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

battery charge, and hustled over to the search area. Though disappointed that Alvin had found the bomb first, the crew was glad they had an important role to play On the way down, Admiral Guest and his staff told the Aluminaut crew, more than once, not to touch the bomb or try to recover it. “He thought we were a bunch of wild cowboys down there,” grumbled Art Markel.

The Alvin crew sat in the dark, on the bottom of the cold sea, for eight hours, waiting for Aluminaut.

Finally, peeking through their windows, the crew saw the glow of lights in the distance. “It was beautiful, the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” said McCamis. “A great silvery-pink monster, it looked like, with great green phosphorescent eyes coming up silent through the water.” Mac flipped on Alvin's lights, giving Aluminaut a clear target. Aluminaut approached slowly, cautiously parking herself about twenty-five yards behind Alvin, in clear sight of the parachute. The Aluminaut held steady as Alvin left her station and rose to the surface.

Alvin surfaced after ten hours and twenty-three minutes underwater, her longest dive of the mission.

Mac sailed her to the Fort Snelling and entered the well deck at 8:12 p.m., just about the time that Guest and his staff arrived on board. The Alvin crew sent their photographs to be developed, then told the admiral what they had seen. The photographs were ready about midnight. The weary Guest gathered his key staff members to look at the pictures. They didn't see a bomb. They saw a parachute. Everyone agreed that the weapon probably lay shrouded underneath, but they couldn't tell for sure.

Mac McCamis was outraged. He knew it had to be the bomb. Guest asked him, “How do you know it's not a parachute full of mud?” To which McCamis replied impatiently, “What else is going to be down there with a parachute and a bomb rack hanging on to it?” McCamis went to bed that night discouraged. “In all my life,” he said, “I'd never had my intelligence so insulted.” After the meeting, Admiral Guest wrote a situation report to his superiors, sending it at 2:50 a.m. on March 16. In it, Guest said that Alvin had photographed a large parachute covering an object. The contact was promising but not conclusive; positive identification was impossible. However, he was starting to plan the recovery. He planned to proceed as slowly and deliberately as possible, but if the object started to slide down the slope, he might have to take immediate action. He would use three ships, Mizar, Privateer, and Petrel, as the primary support vessels for the recovery, with two minesweepers on security patrol. All other ships would attend to business as usual. Guest didn't want the newsmen on shore to notice anything odd.

The other memo, the one for the Cyrus Vance committee that had taken four days to write, was never sent.

Early on the morning of March 16, Robert Sproull, the chair of the Cyrus Vance committee, went to the Pentagon for the group's second meeting. Sproull expected this gathering to be as gloomy as the first. He arrived around 4:30 a.m. to gather his thoughts and prepare for the meeting. He checked the message traffic, just in case there had been any developments in Spain, and found Admiral Guest's report. The second meeting, Sproull remembers, went off rather well.

That morning in Rota, a radioman found Red Moody at the Bachelor Officers Quarters. Moody had stayed out late the night before, drinking with an old friend. The messenger handed Moody a clipboard, the cover indicating that the note inside was classified. Red looked at the note and then at the messenger. “Tell them I'm coming back,” he said. He asked for an early flight.

That afternoon in Spain, Tony Richardson and John Bruce, the mathematician and oceanographer who had escorted Simo out to sea the day before, visited the fisherman at his house. Simo found the fathometer trace and unraveled it on the dinner table. John Bruce looked at the trace and questioned Simo. He saw nothing resembling the falling weapon.

The Americans told Simo that he would be paid for the previous day's excursion — his boat had lost an entire day of fishing. Then Bruce, curious to see Simo's fathometer, asked if they could visit the Manuela Orts. Simo agreed. The men boarded the ship, took a look around, and were impressed with the sleek vessel and its modern gear. When they finished, Simo offered to buy the men a drink, and they headed to a nearby tavern.

At the bar, Tony Richardson sipped a beer and watched news of the Gemini 8 space shot. The ship had launched from Cape Kennedy that morning and was due to orbit earth for three days. During that time, Gemini pilots planned to link the nose of their capsule with a satellite called Agena. If they pulled it off, it would be the first time two crafts had docked in space, a key component in the plan for landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

After a flawless start to the flight, Gemini docked to the satellite successfully. But shortly thereafter, a thruster on the spacecraft stuck open and set the linked vehicles spinning crazily The astronauts separated their capsule from the satellite and stabilized the craft, using rockets normally reserved for reentry. NASA ordered the crew to make an emergency landing in the Pacific. The astronauts were picked up after three hours at sea.

The outer-space drama received massive news coverage: a banner headline on the front page of The New York Times, with more than two full pages of stories. Alvin and Aluminaut' s deep-sea rendezvous, the first time two submersibles had ever accomplished such a feat, remained secret.

The same day that General Wilson received Guest's report, he sent three nuclear weapons experts to the Fort Snelling to look at the Alvin photographs. One man worked for the Atomic Energy Commission; the other two were EOD officers who had several years' experience with the Mark 28.

The weapons experts showed the Alvin crew photos of a Mark 28 bomb, and they recognized it immediately as the object they had seen. “That's it!” the crew said. The weapons team then examined the photos that Wilson had taken underwater. Although the parachute had wrapped itself around the object almost completely, the experts saw what appeared to be a lift lug. They also recognized the parachute as the right type for a Mark 28. Convinced that the Alvin crew had seen the bomb, the weapons experts took a boat to the flagship to tell Admiral Guest.

On board the USS Albany, the experts found Guest resistant to their news. “It is the opinion of my team that they had difficulties in convincing CTF-65 of similarities between the two sets of photographs,” wrote General Wilson in a secret telegram to his Air Force superiors the next day.

“Offers by my EOD team to assist in recovery operations and provide technical assistance met with cool reception.” Wilson promised to keep his superiors in the loop as new developments arose.

In the same message, Wilson also mentioned that both he and Guest had received marching orders from the embassy in Madrid. The identification and recovery of the weapon must be handled secretly. Only the embassy, working with the government of Spain, could make public announcements on the matter.

In Madrid, Duke was determined to keep the rest of this story under his control. If he played his cards right, the weapon recovery could become a proud moment for the U.S. and Spanish governments, an example of how well the two countries had worked together to tackle a tough problem. In the upcoming base negotiations, Spanish officials would remember how well the Americans had handled the accident, scoring points for U.S. negotiators.

But on March 17, two days after Alvin found the parachute, Duke's phone rang, and his vision of a smooth ride to the finish was shattered. The man on the phone was Harry Stathos, the Madrid bureau chief for UPI, who had just returned from a trip to Germany. On the plane, he had struck up a conversation with a Pan Am pilot, who had been out drinking with an Air Force colonel the night before. The colonel had told the pilot, who told the reporter, that the bomb had been found. Now Stathos asked Duke: Had it? Duke said simply, “No comment.” But the word was out.

Trying to nip this gossip in the bud, Duke decided to hold a press conference to announce the news officially. The ambassador was hosting a gala reception at the embassy that evening. He would talk to the press when the party ended. Staffers sent word to the press corps to assemble at the American Embassy at 1 a.m.

Meanwhile, Duke sent a telegram to the secretary of state. In light of the UPI news break, he said, he planned to make the following public statement: