microscopic glass bubbles embedded in an epoxy resin. Altogether, Alvin measured twenty-two feet long from nose to tail, its body only eight feet wide at the waist. Alvin's batteries drove one big forty-eight-inch propeller on its tail and two fourteen-inch props on its back. The big prop could turn 50 degrees to either side, and the little ones could turn a full 360 degrees, allowing pilots to “fly” the sub like a helicopter. Alvin could glide along at about 2.5 knots or sprint at 6 knots in short bursts. She could stay underwater for ten hours, maybe twenty-four if the pilots conserved power, and swim down to 6,000 feet.

The only other sub in Spain that could dive that deep was Aluminaut, owned and operated by Reynolds Metal Company. (Company Vice President J. Louis Reynolds was a submarine buff and deep- ocean enthusiast.) Aluminaut was much bigger than Alvin, 50 feet, 11 inches long, and had greater endurance. Builders had assembled it from a series of huge aluminum doughnuts, shaped from the largest ingots of aluminum ever cast. Each massive doughnut stood eight feet tall; the builders had aligned them into a cylinder and bolted them together, capping each end with a bowl to create what looked like a giant aluminum Tylenol capsule. They had then painted the outside a bright orangey red. With three propellers the sub could cruise underwater at 3.8 knots, but its large size made it difficult to maneuver. If Alvin was a guppy, Aluminaut was a whale.

The sub could carry up to nine people, depending on the amount of gear they brought along. This is not to say that the sub was roomy. Rather, the inside felt like a subway car that had been shrunk to one-quarter scale and stacked high with luggage along the walls. The sub held two bunks that the crew usually pressed into service as work-tables. There was also a toilet, which the crew tried to use judiciously. With five to nine men in a cramped space for up to seventy-two hours with no fresh air, the sub already smelled like a sweaty locker room. No one wanted to add another smell to the already heavy air.

At the front end of the ship, a semicircular bench, padded and covered with green imitation leather, fit snugly to the inside of the hull. Sitting on the bench allowed one to see out of three of Aluminaut's four viewports. The fourth viewport was under the bench, facing down