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

At a meeting with Guest, a member of the admiral's staff raised the idea of letting Alvin look downhill. They even sweetened the pot by encouraging Guest to ride along as an observer. Admiral Guest turned down the offer: there was no way he was diving in a submersible, especially one built by civilians. But just to get the Alvin pilots off his back, he agreed to let them search downslope.

And he suggested that George Martin, who was standing nearby, take his place as observer.

On the morning of April 2, Alvin dove again, with Rainnie, McCamis, and George Martin inside.

The sub had cruised down to about 2,800 feet when Mac spotted an anomaly — a clod of dirt that seemed out of place. Nearby, they saw some more dirt that looked oddly displaced. Then, suddenly, they saw a parachute, still tightly wrapped around an object that they knew was the bomb. They had been searching for just over a half hour.

The elated crew announced their find to the surface and settled in to wait for another rendezvous with Aluminaut. As they had suspected, the bomb and chute had slid downslope, landing about 120

yards south of its previous position. It was deeper now — resting at about 2,800 feet — but lying on a gently sloping plain that seemed far less precarious. George Martin marveled at the sight; this long-sought object, so far under the sea. To commemorate the occasion, he pulled a 100-peseta note out of his pocket and asked his companions to sign it. Then he sat back, ate the peanut butter and jelly sandwich he had packed for lunch, and wrote a letter to his wife.

Red Moody heard a buzz on ship and asked what was going on. He was told that Alvin had found the weapon but it was wrapped tightly in the parachute and nobody knew if it was the same bomb or not. Moody laughed. “How many bombs do we have down there?” he asked. “Let's just go get her, but do a better job this time.”

APRIL

16. Hooked

Soon after Alvin found the bomb, a diver named Herman Kunz flew from the United States to Spain and reported to Task Force 65. Kunz was an expert in deepwater rigging and explosive ordnance disposal. He was also the quintessential Navy diver: hard-living, hard-drinking, and tough.

Kunz arrived on the USS Albany and headed down to his quarters, a cramped room already bunking five ensigns. Malcolm MacKinnon, the naval engineer and an old friend of Kunz, showed him the way. Ignoring the lounging ensigns, Kunz began to unpack. MacKinnon watched, stunned, as Kunz opened an aluminum suitcase to display twelve neatly packed bottles of Gilbey's gin, lined up square like soldiers at attention. “Herman!” said MacKinnon. “What the hell are you doing?” Both men knew that liquor — especially that much liquor was not allowed on a Navy ship. The ensigns looked over, undoubtedly with a mixture of interest and alarm. Kunz shrugged. “I thought I might have to spend time on the beach.”

Before leaving for Spain, MacKinnon and Kunz had visited the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) in Pasadena. The supervisor of salvage had told MacKinnon about a torpedo recovery device called CURV, which might be useful in Palomares, and asked him to check it out.

MacKinnon visited CURV and realized that the Navy might need this device in Spain. He told the technicians to prepare CURV for the mission and then headed to Palomares himself.

The engineers and technicians at NOTS had built CURV, which stood for Cable-controlled Underwater Research Vehicle, two years earlier because the Navy needed a better way to recover prototype torpedoes. To test a new torpedo, the Navy used a real weapon but removed the warhead and replaced it with an “exercise head” containing lead weights and pingers. Then it took the modified weapon to the test range off Long Beach and shot it at a target. If all went well, the torpedo completed its full run, using up all its fuel, and then dropped its lead weights. The loss of fuel and weights made the torpedo buoyant. Spent, it floated to the surface, where the Navy could recover it easily.

But test torpedoes didn't always work as planned. Often they sputtered before finishing their test run and, carrying their heavy load of fuel, sank to the bottom. With each sunken torpedo costing close to $100,000—and holding important information about the failure — the Navy couldn't just leave them there and so developed a crude way to recover them. It tracked the torpedo's pinger and, when it located its resting place, sailed a barge to the site. The barge had a moon pool in the center and four mooring winches, one on each corner. When the barge arrived at the torpedo, searchers moored the ship directly over it with three or four anchors. Then they lowered a rectangular frame containing lights, sonar, a wire noose, and a TV camera and looked for the lost torpedo. To move the dangling frame, the captain had to motor the entire barge back and forth. Eventually, if the searchers were in the right place, they would see the torpedo and try to snare it with the noose. The process was long, slow, and awkward; it could take days to recover one torpedo.

CURV resembled this old system in some ways. It consisted of a frame of aluminum tubing, which held sonar equipment, lights, cameras, and three propellers. On top rested four oblong buoyancy tanks, and off the front jutted an arm holding a metal hydraulic claw lined with rubber. The whole contraption measured about five feet high, six feet wide, and thirteen feet long.

To recover a torpedo, the Navy steered a ship to the site and lowered CURV into the water. But CURV didn't just dangle there as the barge swayed overhead. CURV was remote-controlled, attached to the surface ship with a thick umbilical cord. A surface operator, sitting at a console, could see the bottom through CURV's TV and sonar and direct its propellers with joysticks. The operator flew CURV to the lost torpedo, grasped it around the middle with CURV's claw, then carried it to the surface. If the torpedo was too heavy, the operator could jettison the claw and back away. The claw, attached to a lift line, could then be raised to the surface. Early in its career, CURV managed to recover an unheard-of four torpedoes in one day.

By the time the Air Force dropped four bombs over Palomares, CURV had been operating for about two years and had plucked up fifty-two torpedoes from as deep as 2,000 feet. The CURV team had mastered their job, but the device itself was still a work in progress, and the CURV group remained a small-scale, low-budget operation.

When the Navy requested CURV's services in Spain, the team welcomed another opportunity to show off their skills. If they were successful, it would mean more recognition and money for their project. An H-bomb, to them, was just a big torpedo, and they certainly knew how to recover those.

There was only one problem — the tether was too short.

CURV's umbilical cord, an inch-and-a-half-diameter cable that fed power and commands to the device, was about 2,000 feet long. But by March 15, when Alvin found the bomb at 2,500 feet, the Navy knew that CURV would have to go deeper. So the CURV team embarked on a crash program to lengthen its lifeline by splicing in an additional 1,000 feet of cable.

The splicing was tedious work. The cable contained fifty-five separate conductors, each of which had to be spliced individually. The team staggered the splices over about four feet of cable, then covered the wounded area with a gray, pliable goo used for sealing air ducts. (The team dubbed the material “monkey shit.”) Then they wrapped the area in black electrical tape, sealing the splices as well as they could. Larry Brady and George Stephenson, the CURV operators, spent several days on the splicing operation. When they finished, the splice was an ugly black blob. “It looked like a python had swallowed a dog,” said Brady. “Or a couple of dogs.” Dragging the device to a NOTS range, the CURV team ran a few test dives. The ugly splice held.

The cable now stretched 3,100 feet long — long enough for the job — but they couldn't go much below 2,800 feet and still maneuver. There were some other bugs as well: CURV's depth gauge didn't work well below 2,000 feet, and its altimeter, which measured CURV's distance from the bottom, didn't work at all. But on March 24, as soon as Task Force 65's first lift attempt failed and the bomb fell back into the Mediterranean, Admiral Swanson