The United States promised to decontaminate Palomares. But guidelines for removing plutonium after a weapon accident didn’t exist. Nor did criteria for determining safe levels of plutonium in the environment. Almost four thousand truckloads of contaminated beans, cabbages, and tomatoes were harvested with machetes and burned. About thirty thousand cubic feet of contaminated soil were scraped from the ground, packed into steel drums, sent to an AEC facility in Aiken, South Carolina, and buried. The soldiers who cleared the fields and filled the drums were given surgical masks. According to the DNA report, the masks offered no protection against radiation hazards and served mainly as a placebo—“a psychological barrier to plutonium inhalation.” To reassure the public and encourage tourists to visit southern Spain, the American ambassador brought his family to the beach near Palomares, put on a bathing suit, invited the press to join him, and took a well-publicized swim in the ocean, not far from where the hydrogen bomb had landed.
Randall C. Maydew, head of the aerodynamics department at Sandia, was recruited to help look for the missing bomb. His group had designed the parachutes and casing of the Mark 28. Before Maydew left for Spain, his friend Bob Peurifoy gave him a tool to aid with the search: a forked stick, like the divining rods used by dowsers to find water. Maydew and his team tried to ascertain where in the sky the two planes had collided. They performed reverse trajectory calculations — based on where the three bombs and the B-52’s engines had hit the ground — and decided that the crash had happened somewhere within a circular, mile-wide patch of the sky, two miles from the coast, at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. Given that location, the prevailing winds at the time of the accident, the discovery of the missing bomb’s tail plate on the beach, and an assumption that its parachutes had opened, Maydew’s team pointed to an eight-square-mile area in the Atlantic where it had most likely landed. A few days later, their conclusions were supported by a Spanish fisherman, who claimed to have seen a “stout man,” attached to a large parachute, fall into the water there.
Ships, planes, helicopters, underwater television platforms, more than one hundred deep-sea divers, and four manned submersibles — Deep Jeep, Cubmarine, Aluminaut, and Alvin — searched the ocean for weeks, as Soviet vessels lingered nearby. “It isn’t like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Rear Admiral William S. Guest, the commander of the operation, said. “It’s like looking for the eye of a needle in a field full of haystacks in the dark.” On March 15, the crew of the Alvin spotted the bomb, wrapped in a parachute, at a depth of roughly half a mile. Nine days later, while it was being pulled from the sea, the line snapped — and the bomb disappeared again. The search resumed, another week passed, and Alvin found the bomb a second time. Aside from a small dent on the nose, it looked fine. The second attempt to recover it went smoothly. Having endured two and a half months of bad press, the Pentagon invited reporters aboard Admiral Guest’s ship to show off the weapon, which sailed past them on the deck of another ship, proudly displayed like a prizewinning fish that had just been caught. Although the United States had deployed thousands of hydrogen bombs during the previous decade, this was the first time the American people were allowed to see one.
After the Palomares accident, the government of Spain prohibited American planes from carrying nuclear weapons in its airspace. The SAC base in Torrejón was handed over to NATO, and members of President Lyndon Johnson’s administration debated whether to end the airborne alert. It now seemed risky, expensive, outdated, and unnecessary. The kind of surprise attack that Pentagon officials had feared in 1960 no longer seemed likely. And as a nuclear deterrent, the twelve B-52s on airborne alert weren’t as intimidating to the Soviets as the roughly 1,600 ballistic missiles in American silos and submarines. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the new commander of SAC, General John Dale Ryan, insisted that the airborne alert was crucial for the national defense. President Johnson decided to continue the alert for the time being, but reduced the number of daily flights to four.
