The B-52 carried four Mark 28 hydrogen bombs. None of the crew knew what had happened to them. A full-scale nuclear explosion clearly hadn’t occurred, and yet beyond that, little was known. A Disaster Control Team from the SAC base in Torrejón, Spain, arrived in the afternoon and started to look for the bombs. Debris from the B-52 littered the ground for miles; much of it had fallen in and around Palomares. The village was so poor and remote that it didn’t appear on most maps of southern Spain. The roughly two thousand inhabitants lacked electricity until 1958 and still didn’t have running water.
At dusk, members of the Spanish federal police led the Disaster Control Team to the first bomb, which had landed southeast of Palomares, about three hundred yards from the beach. The weapon was remarkably intact. One of the parachutes had opened, dropping the Mark 28 onto soft, clay soil. Air Force sentries were left there to guard it overnight. A group of experts from Los Alamos, Sandia, and the Atomic Energy Commission, assembled by the Joint Nuclear Accident Coordinating Center in Albuquerque, were supposed to arrive the next morning.
The second bomb was spotted from a helicopter, almost twenty-four hours after the crash. What was left of the weapon lay in the hills above the local cemetery. Its parachutes hadn’t opened. And its high explosives had partially detonated, digging a crater twenty feet wide, scattering bomb parts, and spreading plutonium across the hills. The third bomb was found about an hour later. It had struck the base of a stone wall, amid a vegetable garden on the outskirts of Palomares. The hydrogen bomb had missed a farmhouse by about seventy-five feet. One of its parachutes had deployed, and some of the high explosives had gone off. Pieces of the weapon, charred explosives, and a cloud of plutonium had been blown into nearby tomato fields.
The fourth bomb couldn’t be found. Long lines of troops walked for miles, shoulder to shoulder, looking for it. Planes and helicopters looked for it. Hundreds of abandoned mine shafts, wells, and other holes in the ground were carefully explored for it. A month and a half after the crash, the Mark 28 was still missing, and the search of the countryside near Palomares was called off.
The little village had been overrun by reporters from around the world. At first, the Air Force refused to confirm or deny that nuclear weapons were involved in the accident. But the sight of “450 airmen with Geiger counters looking for nuclear material,” as Reuters reported, soon made the subject hard to avoid. Three days after the accident, the Air Force admitted that the B-52 had been carrying “unarmed nuclear armament,” stressed that “there is no danger to public health or safety as a result of this accident,” and failed to disclose that a bomb had been lost. As a small armada of American ships searched for it, headlines conveyed the growing anger and doubts about the official story: “SECRECY SHROUDS URGENT HUNT FOR MISSING A-WEAPON,” “MADRID POLICE DISPERSE MOB AT U.S. EMBASSY,” “NEAR CATASTROPHE FROM U.S. BOMB, SOVIETS SAY; ‘NUCLEAR VOLCANO’ IN SEA OFF SPAIN.” After weeks of bad publicity, the Pentagon finally acknowledged that a nuclear weapon was missing. The news brought to mind the plot of the latest James Bond film, Thunderball, and its underwater search for stolen hydrogen bombs.
The governments of Spain and the United States denied that the plutonium released by the two weapons posed any threat to the public. “There is not the slightest risk in eating meat, fish, vegetables from the [impact] zone, or of drinking milk from there,” Spain’s Nuclear Energy Board declared. The truth was somewhat more complex. Little research had been done on plutonium dispersal or the proper methods of decontamination. And the alpha particles emitted by plutonium were hard to detect outside of a laboratory. They traveled about an inch and could be blocked by a blade of grass or even a thin film of dew — making it almost impossible, with the available equipment, to determine exactly how much land was contaminated around Palomares. The Air Force had been caught unprepared for a weapon accident that spread plutonium. Portable alpha detectors had to be rushed to Spain from bases in other NATO countries, the United States, and North Africa. And the detectors often didn’t work.
Nevertheless, traces of plutonium were detected in the mile-long strip of land between the two spots where bombs had landed. The contamination extended through the village of Palomares into nearby tomato fields. Residents weren’t evacuated from these areas, and hazard control lines weren’t established, a report by the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA) later explained, because of “the politics of the situation.”
