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

In 1966, JEN set up air monitors in and around the town and has regularly checked the contamination levels since then. It has also tested chickens, rabbits, tomatoes, and other crops. Every year, about 150 residents of Palomares travel to Madrid — all expenses paid — for complete physical examinations, including urine testing for plutonium. So far, at least 1,029 people have received more than 4,000 medical and dosimetric examinations. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, these tests show that about 5 percent of the people studied carry plutonium in their bodies. However, say the authorities, the increased plutonium causes no health risk. This is proven, they say, by the fact that the residents of Palomares have shown no increase in illnesses or deaths that might be caused by plutonium ingestion.

Unfortunately, neither CIEMAT — the successor to JEN — nor the DOE has made these medical results public. Villagers who visit Madrid for screenings are given detailed printouts listing their weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol but are never told anything about the plutonium that may or may not be in their bodies. Only one small study examining the villagers' long-term cancer rates has been published. It found that the cancer rates in Palomares were no higher than those in another Spanish town with a similar population.

Nevertheless, the accident continues to haunt the village. In the late 1970s, a large irrigation pool was built next to the area where bomb number two fell and cracked open. This area, which also served as the staging ground for loading the contaminated soil into barrels, remains the most contaminated zone. The heavy digging for the pool resuspended some of the buried plutonium, spiking contamination levels. Iranzo, who still ran the program at the time, insists that the levels, even at their highest, remained safe for the villagers.

In 2002, because of development encroaching on this same area, CIEMAT purchased about twenty-three acres of contaminated land in order to restrict use. It forbade farmers to plant in the area and eventually enclosed it with a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. (“Now they put a fence around it!” said Dolores Gonzalez, rolling her eyes.) Around the same time, DOE and CIEMAT created a new program to survey, once again, the contaminated areas around Palomares.

Between November 21, 2006, and February 22, 2007, CIEMAT technicians swept 71 million square feet of land — the equivalent of 660 soccer fields — in and around Palomares with radiation meters, collecting 63,000 measurements. The preliminary results, released in the summer of 2007, surprised the scientists. The plutonium contamination was higher and more widespread than they had suspected, and several areas they had considered clean were contaminated with americium, a product of plutonium disintegration. In April 2008, CIEMAT announced another surprise: the discovery of two trenches, about ten yards long and thirty yards wide, containing radioactive debris.

Little information on the trenches is available, though they appear to contain many “small radioactive metal objects” left by the Americans. Though the U.S. and Spanish governments had long known of the trenches' existence, they had not known their exact location.

The scientists insist that the radiation levels, though higher than expected, are still safe for residents.

But as a result of the 2007 findings, they widened the “contaminated” zone from 107,000 square yards to almost 360,000. They have also restricted construction in and the sale of produce from the most contaminated areas. They have not yet established a plan for remediation.

The townspeople, who stand to gain or lose much from land use restrictions, are not happy with the increased attention. Manolo and Dolores Gonzalez consider the new rules ridiculous. Manolo is not worried about the plutonium; after the accident, he says, he took a piece of the melted wreckage and used it for a paperweight, and he is healthy as a horse. “Everybody is healthy, no one is sick. The death rate in Palomares is below the national average,” said Manolo. Everyone just needs to be tranquilo.

Alvin and Aluminaut met, one final time, in 1969.

After Palomares, both subs received their share of good press, and John Craven predicted a boom in miniature submersibles. “Minisubs,” he told The Washington Post, “may some day be as common under the sea as planes streaking over it.” But, much as space colonies failed to flourish and astronauts never made it to Mars, this imagined world of minisubs and undersea habitats never emerged.

However, Alvin and Aluminaut both kept busy after Palomares, though their jobs were decidedly odd. In 1967 and 1968, Alvin dove along the continental slope for geology and biology studies and also surveyed the tops of seamounts for a new acoustic test range. By late 1968, it had completed 307 successful dives. Aluminaut, meanwhile, took scientists on expeditions, salvaged lost gear, made a film with Jacques Cousteau, and sampled outflow from a Miami sewage treatment plant.

Then, on October 16, 1968, a freak accident seemed to change the future of both subs. On that day, Alvin was preparing for a routine dive about ninety miles southeast of Nantucket. Its task was to dive near a deep-moored buoy to inspect the line holding it. During the launch, two cables securing Alvin's bow snapped, and the sub plunged forward. As its nose dunked under water, water poured into the open hatch. A few seconds later, someone yelled that the ballast tanks had ruptured. Alvin's three crewmen scrambled for the hatch and barely had time to escape before the sub went under. It sank in about sixty seconds.

Immediately, everyone on board Alvin's mother ship, Lulu, began to throw objects overboard — scrap metal, aluminum lawn chairs, a fifty- five-gallon barrel — to mark the spot. Lulu and her escort ship, Gosnold, took bearings and swept the area with sonar, trying desperately to pinpoint the spot where Alvin had come to rest.

The ships left the area with a pretty good sense of where Alvin had landed. But because neither ship could photograph Alvin on the bottom, nobody knew if the sub had landed intact or broken to bits.

WHOI eventually persuaded the Navy to send the USNS Mizar to sweep the ocean floor for Alvin.

In June 1969, Mizar found and photographed Alvin. The little sub sat upright on the bottom, about 5,000 feet deep, slightly embedded in the soft mud. It was intact except for a broken aft propeller.

Alvin, fully flooded, was estimated to weigh about 8,800 pounds in water. WHOI wanted its sub back, but no object as big or heavy as Alvin had ever been recovered from such depths. The salvage operation would be difficult and costly, and the Navy wasn't sure if it wanted to bother. When a team at the Office of Naval Research met to decide whether or not to salvage Alvin, the chief of naval research reportedly grumbled, “Leave that damn toy on the bottom of the ocean.” But eventually Alvin's advocates persuaded the Navy to fund the recovery.

Salvage experts agreed that the best way to recover Alvin was to place a spring- loaded nine-foot toggle bar in its open hatch. The bar would then be hooked to a lift line, which Mizar could winch to the surface. Experts considered all the submersibles that could dive below five thousand feet and plant the toggle bar and then chose Aluminaut for the job. The assignment was a coup for the Aluminaut team. It got them a fat government contract and allowed them to rescue the sub that had upstaged them in Spain.

On August 27, 1969, Aluminaut submerged about three miles from Alvin and was guided to the sunken sub by Mizar. In addition to her crew, Aluminaut carried a Navy observer and Mac McCamis. Still part of the Alvin crew, Mac had helped design the toggle bar. Since he knew Alvin as well as anybody, he was a good man to have along.

The job proved difficult. Aluminaut, not especially maneuverable, faced a delicate job while fighting a steady current. Also, the toggle bar, which was slightly buoyant, was difficult to handle. Bob Canary, the Aluminaut pilot, said that getting the bar into Alvin was like trying to thread a wet noodle into a soda bottle in a half-knot current. Time after time, Aluminaut carefully climbed the side of Alvin and its crew tried to maneuver the toggle into the open hatch. Time after time, they failed. Mac McCamis, watching from the wings, grew increasingly frustrated. He wanted to grab the controls and do the job himself. (Some Alvin veterans say he did just that, an account flatly denied by the