Broken Arrow - Palomares Learns to Love the Bomb (the New York Times Magazine, February 20, 1966) (Palomares, Spain)

Page 1

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Learns to Love By TAD SZULC AT 10:16 A.M. of Monday, Jan. 17, (the day of Saint Anton the Abbot, a fact that has been frequently discussed in recent days), Miguel Castro Navarro, a 37-year-old tomato farmer and owner of six cows, strolled to the shed next to his white washed house in the village of Palo mares to check the engine of his old red tractor, as he did every morning during the harvest season. Five hundred yards away, past the rutted piece of land that serves as the main village square and behind the shabby town meeting hall, Jose Moreno Fernandez was idly polishing the marble counter in his dark little bar as he awaited the usual early trade of villagers dropping in for a bracing drink of cognac to thaw the Beyond a shallow ravine where black and brown goats grazed lazily, Josd Molinero, the young schoolmaster of Palomares, finished writing a sen tence on the blackboard for the bene fit of his 51 elementary boy pupils at the local school, the only modern structure in the village and one of two here equipped with television And in the town of Vera, the re gion’s trade center, five miles away, Capt. Isidore Calin of the Civil Guard, the relatively new police commander of the area, was beginning to thumb boredly through the routine report of petty occurrences in his jurisdiction, mainly weekend brawls born from too much beer, cognac or sol y sombrn, an It was a typical Monday morning in this remote and peaceful tomato growing and fishing district along the rocky coast of Spain's southeastern Almeria Province, at the far end of Andalusia, on the Mediterranean Sea. It was here that the Phoenicians founded their colonies and began ex ploiting silver and lead mines 12 cen turies before Christ, only to be fol lowed by warlike Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths and Moors, who were filially, chased out by the Chris tian sovereigns in 1492. The next memorable event affecting this coastal zone came in A.D. 1962, when David not too far from Palomares, taking advantage of the fact that Almeria is enough of a parched desert to pass cinematically for anything from the Sahara to the Gobi. time that Miguel Castro Navarro, Captain Calin and a number of other people were to remember with singu lar clarity—there was a tremendous explosion high in the blue sky over the Palomares coastline. Immediately, a black-and-red min of flaming jet fuel poured over the village, its dry tomato fields and the sea. Huge chunks of incandescent metal, some of them bigger than the average Palo mares house, plummeted to earth with such force that it subsequently took bulldozers to dig them out What had happened was that a Strategic Air Command jet bomber, engaged in wide alert, had collided with a tanker plane while refueling in midair. ^S Miguel was to remark later, the world was coming to an end.” How awesomely close to the truth he had been at that bewildering moment became clear when it turned out that in the debris that rained on the area of Palomares — whose name means They are authoritatively believed to have been hydrogen bombs of 25 megatons each—a total of 5,000 times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, and presumably enough to have obliterated the whole southeastern corner of Spain. They did not explode, and three which fell on land were re covered within 24 hours. The fourth was thought to have fallen into the sea and remained missing for long weeks despite an intensive and im first publicly known instance of a nuclear weapon being actually lost. On the morning of Jan. 17 the concharts at Torrejon de Ardoz, 10 miles outside Madrid, and Mordn, the joint base near Seville, showed this: 68th Bomb Wing at Seymour | Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina, carrying nu clear weapons on a flight to was to be refueled over the coast of southeastern Spain by a KC-135 tanker belonging to the 910th Air Refueling Squadron from Bergstrom Air Force Base in Texas, but cur rently stationed at Moron. The aerial refueling of SAC bombers is a delicate though routine operation in which a long boom with the fuel line is extended from the tail of the tanker to the nose of the B-52. The two jets then fly only yards apart. Suddenly, at 10:16, the con trollers lost radio contact with the two aircraft. They assumed an accident, and within min utes they had confirmation. [ The pilot of a Spanish Air ] Force Junker transport, on a paratroop training flight from | Murcia, had seen the collision and radioed his tower. Imme diately, the Spanish Air Force jon. The 18th did not waste With the disturbing knowl edge that nuclear bombs were aboard the B-52, Maj. Gen. Delmar Wilson, commander of the 16th, rushed out of his of fice with a few officers and men to his C-54 and took off | for San Jiavier, the nearest ! field to the crash area. Simultaneously, word went j out to SAC headquarters in Omaha, Neb., and to Washing ton, and a vast search-andrescue project, which has been named Operation Broken Ar row, was under way. Sixth Fleet ships in the Mediterra nean were ordered to steam toward Palomares. Aircraft in the United States, France, and West Germany were dis patched to Spain with men At Torrejon and Moron, of ficers rounded up their noncoms and men and packed them into aircraft and blue Air Force buses for the dash to Palomares. They were not given time to collect extra clothes or even toothbrushes— which were later delivered to

Page 2

The New York Times Magazine I his office at the Air j Ministry in Madrid, Lieut. Gen. Stanley Donovan, the officer responsible for all United J States joint military operations I in Spain, received the word, | and rushed to Torrejon to take j advised the United States EmJ bassy by telephone of the acci- (dent. Joseph Smith, the official J in charge of military liaison, ran to the office of AmbassaI dor Angier Biddle Duke on the I fifth floor with a typed, slip of paper giving the first deI tails. As in Torrejon, the I awareness of the implications J of a nuclear crash was instant I at the embassy. Mr. Duke, however, was de livering a speech to a business association downtown, and Mr. | Smith found in the office only Timothy Towell, the Ambassa dor's young special assistant. The two men consulted quick ly and decided that they would set out for the business asso ciation in separate cars, hop ing to locate the Ambassador. The Spanish Air Force knew of an accident, but it had no particulars, and the Spanish Government had to be advised I immediately of the real mean- | ing of what had occurred. When Mr. Smith reached the j bassador Duke was finishing the front row and stared inj tently at him, hoping to catch his eye. Mr. Duke, an affable who served as chief of protoj nedy and Johnson, recalled later: “I knew that something was wrong when I spotted Joe staring at me so hard.” I As soon as he finished speakj ing, the Ambassador went to la side room with Mr. Smith j and was told of the nuclear I crash. The two raced in the Foreign Ministry, a few blocks away. There, it turned out that Foreign Minister Fernando Ma ria Castieila y Maiz was away, attending a funeral. AH other top officials were gone, too. In desperation, Mr. Duke went I to see the assistant chief of protocol and informed him of the nuclear accident. The of ficial said, “Hold it, let me | produced the Under Secretary jof Foreign Affairs, to whom Jthe Ambassador repeated the Back at the embassy, Mr. Duke found in his office a meeting of his aides with offi cers of the 16th Air Force, who had brought along a copy of the SAC emergency proce dures for a nuclear accident. Further measures were agreed upon for coordination with the at once—was for an end to nuclear flights and refueling over Spanish territory, a seri ous complication for the SAC operation. Further repercus sions are likely. The U.S. Em bassy in Madrid already has had its first post-Palomares In Palomares, as soon as they had recovered from their first shock, : Miguel Castro Navarro and scores of his J friends ran into the fields to look for survivors. Captain \ Calin was also on the scene with his green-uniformed civil guards from Vera. They had rushed to Palomares in Land Rovers and now had fanned out over the tomato fields, trying to put out the fierce fires with dirt they scooped with spades and buckets. They found no survivors. Captain Calin came upon the bodies of two fliers who had plummeted to the ground after their parachutes failed to open. The captain remembered look ing at their wristwatches; the hands were stopped at 10:16. Five other bodies were found later, bringing the fatalities to seven, including the whole fourman crew ot the tanker plane. But fishermen from the lit tle port of Garruoha, three miles away, set out in their boats when they saw five para chutes — four white, one col ored—floating down to the sea after the crash. They rescued four crewmen from the B-52. The colored parachute eluded them, but Francisco Sima, mas ter of the Manuela Orts, noted where it sank—about six nau tical miles offshore, in a depth of about 2,300 feet. The first assumption was that it carried the lost bomb. When the planes collided, a number of objects had been dropped by variously colored presence of mind in marking on his map where one of the colored parachutes went down may have been all-important. He gave his information to believed that this colored par achute did indeed carry the search proceeded on that as sumption. But after a month of operations some experts suggested that, conceivably, the lost hydrogen bomb may be on land. The three other bombs, each only about four feet long, fell each embedded in a shallow crater. One of them cracked its lead casing on landing, re leasing a low amount of radio activity, confined to the im mediate area. Thus, it was easy to locate all three bombs. One theory about the fourth bomb was that it fell on land without a parachute. It would have buried itself deeply, elud ing any tracking for radioac tivity, which cannot be de tected beneath six inches of sand or topsoil. The result would be the same if the bomb buried itself in the sandy bot tom of shallow waters near As far as the villagers and the civil guards were con cerned, putting out the fires and rescuing the surviving fli ers marked the end of the ac cident To them, it had been a tragedy they had witnessed and there seemed to be no rea son that their lives should be come any. further intertwined with the crash. The villagers hoped to collect damages for the burned crops in the impact area and that, they thought, would be that What they were to discover was that the drama of Palomares had only begun. T- first thing that the Air Force did upon arrival at Palo mares was to clamp down an lid. Not until the third day after the accident—after the international press had point ed out that a nuclear bomber might naturally be presumed to be carrying nuclear bombs Even that statement did not officially confirm that the “nu clear armament” was hydro gen bombs. The point was that, being "unarmed,” the things implying that the nuclear de terrent had proved itself, the hard way, no danger to any Yet, some four weeks after the crash, when the Navy was letting it be known that It was missine’ bomb lay, official Reporter: “Can you tell me I know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you | think we are looking for." The news blackout extended I even to the cause of the crash. The reason may never be known; neither plane carried a as commercial let airliners do. the Torrejdn air base, are un-| derstood to have told investi gators they have no idea of| no warning, no known mal-J function in their craft before! ESPITE the security, the I story of the aftermath can be assembled — much of it from | eyewitnesses, drop by drop: U.S. Air Force personnel be gan arriving in Palomares the | afternoon of the day of the | crash. Helped by the civil! guards, they sot up restricted areas in the fields where to matoes were waiting to be picked. The villagers were told they could not enter the fields ] in an area of three square miles where red pennants were posted on long sticks. They were not told why. The police said simply, “Stay away from the fields,” as Miguel Castro Then the villagers saw Amer icans, wearing green face masks and carrying strange objects, combing the fields, burning tomatoes and beans. They still were not told—that i the masks were for protection I against radiation, that the I strange objects were Geiger I counters and alpha oscillator | counters and, above all, that Palomares was under suspi cion of radioactive contami The reason, of course, for these initial precautions was that one of the three bombs that fell in the Palomares fields did suffer a cracked dioactive leakage from the watermelon - shaped critical mass in its core. After the remains of the crashed planes had been hauled away, Air Force tire trucks came in to spray the rutted tracks with jets of water. Some of the to mato crop was carefully de stroyed by Air Force radiation I teams. And, as late as the third week after the crash, Air Force men were scooping

Page 3

The New York Times Magazine Both U.S. radioactivity teams and the Spanish Nuclear En ergy Board, which have been working together, indicate that no dangerous levels of radia tion have been recorded among Palomares villagers or the civil guards, some of whom have been undergoing blood and urine tests. If there is a victim of the Nuclear Age irt Palo mares it may be a young ar chitect who happened to be in the village that day and rushed to see what had fallen | from the sky. Coming upon the small crater made by one I of the bombs, he knelt to look | inside, and immediately felt a burn above his left knee. “It never crossed my mind I was staring at a nuclear bomb,” he i said later, but the dark red burn, the size of a dime, has made him the object of in tensive studies by American_ and …