Broken Arrow - How the U.s. Recovered Its Biggest Fumble (True Magazine, September 1966) (Palomares, Spain)

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No nuclear explosion occurred when our H-bombs fell on Palomares, but the diplomatic fallout was immense. For 80 dramatic days American prestige was at stake while we groped for la bomba " The morning of Monday, January 17, began no differently from most winter mornings for the 800-odd inhabitants of this hopelessly isolated vil lage on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Mid-January is the start of the winter tomato and bean crop here. It was about 10 years ago that some enterprising people came from Valencia and taught the villagers how to dig Wells to defeat the terrible coastal droughts and to raise tomatoes, beans and a little wheat in the irrigated fields. Before the tomatoes, Palomares had been one of those dying villages that one still finds in Spain; the old lead and silver mines in the region closed down a generation ago, and the men had either emigrated or just vegetated. But now things were better and at least the people were making a living. On this particular morning the Palomares farmers and the field hands were going through the normal routine of checking the village’s few tractors, drawing water where required for the cooperative irrigation system and looking after their cows, goats and sheep. The children had already gone women were washing clothes, straightening out the modest, whitewashed houses and feeding the scrawny chickens and the brown rabbits which are found in almost every Palomares backyard. Shortly after 10 o’clock, many of the villagers looked up into the blue sky out of habit. Every morning at that hour for more than five years, four fast moving little dots would appear high above the coast—two of them virtually merging with the two others—and then vanish. The dots were the pairs of American B-52 bombers and KC-135 jet tankers meeting to refuel over Palomares, and the villagers were so used to the planes’ punctuality that many would set their watches by them. This time, however, something suddenly occurred, something that was

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in protective suits field near Palomares. Frogman confers with the crew of midget sub Alvin which finally found the elusive bomb. In hours an emergency task force descended on the scene to plunge the village into the nuclear age and drasti cally alter the lives of its inhabitants. As a B-52 and its tanker flew over the low mountains northeast of the village, there was a muted explosion, then a flash of Are and, before those who saw it could realize what had happened, flaming debris started raining over Palo mares and its fields. Because of the speed of the aircraft and the prevail ing wind, the actual breakup of the big jets following their collision took place directly over the village. A burning wing section and an engine crashed 50 yards from the boys’ school, near the tiny Palomares church that stands at the crossroads. Twisted pieces of metal came down in backyards and between the houses that squat close together in the village but stand farther apart on the outskirts. The tail section of the B-52 buried itself in the sand of the dry bed of the Almanzora River east of Palo mares, a deserted area, but several engines and the cockpits of both aircraft fell in a semicircular pattern close to farmhouses beyond the west end of the village. Senora Esperanza Otero, who lives in one of these farmhouses and whose two children were at school, came running out into her yard when she heard the explosion. She saw the smoking debris raining down near the school. “I thought it was the end of the world,” she reminisced later. “I didn’t know where to go, where to run ... my thoughts were on the children.” On the other side of the village, 60 yards from the knoll where Eduardo Navarro Portillo, Palomares’ principal landowner, has his house, there was the thud of an explosion and acrid smoke rose in the air. The B-52 was carrying four hydrogen bombs and one of them, both its parachutes burned in the collision, had fallen against the side of a terraced hill. Its arming mechanism for a nuclear explosion was unconnected, L but the bomb had cracked on impact producing the f detonation of its 44-pound TNT trigger charge. An old i man who happened to be walking past the hill was it thrown to the ground by the explosion’s air blast but was not injured except for a powerful dose of fright. Elsewhere in the village, others had just as narrowly escaped death or injury. Padre Francisco Navarete ; Serrano, the 25-year-old pastor in the nearby village it of Cuevas del Almanzaro who is also in charge of the i: Palomares church, kept telling his people afterwards, “It was the Hand of God that was spread over you to protect you.” And as he was to remark later, church at- ; tendance in this religiously casual village went up . after the accident, even among the men. When the first moment of shock passed, people rushed toward the hills west of the village, beyond the Otero home where huge chunks of the aircraft had fallen. There, among pieces of the fuselage and en gines, they came upon the horribly smashed and burned bodies of all four KC-135 crewmen. Their f TRUE THE MAN'S MAGAZINE

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True Magazine article cont'd Gen. Delmar Wilson, left, and Adm. William Guest led the land-sea search that ended when CUHV (rear) recovered parachutes had not opened after they ejected—having presumably caught fire—and they died even before reaching the dust of the Palomares hills. The watch on the wrist of one of the crewmen had come to a stop Less than a half mile from the Oteros, near the walled-in cemetery on a hill where the singing of the birds was the only sign of life, another H-bomb split and detonated its TNT charge. A third bomb feli in the river bed without breaking. Between Palomares and the beach, the villagers found Maj. Ivens Buchanan, the B-52’s radar navi gator, alive but unconscious under the ejection seat to which he was still strapped. Capt. Charles J. Wendorf, the B-52 commander, was also saved by his parachute. With two other survivors from the B-52, he was picked out of the ocean by fishing boats in the area. Three crewmen from the bomber were killed. One of the fishing captains, a dashing Catalan named Francisco Simo Orts, made a notation on his map of the spot where he saw another parachute float down and sink immediately. This spot was five miles offshore, and the fact that Captain Simo marked it was to become a vastly important factor in the tense weeks that followed. Exactly how the earthshaking collision came about is still not fully known. We do know that at 10:22 a.m., January 17, the B-52 Strategic Air Command bomber, with four 20-megaton hydrogen bombs aboard, rammed the underside of the KC-135 jet tanker’s right wing. The two aircraft were flying close to each other at 30,500 feet to begin a standard refueling operation. Their speed was about 300 mph. The B-52, flown by Captain Wendorf, a 30-year-old SAC veteran with 2,109 hours at the controls of the big jet bombers, had left Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina along with another B-52 the day before on a routine alert flight toward Soviet borders. It was refueled in the late afternoon of Janu ary 16 over Zaragoza, in northern Spain. Now it was on its return flight rendezvousing with the tanker over the Almeria coast to take on fuel for the Atlantic cross ing back to Seymour. To meet Captain Wendorf’s plane, the fuel-laden KC-135 had taken off from the joint United StatesSpanish Air Force base at Moron, near Seville, in southwestern Spain. Its pilot was Maj. Emil J. Chapla, a much decorated, 43-year-old veteran of the Pacific and European campaigns in World War II. For both pilots and their crews the operation was as routine as a takeoff or a landing, though it called for flying skill at jet speeds to bring a bomber’s nose under a tanker’s tail so that a boom could be lowered and kerosene fuel fed into the thirsty giant. Not far away, at a visual distance, another KC-135 from Moron was simul-

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True Magazine article cont’d taneously refueling Captain Wendorf’s flight mate. A 60-knot northeasterly wind was blowing at 30,500 feet as Wendorf maneuvered his aircraft into position. This alone did not seem to pose undue problems. But for some reason the B-52 approached the tanker at what was de scribed as “an excessive closure rate of The boom operator of the second KC-135 suddenly saw a flash and an ex plosion and radioed the tower in Mor6n that a B-52 and a tanker had apparently collided. Moron immediately relayed the flash to the headquarters of the Sixteenth United States Air Force, a SAC unit, at the Torrejdn de Ardoz base near Madrid. Within minutes a far-flung search, rescue and decontamination operation was set in motion. Successively it involved the White House and the State Department, the American Embassy in Madrid, the Atomic Energy Commission, the United States Sixth Fleet, the Central Intelli gence Agency, the United States In formation Agency, the Bureau of Mines, an array of civilian specialists—and, con currently, the Spanish government, air force and navy. Altogether this enormous undertaking was known as “Operation Broken code name for nuclear accident procedureS. At stake were the international prestige of the United States and the reputations and careers of generals, admirals and diplomats. Costing an estimated $20 million (not counting the value of two destroyed and two dented hydrogen bombs), the operation called for the services of 18 United States Navy ships, an array of science-fiction-type underwater vehicles and other equip ment, and 3,500 men aboard vessels and ashore; the organization of a complicated airlift and the use of helicopters; and, finally, an extraordinary supply of imag ination, ingenuity and tenacity. The first fear of accidental nuclear ex plosion—a highly unlikely but theoreti cally not absolutely impossible event in a situation involving an accidentally dropped bomb—was removed within moments of the collision; the arming mechanism of the bombs had not been connected and if thermonuclear reaction did not occur at once, it would not occur at all. (The explosive power of a that of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had a nuclear detonation happened, there would have been total destruction in a radius of nearly 20 miles, and fire and radiation effects would have spread over much of Spain’s southeastern The first concerns of the American officials were to locate the bombs and re move them from Spain as expeditiously and quietly as possible. But, as it turned out, these hopes were quickly disap While the Air Force set its salvage operations in motion with extraordinary speed—the first aircraft from Torrejdn and Moron were flying towards Palo mares within 30 minutes of the first flash on the accident—the United States also faced the ticklish diplomatic task of in forming the Spanish government that four powerful nuclear bombs were lost somewhere in its territory. This responsibility was in the hands of Ambassador Angler Biddle Duke and of Lt. Gen. Stanley J. Donovan, the chief of the United States military mission in Spain. Mr. Duke, an affable and quick acting diplomat, rushed with his message to the Foreign Ministry. General Donovan, whose office is at the Spanish Air Ministry, hurried to inform the Air Minister, Lt. Gen. Josd Lacalle Larraga. Then he drove to the High General Staff to advise Capt. Gen. Agustin Munoz Grandes, the Chief of Staff and Vice-President of the government, of what had happened. In all cases, the Spaniards accepted the news with remarkable calm and matterof-factness. They took the view that it was a deplorable and worrisome acci dent, but that it was a risk Spain had taken in entering into agreements with the United States for the stationing of SAC aircraft at bases in Spain. From that moment on, Americans found the most complete cooperation—and an absolute lack of recriminations—on the part of the Spaniards. An American diplomat re marked later, “Can you imagine the hell that would have broken loose if we had lost those bloody bombs in France?” The first act of Spanish cooperation was to assist the advance party of Maj. Gen. Delmar E. Wilson, the commander of the United States Sixteenth Air Force at Torrejdn, outside Madrid. The gen eral had flown to San Javier, the nearest base to Palomares, aboard his T-39 jet as soon as he had notified SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, and assembled his Disaster Control Team. The D-C-T., a unit attached to every SAC base in the world, is called into action whenever an accident involving nuclear weapons has occurred. It is made up of some 30 officers and men, chiefly nuclear weapons specialists and radio activity detection and decontamination experts, equipped with special protective suits and gear as well as with “Pack One Like D.C.T. units everywhere, the Torrejdn detachment had been holding periodic exercises to prepare itself for a nuclear emergency. But as General Wil son said later, nothing quite like Palo mares had ever been rehearsed. After landing at San Javier, General Wilson departed with Spanish and American aides for the scene. It was a 118-mile drive to Palomares. By then a Spanish Navy helicopter had already surveyed the Palomares coast, directing the fishermen to the survivors in the water, and Capt. Isidor Calin, regional commander of the Guardia Civil, the national police, was in charge of rescue As General Wilson, a tall, white-haired pilot who had been associated with nuclear weapons from the early days of the Pacific tests, raced to Palomares to recover his bombs, the well-oiled Ameri can military machine was fully in motion everywhere in the world where special re sources were available. Radioactive decontamination teams and weapons’ specialists attached to the bases in Spain were mobilized within minutes for the flight to San Javier in what was the beginning of an impressive airlift operation. Men were scooped up in offices and air bases in Spain, France and West Germany and flown towards Palomares without time to pick up extra clothing or even toothbrushes. The Atomic Energy Commission’s offices in Washington and Los Alamos, New Mexico, were alerted for technical assistance as was the Spanish Nuclear Energy Board in Madrid. When it be came obvious the following day that one of the four bombs was missing and could have gone into the sea, the Sixth Fleet’s temporary headquarters in Naples, Italy, was ordered to set up a special recovery By early morning of January 18, Palo mares had fairly recovered from the shock of the previous day’s accident. Except for the American fliers there were no victims, and no damage was done to the village. The situation was now firmly in the hands of Captain Calin’s troopers and the United States Air Force. The Palomares villagers, …