dropped the rig from his boat.
A couple of days later, when the weather settled down, Andersen and the divers returned to the cove and untangled the net from the four-thousand-pound clump. It had anchored one of the Navy's scientific buoys, used to measure current speed. The divers cleared the clump and delivered the tangled, torn net back to Simo.
12.
While the search for bomb number four slogged on, Bud White got busy. Colonel White, the man in charge of decontaminating Palomares, didn't know much about alpha radiation. But, having grown up on a farm in Texas, he knew how to run a tractor. It would prove a valuable skill in his difficult task.
Bud White did not have to clean up Palomares on his own. Spanish scientists from the Junta de Energia Nuclear (JEN) had rushed to the area soon after the accident. A week later, Dr. Wright Langham, a plutonium expert from Los Alamos, also arrived with a team. Langham was well known in the world of radioactive contamination. He had joined the Manhattan Project fresh out of graduate school and stayed at Los Alamos afterward, cultivating his knowledge of plutonium, the key ingredient in the “Fat Man” bomb dropped over Nagasaki. Plutonium exists in nature, but only in minute quantities. To get more than a few micrograms, scientists had to make their own, a feat they first accomplished in 1940. For years afterward, scientists had handled the warm, heavy metal, not knowing how dangerous it was. Everyone knew plutonium was radioactive, but nobody knew what would happen if you got some on your skin or breathed in a bit of dust. To keep workers safe, scientists began to study the effects of plutonium ingestion. Langham was involved from the start.
By the time of the Palomares accident, he was the world's foremost expert on the subject, widely known as “Mr. Plutonium.”
Many people involved with Palomares regarded Langham as a heroic figure, and he did much to calm the budding fears over radioactive contamination in the village. When the JEN scientists had arrived in Palomares, for example, they had taken a number of urine samples from villagers and Air Force men. Some of the urine samples had come back alarmingly high, sending the team into a panic. Langham quickly determined that the samples must have been contaminated during collection; anyone with readings that high would already be dead or close to it. Langham suggested that the scientists collect samples again under more sterile conditions. When they did, the results settled into the safe range. Langham next tackled crop and animal worries, assuring the villagers that they could eat livestock that had eaten contaminated vegetation, since animals take up little plutonium through their guts. He also told the farmers that once the Americans had cleaned up the contamination, even if a little was left behind, future crops would be safe, since plant roots could not absorb plutonium.
To Langham, the scene in Palomares was uncannily familiar. In 1962, the U.S. and British governments had cosponsored a series of four nuclear tests in the Nevada desert. The tests, called Operation Roller Coaster, examined what happened when the high explosive in a hydrogen bomb accidentally blew up, scattering uranium and plutonium without a nuclear detonation — in other words, an accident just like the one at Palomares.
Operation Roller Coaster, together with similar studies done in the 1950s, taught the scientists a lot.
They learned, much to their surprise, that the greatest danger came from the immediate plutonium cloud and that the concentration of plutonium decreased rapidly with time. In Palomares, Langham said, the major plutonium hazard had vanished before anyone knew what had happened.
At the time of the accident, Langham also knew how much plutonium a human could ingest without danger. (He had used himself as a guinea pig, placing a bit of plutonium on his skin to measure absorption and also drinking a tiny amount in a glass of water.) At the time, the “maximum permissible body burden,” the total amount of plutonium that a person can carry safely in his or her body, was judged to be six tenths of one millionth of a gram, about the weight of a dust particle. (Current limits, based on annual uptake, are more restrictive.) The maximum permissible air concentration was.00003 millionth of a gram per cubic meter of air, an amount akin to a grain of salt in four cubic yards of soil.
Plutonium-239, the material used in the Mark 28 weapon, has a half-life of 24,360 years. So if the Americans left any traces in Palomares, the villagers would have to live with it for a long, long time.
Operation Roller Coaster was designed to study the long-term effects of plutonium ingestion, as well as the problem of resuspension — what happens when the heavy plutonium settles in the soil but then wind, weather, or people send it back into the air. But the tests had been conducted only four years before. Despite Langham's confidence, nobody in 1966 knew what the effects of such an accident would be in twenty or thirty years. But Langham, together with a team of Spanish and American scientists, plus military and government officials, had to invent a decontamination plan for Palomares now.
Studying Bud White's maps of the contaminated land, Langham calculated how much soil and vegetation the Air Force would have to remove in order to clean up the plutonium. Then, to be absolutely safe, he applied the standard “factor of ten,” setting the safe levels ten times below his calculations, and created a proposal for cleanup. The Spanish officials looked at his numbers and shook their heads. They wanted more assurance that the area would be safe — that tourists would keep coming to Spain's sunny coasts, that real estate values would keep climbing, and that the farmers of Palomares could sell their next tomato crop. The Spanish drew up a counterproposal and gave it to Langham's team. They wanted the Americans to remove topsoil from more than one hundred acres of land, replacing it with uncontaminated dirt.
The Air Force considered this excessive. If the accident had happened on American soil, it would never agree to this level of decontamination. Eventually the two sides reached a compromise. The Air Force would remove any topsoil reading above 400 micrograms of plutonium per square meter.
Areas with less contamination would be watered and/or plowed under to a depth of ten inches, diluting the plutonium to a safe level. This meant that Bud White's team would have to remove topsoil from only 5.5 acres of land. They would have to plow or water more than five hundred acres more.
The area around the site of bomb number two posed its own set of problems. The ground there was too steep and rocky to plow, but it was also the most contaminated. The Air Force agreed to turn the area by hand, with picks and shovels, until the radiation count dropped below the level of detection.
They also agreed to work with the Spanish government to create a long-term monitoring program of Palomares and its people.
The Strategic Air Command had actually been through similar situations before. According to the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy, there had been at least twenty-eight nuclear accidents before the one in Spain. Here are a few examples, paraphrased from official DOD/DOE records:
March 11, 1958: A B-47 left Hunter Air Force Base, Georgia, en route to an overseas base. After leveling off at 15,000 feet, the plane accidentally jettisoned an unarmed nuclear weapon, which landed in a sparsely populated area
October 15, 1959: A B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker were refueling in the air, 32,000 feet over Hardinsburg, Kentucky. Shortly after the B-52 began refueling, the two planes collided. Four members of the B-52 crew ejected from the plane, but four did not. All four men aboard the KC-135 tanker were killed. The B- 52's two unarmed nuclear weapons were recovered intact. One had been partially burned but did not disperse any nuclear material.
January 24, 1961: During an airborne alert mission, a B-52 suffered a structural failure of the right wing. The B-52 broke up in the air, dropping two weapons near Goldsboro, North Carolina. Five of the eight crew members survived. One bomb's parachute deployed, and the weapon received little damage. The other bomb fell free and broke apart upon impact. No explosion occurred, but a portion of one bomb containing uranium landed in a waterlogged field. Despite excavation to fifty feet, the bomb section was not recovered. The Air Force purchased an easement, requiring permission for anyone to dig there. There is no detectable radiation in the area.
These accidents were public knowledge. And many Americans, accepting the logic of deterrence, also accepted that accidents could and would happen. But they assumed that the people in control of nuclear weapons were, in fact, in control. Others were not so sure.
By the early 1960s, a public debate began to take shape, as Americans started to wonder whether they were
