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

distance from the chute), reported that the bomb had shimmied farther downslope, dragged by the two buoyed lines. The news injected new urgency into the operation.

Admiral Guest and his staff feared that the bomb might slip out of CURV's reach. They had to get that third line attached as soon as possible.

But just as the Navy got the second line to the surface on the morning of April 6, the weather turned sour. Twenty-two-knot winds whipped the sea into five-foot waves, conditions too dangerous to operate CURV. Admiral Guest looked at the recovery crews. Most of the men had been awake for more than thirty hours and looked like zombies. Since the seas were too rough to dive anyway, Guest stood them down until that evening.

Just before 9 p.m., sensing that a recovery attempt was near, Admiral Guest and his staff boarded the Petrel. Bad weather grounded CURV until after midnight. Around 1 a.m., CURV dove to attach the third and final line. The control shack was crowded. Members of Guest's staff, including the admiral himself, watched over Brady's shoulder as he flew CURV toward the target. Guest asked him to pull closer to the chute, to try to see the bomb. Since Admiral Guest was paying the bill, Brady indulged him. “We might get stuck,” he told Guest, “but we'll sure give it a try.” Brady steered CURV back and forth around the dangling bomb, trying to give Admiral Guest a clear view of the weapon. Suddenly he noticed that a switch on the control panel had flipped. It was the circuit breaker for the starboard thruster. Brady reached up, flipped it on, and tried to run the thruster. The circuit breaker popped again. Brady panned the underwater TV camera around, looking back over CURV's shoulder. The parachute had tangled in the starboard thruster. CURV was stuck.

Brady pointed at the TV and said, “We're fouled.”

Guest and his staff stared at the image on the screen. Then they stood up and walked out. Guest thanked his lucky stars that CURV was an unmanned machine, rather than a manned sub. Then he climbed the steps to the wardroom and gathered his staff. He had to make a decision.

The CURV crew waited in the control shack, killing time by playing cards. Eventually, a member of the CURV team came down from the wardroom, looking grim. You're not going to believe this, he told his colleagues. The admiral wants to cut CURV's umbilical cord, tie it off to a buoy, and retrieve the bomb later. The men in the control shack were shocked. They had two lift lines solidly in place; why not just raise the bomb?

The same argument flew about the wardroom. The atmosphere grew so tense that Howard Tarkington, the CURV division head, fainted from the stress. Guest had vowed not to make another lift attempt without three lines attached. Yet if they strained to free CURV, the only vehicle that could attach a third line, the bomb might be dragged out of reach. Guest wanted to cut CURV loose.

He turned to each member of his staff and asked his opinion. Red Moody and Brad Mooney argued against cutting CURV free. CURV, in a way, was the third line they were looking for. They should lift the bomb now.

Cliff Page, the admiral's chief of staff, agreed. Knowing that Mooney enjoyed a strong rapport with Admiral Guest and had excellent diplomatic skills — one Navy man called Mooney “the snake charmer”—Page took charge. He cleared out the wardroom, leaving the lieutenant and the admiral to slug it out. They stayed there, behind a closed door, for hours. “I tried to be as respectful as I could, but I was saying, ‘Admiral, this is dumb as hell to cut this thing loose,’” recalled Mooney. “‘It's totally enmeshed in there, and they can't help but lift it now.’” By early morning, Mooney had beaten the admiral down. At 5:02 a.m. on Thursday, April 7, Guest sent a message to General Wilson. The message said that Admiral Guest had a broken leg, code that the lift would soon begin.

Red Moody and Max Harrell, the commanding officer of the Petrel, had already started preparations. The two men went over every detail: they didn't want any lift lines snapping this time around. Harrell designed a system of blocks and pulleys that would haul the two lines up, distributing the load equally between them. He attached a dynamometer to measure the total lifting stress.

Both lines were wound around one capstan, ensuring that the ship would hoist both at the same speed. Moody made sure that the capstan was smooth, free from any imperfections that might cut the lines. A second capstan would wind CURV's umbilical cable. CURV, though hopelessly tangled in the chute, was slightly buoyant and didn't pose much of a lifting problem. But to keep it neutral during the lift, it had to be raised at the same speed as the weapon.

Harrell positioned the Mike boats that would hold Petrel steady for the lift. Looking at the weather, he knew that today would prove particularly difficult. April 7 dawned with little breeze and a calm sea, beautiful for a spring picnic but less than ideal for ship control. It was easiest to judge and hold position when a breeze or surface current offered a force to work against. With neither of these, Harrell's difficult job would be that much harder.

Guest and his staff gathered in the wardroom to watch the lift on CURV's video monitor.

Meanwhile, Moody cleared all nonessential personnel—“tourists,” he called them — off the Petrel's stern, or fan-tail. The only people allowed on deck were those actually recovering CURV or the bomb. Moody wanted to give the recovery team space to work, not necessarily protect the men who hustled belowdecks. Moody was certain the bomb wouldn't explode. But if it somehow did, it wouldn't matter if a man were abovedecks or below. As one EOD diver put it, there'd be nothing left but a greasy stain.

At 5:50 a.m., the Petrel began to raise the weapon. Guest worried most about the bomb lifting off the bottom. He had been told that when the bomb was within 100 feet of the bottom and 100 feet of the surface, vibrations in the nylon line could reduce its strength by as much as 75 percent. The admiral was not the only man in the wardroom worried about this possibility; one scientist paced back and forth with such a scowl that Red Moody and Herman Kunz had to take him outside and tell him to cheer up. Guest, powerless to do anything but wait, looked sick to his stomach. He turned to the man next to him and said, “I'd prefer combat any day to this.” As it turned out, the weapon came up so smoothly that they hardly noticed it leaving the bottom. For an hour and forty-five minutes, the capstans turned slowly, gently raising the weapon. Finally, the top of the parachute broke the surface. Two of Red Moody's divers jumped into the water to inspect the bomb. The weapon, they found, wasn't dangling below the chute but remained tangled about a third of the way up. The fact that they saw the weapon was a huge relief; for the first time, Guest knew he really, truly had the bomb.

The divers attached metal straps and hoisting lines to the bomb. Boatswain mates rigged the lines to the cargo boom on the Petrel's fantail. Then the divers cut CURV free from the chute, and the signal was given to lift. The Petrel hoisted the weapon clear of the water and swung it inboard.

Immediately, the EOD team swarmed the waterlogged weapon with radiation monitors. The readings were negative. The boom swung the bomb over the back of the ship and set it down. It was 8:46 a.m.

Nobody breathed easy yet. The Navy EOD team, joined by Air Force and Sandia experts, inspected the bomb as it sat on a pair of wooden chocks. The rough ride had battered the weapon. The tail section was torn and jagged, the parachute twisted and fouled, the nose dented as if punched by a giant fist. But the rest had remained intact, with a portion of the bomb rack still attached and little corrosion from its stay in the salty sea.

The EOD team began to render the bomb safe, dismantling key components to make sure it couldn't explode or release radiation. Carefully, they removed covers and disconnected cables in a specific sequence. The job went smoothly until about 10 a.m., when they tried to remove the thermal battery.

The pressure of the deep water had squeezed the battery into place, and it stuck stubbornly inside the bomb. The EOD diver in charge of the render-safe, Walter Funston, consulted the manual, which included instructions for this contingency. The manual said to drill a hole in the battery, insert a wood screw, and use the screw to yank the battery out. Funston turned to the Sandia expert standing nearby and asked if the battery configuration had changed. He was about to drill a hole into a hydrogen bomb and wanted to hit the mark. Getting the go-ahead, the team drilled a small hole in the center of the battery and inserted a three-inch wood screw. Several men tried to pull the battery clear, but it refused to budge. Funston had an idea. He hooked a short nylon strap to the wood screw and attached it to a shackle on the ship's bulwark. As he twisted the strap, the battery slowly eased out. At 10:15 a.m. the bomb was declared safe.

On the fantail, there were no shouts of joy, no claps on the back. Everyone was too tired. In the wardroom, the staff applauded, more with relief than excitement. Guest, nearly sick with exhaustion, said simply, “Thank God we finally did it.”

Someone cut up the parachute, handing out small strips as souvenirs. For the next two hours, the members of the task force congratulated one another and autographed the little pieces of parachute.

Then all those who could headed to their bunks.

As Brad Mooney walked toward his quarters, Herman Kunz leaned out of a doorway and beckoned to him.