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Declassified record · U.S. Department of Energy

Broken Arrow - Cut Cable Sends H-Bomb to Bottom (Albuquerque Journal, March 28, 1966) (Palomares, Spain)

Dated
Mar 28, 1966
Document type
Newspaper article
Length
1 page
Open the original scanArchive record OSTI ID 1084980 · public domain

Document text

Machine-read from the scan, so expect some errors. Lines that couldn’t be read are left out.

Page 1

Freak Salvage Accident Cut Cable Sends PALOMARES, Spain (XJPI)-^-' The steel cable bringing a missing nuclear bomb fromliSOO feet below the Mediterranean surface was accidentally cut Sunday, sending the bomb plum meting back to the bottom. The freak ^accident shattered hopes for a quick recovery of the bomb, lost almost 10 weeks ago in the' crash of a B52 bomber, and presented the U.S. Navy salvage teams with an eveij more difficult An official Navy communi que-issued Sunday night said an anchor being used in the recovery operations became entangled in. the cable and cut it as it, was lifting the warhead to the surface. Infonned sources said: twosimilar cable Reparations oc curred beiore, but this was the first officially - admitted U.S. sources said it was not immediately known whether the anchor which .foiled the recovery attempt belonged to one of the 12 U.S. Navy ships of the buoys which marked it. U.S. officials declined to say whether the thermonuclear weapon rolled down into a which in the last few days ap peared to be ready to swallow it along with hopes of bring ing it to the surface. The best hope of retrieving the bomb apparently lay in a ontrolled Unmanned Recov ery Vehicle (CURV) expected to be ready by Tuesday. The Navy has used it at the naval ordnance testing station at Pasadena, Calif., to recover errant torpedoes. The CURV was flown in from the United States last week. Since then, it was tested on steep slopes and canyons off the southeastern coast of Spain, where it proved it can go down to tremendous depths and stay there for unlimited