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

of the ship to hold the Mizar steady.

The captain refused, saying he could maneuver his ship without help. Moody gave up, and the lift got under way.

The Mizar's crew snagged the floating buoy tied to the anchor and the POODL. They jettisoned the buoy and attached the lift line to the ship's winch. Moody and Jon Lindbergh stood by the Mizar's moon pool to watch the operation. Guest and members of his staff waited in the ship's laboratory, watching the instrument panels. At about 7:30 p.m., Mizar's winch began to turn. Guest started to pray.

After about an hour, the instruments noted a slight strain as POODL rose off the seafloor. Fifteen minutes later, the rope took a heavy strain: the anchor had cleared the bottom. Slowly, the winch turned. The line grew steadily more taut, but the instruments showed that the strain was not severe.

Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. The instruments showed another strain. The bomb had lifted off the bottom.

Three minutes later, the instruments jumped. Moody and Lindbergh, watching the line, saw it suddenly go slack. Staring at the loose line, Lindbergh felt a terrible sinking feeling. Moody thought,

“Oh, shit.”

The winch took another long hour to reel in the anchor. The line below the anchor — the one that had been attached to the bomb — ended in a frayed stump. The bomb itself was gone. Looking at the mangled rope, Lindbergh guessed that about three fourths of the strands had been cut cleanly on some sharp object. The rest had just split.

Moody later discovered that Mizar had, in fact, drifted off course while raising the bomb. The captain had cut power while the winch turned, sending the ship drifting toward shore and likely dragging the bomb upslope before lifting it. But it's not clear if Mizar's drift snapped the line. The line could have fouled on the anchor flukes, rubbed on a sharp rock, or even cut itself on the POODL. Perhaps the nylon line was too prone to splitting or this particular line was defective.

Nobody ever figured it out for sure.

McCamis and Wilson were eating dinner when they heard the bad news. “Oh, boy,” said Mac. “Now we got to go find it again.”

Alvin needed a battery charge and repairs to her ballast system and couldn't dive again for almost a full day. The admiral ordered Aluminaut to head down and look for the bomb. Several times, Mizar reported that the sub passed within 100 feet of the weapon's former position, but the Aluminaut crew saw no sign of it. After five hours of searching, they were ordered to surface to avoid disturbing the bottom further. When Alvin returned to the weapon site on the evening of March 25, the bottom was scored with deep gouges. “The slope looked [as] if it had been torn up by bulldozers,” said Mac. The pilots found chunks of stone, clay, and mud, but no bomb.

The broken line seemed like a small mishap — an unlucky break rather than a tragedy. The recovery team hadn't moved the weapon far from its original resting place, and they knew where they had dropped it. How far could it have gone? Surely, the subs would soon find it again. So, as Task Force 65 combed the ocean floor, the embassy staffers didn't panic. Instead, they continued to argue about how to display the bomb when Guest finally brought it up. Ever since word had leaked out that the bomb had been found, an international chorus had been offering suggestions and making demands.

The Soviet newspaper Izvestia called for an international commission to verify the discovery, witness the bomb raising, and judge if the bomb had leaked any radiation. U.N. Secretary General U

Thant privately suggested inviting the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) to verify the recovery. American officials balked at both suggestions. The Soviet Union was a member of the IAEC, and the military certainly didn't want a mob of Communist scientists poking around its top secret weapon.

There was still the question of logistics, as well. The embassy wanted Duke, Spanish Vice President Munoz Grandes, and other VIPs to witness the actual bomb raising. Wilson opposed this idea: the bomb might be dangerous and should be rendered safe before VIPs showed up. Should he keep Munoz Grandes, the number two man in Spain, waiting in a tent, maybe for days? Guest agreed.

Military officials hated the idea of displaying the bomb in public. If they had their way, they would raise the bomb in secret, pack it into a box, and ship it back to the United States under cover of darkness.

Duke knew this was impossible. Finding this slender bomb in the depths of the Mediterranean had been a nearly impossible task. If the Americans didn't show the bomb to the world, nobody would believe they had really found it. Rumors would linger for years; the story of the accident would never die. So when Duke reached an impasse with Wilson and Guest, he broke protocol and called Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. A serious breach of diplomatic decorum, the call was the only time, Duke claims, that he directly crossed the divide between State and Defense. McNamara was a friend, and the ambassador was desperate. On the phone, Duke argued his position, and McNamara agreed that the find had to be verified. Together, the Departments of Defense and State ordered Wilson and Guest to come up with a plan that would satisfy everyone.

Developing a plan for public display soon seemed less urgent, however. As one day stretched into another with no sign of the bomb, Guest's hope faded. Days passed. Then a week. The bomb seemed to be hiding.

Among the members of Guest's staff, the tension ramped up a notch. Red Moody felt personally responsible. The dropped bomb had been an accident, but Moody had played a large part in the recovery operation and shouldered his share of the blame. The mood on the USS Albany was bleak.

“Here we were in the ninth inning, and the score is zero to zero,” said George Martin, a Trieste pilot who had been sent to Palomares to augment the task force. “And the fans — we'll call that the world opinion— was also at zero.”

The crew of the USS Albany, already operating at a higher state of readiness than usual, responded to the heightened tension. The flagship carried long-range TALOS missiles, which could deliver either conventional or nuclear warheads. Usually, the crew armed the missiles with conventional warheads. But on March 29, the gun crews aboard the Albany made the switch. The flagship now bristled with nukes of her own. The task force was ready for anything.

At the end of March, Duke received a secret cable from the Departments of State and Defense regarding nuclear overflights of Spain. The tone was urgent: Because arrangements for overflights of Austria, Switzerland, France or Morocco with nuclear weapons for various reasons not feasible, resumption such overflights of Spain extremely important not only in maintaining our tactical alert and dispersal plans but also in providing nuclear logistics support to forces in Mediterranean area. Restoration US overflights could have favorable in fluence elsewhere in world where such flights involved. Early approach Spanish authorities is desirable to seek resumption such flights through Spain…. Would like views on timing such approach in light current request on three squadrons and in relation recovery B-52 weapon.

Duke responded in a secret cable to the secretary of state. His tone was patient but annoyed, like a father explaining, once again, why his son could not play baseball in the living room. He reminded Washington that the Department of Defense had just asked the Spanish government to station three fighter plane squadrons at Torrejon and had considered transferring France-based Air Force engine facilities to Spain. He pointed out that the United States soon faced the problem of extending, and probably renegotiating, its valuable base agreement with the Spanish government. And, in case anyone had forgotten, there was still a hydrogen bomb lost somewhere in the Mediterranean.

“Timing of our demands, with an eye to international context, is important,” he wrote. “It would be patently inopportune to raise subject of resuming overflights carrying nuclear weapons before lost weapon safely recovered and entire incident well behind us.” Guest assumed that the weapon now rested upslope from its former position. Mizar, he guessed, had probably been dragging the bomb uphill before it lifted off the bottom. Bolstering this theory, when Alvin went down to look, the crew found a track leading up the slope. Everyone hoped that this track, like the one before, would lead them to the bomb.

But it didn't. And after a few days of fruitless searching, the Alvin pilots began to imagine a different scenario. They suspected that the uphill track had been dredged by the dragging anchor, not the bomb. Maybe the bomb had dropped into its old track and skidded down the slippery slope. The Alvin pilots wanted permission to search downhill.