BY 1946, J. Robert Oppenheimer was no stranger to nuclear secrecy. During World War II, as scientific director of the Manhattan Project, he had supervised America’s quest to build an atomic bomb from Los Alamos, where everything was secret. He was also present at the Trinity test site in July 1945, when the design for a plutonium bomb was secretly and successfully tested. So his appearance at a closed Senate hearing in 1946 to discuss nuclear matters was rather unexceptional.1
But his response to one senator’s question was a surprise, at least to the senator. When Oppenheimer was asked “whether three or four men couldn’t smuggle units of an [atomic] bomb into New York and blow up the whole city,” he responded politely, “Of course it could be done, and people could destroy New York.” Following up, the shocked senator asked, “What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?” Oppenheimer’s response was probably even more shocking, and certainly disheartening: “A screwdriver”—to open every crate or suitcase big enough to hold a bomb.2
A few years later, in the early 1950s, Oppenheimer sought help in giving the United States a better, more high-tech means of detecting a smuggled nuclear weapon than a screwdriver. He asked physicist Wolfgang Panofsky, another Manhattan Project veteran, to produce a top-secret study, which became known as the “Screwdriver Report,” on how to neutralize any enemy efforts to smuggle nuclear weapons or radioactive materials into the United States. The result was the discrete placement of radiation detectors at airports and ship terminals during the 1950s. Their primary accomplishment was detecting a woman smuggler who was carrying a hundred radium-dial watches in her corset.3
Another branch of the U.S. government would also worry about smuggled nuclear weapons in the early 1950s and beyond. On Thursday, August 30, 1951, the United States was fighting two wars—one hot and one cold. The hot war was being fought on the Korean Peninsula, the result of North Korea’s June 1950 invasion of South Korea. Truce talks had broken down and there was little prospect of a cease-fire.4 The Cold War, with the Soviet Union as America’s main antagonist, was being fought on every continent and in a multitude of ways—through diplomacy and propaganda, espionage and covert action, and the buildup of conventional and nuclear forces.
The Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic device in August 1949 had created the prospect that not only could the Cold War between the two superpowers turn into a hot one but also it could lead to atomic bombs exploding on American territory. Soviet Tu-4 bombers bearing the red Soviet star, on one-way missions, might drop their deadly payloads on the residents of New York, Boston, Washington, and other major American cities, leaving those cities and millions of lives in ruins.5 It was possible, however, that the Soviets might also employ more clandestine means of attack. Undoubtedly, the senator who asked Oppenheimer about smuggled nuclear weapons had Soviet agents in mind as the most likely smugglers.
And on that Thursday in late August 1951, in downtown Washington, D.C., Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Walter Bedell Smith, or his representative, was chairing a meeting of the Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC), whose functions included approving national intelligence estimates. Also attending were representatives of the intelligence organizations of the State Department, Army, Navy, Air Force, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Under consideration was a newly completed national intelligence estimate with a rather ponderous title—Soviet Capabilities for Clandestine Attack against the US with Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Vulnerability of the US to Such Attack (mid-1951 to mid-1952)—which examined how the Soviets might attack with stealth.6
Among the methods American intelligence analysts identified as options for the Soviet Union, should it wish to conduct a clandestine nuclear attack, were atomic bomb–carrying merchant ships and smuggling. “The delivery of atomic weapons into key harbors by merchant ships is feasible and therefore constitutes a serious threat,” they wrote. They also identified a number of factors that would “seriously hamper” the Coast Guard in detecting a hidden weapon—most importantly that “there is no device for detecting an atomic weapon within the hold of a merchant ship.” Further complicating the Coast Guard’s task was the Soviet operation of fishing trawlers similar to U.S. ships as well as the 140 Western ships under charter to countries in the Soviet orbit.7
An atomic bomb might be smuggled in whole, or broken down into relatively small components that could be brought into the United States over a period of time—with the components packaged so that “radiation detection would be most improbable.” Smuggling, whether of components or a complete bomb, could be accomplished in a number of ways. Shipments to Soviet diplomats in the United States, which were not subject to inspection by the Bureau of Customs, and not limited in size, could be labeled household effects but actually contain far more deadly items. Alternatively, bombs or their components might be smuggled in as commercial shipments.8
While customs inspectors had been alerted to watch for shipments with the weight and size characteristics of a bomb, the bureau “would have considerable difficulty detecting bomb shipments,” the U.S. intelligence analysts concluded. A third possibility, which was characterized as “well within Soviet capabilities,” was the smuggling of a bomb, particularly a disassembled one, into an isolated section of the United States. According to the estimate a smuggling operation could involve the transfer of a bomb from a Soviet-controlled merchant vessel or submarine to a small boat, which would bring it ashore. From there it could be loaded into a truck for assembly and delivery to the target area, where the truck might be parked and the bomb detonated. Yet another possible means of sneak attack was placing a nuclear bomb on a civilian aircraft used by U.S. or foreign airlines.9
The estimate also informed its readers that no coordinated overall plan had been completed for the detection and prevention of the smuggling of atomic weapons into the country at secluded points. It warned that “until such a plan is complete and put into effective operation, the US will remain vulnerable to this threat.”10
One attempt to reduce that vulnerability was the creation of “Committee B,” also known as the Committee on Countermeasures, in 1953. The group was a joint enterprise of the Interdepartmental Intelligence Conference and the Interdepartmental Committee on Internal Security—both of which reported to the National Security Council (NSC) until June 1962, when President John F. Kennedy transferred responsibility for oversight to his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Committee B’s mission was to “consider ways and means of safeguarding against the clandestine introduction of nuclear weapons.”11
The Intelligence Community also periodically produced new estimates concerning the threat of clandestine nuclear attack, estimates that reflected both continuity and change. In 1963, the community presented one in response to President Kennedy’s concern, in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, that Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) might be smuggled into the United States just as they had been smuggled into Cuba. The estimate was not reassuring. Nuclear weapons with yields up to three hundred kilotons “could be brought into the United States by a variety of means such as by ground or air transport across land borders or at points along U.S. seacoasts.”12
But the majority view in that estimate—that a Soviet clandestine attack of any sort was unlikely and if attempted would be only as a supplement to an overt attack—held through the 1960s and beyond. Problems the Soviets faced in carrying out a clandestine attack included getting any significant number of bombs to their targets without detection, the possibility of a leak or defection, and the amount of time the devices would have to be concealed before they were detonated. Yet there were always some skeptics among the nation’s intelligence agencies. In 1963 the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA, the nation’s foreign eavesdropping agency), the Air Force’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence, and the Joint Staff’s J-2 (the intelligence unit of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) argued that “as long as the Soviets have the capability for clandestine nuclear attack against selective important targets in the US, with minimal risk, there is not enough evidence to make the judgment that such an attack is unlikely.”13
One change in the estimates was in the evaluation of port security. The 1960 estimate stated that existing port security measures would probably prevent the employment of merchant ships for carrying nuclear weapons into U.S. ports (although use of fishing boats or similar small vessels was still viable). In 1968, a new estimate, prepared at the request of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reflected China’s having entered the nuclear club in October 1964. It noted that since China had no other means of attacking the United States with nuclear weapons, its leaders might consider clandestinely placing nuclear weapons on U.S. territory for deterrence purposes. The ultimate targets would be U.S. population centers. Then, in 1970, analysts for the first time suggested that a nation might consider a clandestine nuclear attack on the United States “as an act of deception designed to embroil the US with a third power.” One particular scenario, mentioned despite being considered highly unlikely, had China detonating a nuclear device on U.S. territory during a period of great tension between the United States and Soviet Union in the hope that the United States would strike back at the Soviets.* Another scenario had China constructing a bomb to appear to be of Soviet origin and then have it discovered by the United States so as to provoke a crisis between the two superpowers.14
During the Cold War the scenarios created by U.S. intelligence analysts—of Soviet or Chinese nuclear weapons hidden in the United States—never became more than unlikely possibilities. The United States never experienced the devastation of a clandestine nuclear attack or had to send out search teams in a desperate attempt to locate foreign atomic weapons hidden on its territory. But in the 1950s and 1960s the U.S. government would spend considerable time and expense trying to locate U.S. nuclear weapons after nuclear-armed aircraft had crashed.
On February 4, 1958, Maj. Howard Richardson, age thirty-six, and his two-man crew took off from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida in a Strategic Air Command (SAC) B-47 Stratojet, the country’s first swept-wing, multiengine bomber, and headed west toward New Orleans. Their plane was carrying a 7,600-pound, eleven-foot-seven-inch-long thermonuclear weapon—although it was not armed with the removable nuclear capsule required to actually produce a nuclear detonation. Richardson and his crew were participating, along with a second B-47, in a practice mission designed to simulate wartime attacks on targets in the Soviet Union.15
Usually the flight, an almost 5,000-mile round trip at speeds up to 600 miles per hour, included aerial refueling and the dropping of an electronic “bomb” before returning to its home base. On this run, Richardson turned north near New Orleans, flew to a point near the Canadian border, headed south for a bombing run on the radar scoring facility at Radford, Virginia, and then turned toward home. At this point the crew had been in the air for eight hours and had covered 4,000 miles. Headquarters then told Richardson he had entered friendly territory and would not be encountering any “enemy” fighters during the last several hundred miles of the flight.16
Unfortunately, three pilots at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina had been told that as part of the exercise, they could “attack” Richardson’s plane anytime before it landed in Florida. At the time, each of the pilots, including Lt. Clarence Stewart, were flying F-86L Sabre Dog aircraft. First introduced in 1956, the forty-foot-long planes could fly just fast enough (715 miles per hour) to break the sound barrier. At 12:09 a.m. on February 5, the alert shack’s horn began blaring. Three minutes later the planes were in the air, heading to intercept Richardson’s plane. But while the Air Defense Command’s radar had detected the second plane, it had missed Richardson’s B-47. Ground control therefore gave the pilots a target several thousand feet above and fifteen miles behind Richardson’s plane. As a result, Stewart descended while watching the other B-47 on the radar screen. When he looked up, he found the sky “filled with airplanes.” He rolled his plane to the right.17
Stewart’s maneuver couldn’t prevent a collision. Richardson and his copilot felt a tremendous jolt and witnessed a bright flash. Richardson could see that the far right engine had been bent to a thirty-degree angle while the right external fuel tank was missing. Meanwhile, Stewart’s fighter was without its left wing and then, after the fuel accumulation tank exploded, its right wing—although Stewart would manage to land his wingless plane safely, “in a little clearing in the biggest damn swamp in South Carolina.” Richardson took his plane down to 20,000 feet, reduced the speed, extended the flaps, and lowered the wheels to determine if a safe landing was possible. He headed for Hunter Air Force Base, outside of Savannah, Georgia. But repair work at the base had left an eighteen-inch drop at each end of the runway, and if his plane landed short, the landing gear and dangling engine could snag. As a result, Richardson was told, the bomb could be propelled through the cockpit and down the runway at over 200 miles per hour. He then decided to jettison the bomb in the Atlantic and, not long after telling SAC of his plans, let it loose into the water near Tybee Island, Georgia, before landing safely at Hunter. On April 16, 1958, after a nine-week search, which covered an area of three square miles, the Air Force declared the bomb to be “irretrievably lost.”18
A little less than eight years later, another U.S. nuclear weapon landed in the water after an accident—only this accident was far more devastating. Its immediate aftermath included seven U.S. airmen dead, four nuclear weapons on foreign territory, and a public relations nightmare not only for SAC but also for the U.S. government.19
At 10:22 a.m., on Monday, January 17, 1966, a B-52G bomber and KC-135 tanker aircraft collided over Palomares, a small remote village about a mile inland from the Spanish Mediterranean Coast. About fifteen hundred people, whose principal activity involved raising tomatoes, lived in the vicinity. The B-52G was piloted by Capt. Charles F. Wendorf, age twenty-nine, a 1958 graduate of Duke University. The captain’s crew included another five officers, and Tech. Sgt. Ronald P. Snyder, the B-52’s gunner. Also on board, as the B-52 was on airborne alert, were four nuclear weapons, each of which could explode with a force equivalent to 1.5 million tons of TNT (1.5 megatons), but they were not armed. Arming the weapon required the crew to activate two switches (a readiness switch and an inflight control switch) after receiving orders from higher authority.20
After twenty-three hours in the air, having departed Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina at about 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, January 16, the B-52G was scheduled to be refueled by a KC-135 stationed at the joint U.S.-Spanish air base at Torrejón, nineteen miles from Madrid. At the helm of that plane was Maj. Emil J. Chapla, a forty-two-year-old Ohio native who flew B-24 bombers in the Pacific during World War II. Also along for the ride were Chapla’s copilot, his navigator, and the boom operator, who ranged in ages from twenty-seven to forty-one.21
The B-52G had entered Spanish territory near the port of Cartagena and was flying, at an altitude of 30,500 feet, along the coastline toward what was known as the Saddle Rock Refueling Area, and Palomares. In preparation for refueling, Captain Wendorf began to reduce his plane’s speed, from its cruising speed of 600 miles per hour. Chapla had also cut his plane’s speed and lowered his KC-135 to enter a “racetrack” orbit twenty-one miles ahead of the approaching bomber, which was to edge up behind and slightly below the tanker. If nothing went wrong, the tanker’s forty-two-foot fuel boom would be lowered and connected to the B-52’s nose, refueling would be completed, and the two planes would go their separate ways.22
But something did go wrong. The B-52 came in too fast, at 275 miles per hour, and the top of its fuselage rammed the KC-135. A few seconds later the tanker was consumed by flames as its enormous load of fuel exploded. Both planes began falling to earth, breaking into hundreds of fragments as they did. The Associated Press reported that “school children walking to their classes heard the rending of metal, then watched as smoke clouds erupted from the big planes as they spiraled down, scattering burning wreckage over a wide area.” The four bombs, along with their parachutes, slid out through the bomb bay door. Miraculously, no one on the ground was killed by the debris, but the tanker had no ejection mechanisms and all four of its crew died as a result of the explosion. Three of the B-52 crew also perished, while the four in the aircraft’s forward section survived. Wendorf, Capt. Ivens Buchanan, the radar-navigator, 1st Lt. Michael Rooney, the copilot, and Maj. Larry G. Messinger, who had been serving as the relief pilot on the long flight, were able to parachute to safety.23
Word that there had been a nuclear accident, a “Broken Arrow” in Pentagon terminology, reached Washington—specifically, Col. Charles Burtyk, the duty officer at the National Military Command Center—at 5:35 a.m. A flurry of notifications, from the center and other sources, followed, as did orders. SAC’s chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Charles M. Eisenhart, informed Maj. Gen. A. J. Beck, the head of SAC’s Disaster Control Team, of the event. By 4:13 a.m. Omaha time, every member of Beck’s team had been awakened and instructed to get to the SAC airfield by five o’clock ready to board a plane for Spain.24
Also receiving notice of the accident, courtesy of the Air Force Nuclear Safety directorate, was the Joint Nuclear Accident Coordinating Center (JNACC), an organization that reported to both the AEC and the Department of Defense. It was described by one author in 1967 as “America’s nuclear fire station”: “if a reactor blew its stack, if a radiation laboratory had an accident, if an atomic-weapon storage depot caught on fire, if a train carrying uranium logs to a nuclear munitions plant was derailed, if a B-52 loaded for air-alert duty crashed with its cargo, [JNACC] would be the place to turn for emergency assistance.”25
JNACC headquarters, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, consisted of two rooms a few blocks apart. Inside those rooms were metal maps of the United States and the rest of the world. Magnetic markers showed the locations of nuclear emergency teams. A card index provided extensive details on the capabilities, current strength, and deployment of individuals and machines that might be called on to deal with nuclear accidents or disasters. Manning one of the two rooms were representatives from the AEC, while personnel from the Defense Atomic Support Agency manned the other.26
Experts from JNACC and two AEC laboratories, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and the Albuquerque-based Sandia Corporation, were sent to Spain, along with Air Force personnel, to observe the effort to locate the bombs and detect any signs of radiation. Among those arriving from Los Alamos were Douglass Evans, from the high-explosives division, and William H. Chambers, of the lab’s weapons division.27
Chambers, a native of White Plains, had graduated from Cornell University in 1943 and immediately entered the Army. Once the war ended, he returned to physics and received his doctorate from Ohio State. While there he coauthored two papers that appeared in Physical Review—“The Nuclear Magnetic Moment of Praseodymium141” and “Nuclear Gyromagnetic Ratios II.” In the course of his graduate studies Chambers met several physicists who had worked at Los Alamos during World War II. When he interviewed there in 1950, Chambers looked the facility over and thought it would be a good place to spend five years (he was still there fifty-seven years later). At the lab he became involved in weapons design work and, as a sideline, preparing explosive ordnance disposal manuals for America’s nuclear weapons. He recalls that the order to head for Palomares came from lab director Harold Agnew “in the midst of a midnight phone call.”28
Detection, location, damage limitation, and bomb disassembly were the primary responsibilities of the Air Force, including the Disaster Control Team attached to the 16th Air Force (headquartered at Torrejón) and the 7410th Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Squadron from United States Air Forces Europe. Sgt. Raymond Howe of the 16th Air Force arrived with a PAC-1S, the military’s standard monitor for alpha rays, an AN/PDR-39, similar to a Geiger counter, and a device (the “27-C”) that could detect beta and gamma rays.29
One objective was to keep even a single bomb out of the hands of the Russians, whose experts would examine the device to determine its electronic arming, firing, and fusing mechanisms. But the United States also did not want any of its hydrogen bombs to fall into the hands of friendly nations, particularly France. French President Charles de Gaulle was pressing his nuclear scientists to present him with a hydrogen device before the end of 1968.30
By the time the plane bringing Air Force and AEC experts to Spain landed, Air Force reconnaissance planes, including five RF-4Cs, one RF-101, and an RB-66, had obtained pictures of the wreckage. It does not appear those photos played a role in the detection of any of the bombs. The first was discovered on the same day as the accident by a member of the Guardia Civil, who saw something that appeared to be “a kind of weapon” lying in the soft sand near the river bed. The EOD men, who were trained to “render safe” such devices by disconnecting bomb components so a nuclear reaction could not occur, examined the policeman’s find for signs of damage. But it was too dark for them to proceed, so disabling the bomb had to wait until the following morning.31
The next day also brought the discovery of two more bombs. Within an hour after first light, the crew of a search helicopter had spotted a parachute with a metal tube protruding from the ground on a hill well behind the Palomares cemetery. The location of the third bomb also came from the Guardia Civil in the form of a story about a torpedo in a tomato patch. It was clear to Sergeant Howe that there had been a partial detonation of the bomb’s conventional explosives and that the detonation had shattered the connections in the bomb, eliminating the need for EOD personnel to disassemble it.32
In about twenty-four hours from the time of the accident, U.S. and Spanish authorities had been able to locate three of the four bombs. But locating bomb number four would be a far more difficult task. U.S. aerial reconnaissance missions produced plenty of photographs but none that showed the resting place of weapon number four. Hundreds of American servicemen searched the vicinity of Palomares, some armed with Geiger counters, but also came up empty. North American Aviation (NAA) offered to provide a device capable of detecting gamma rays from the decay of uranium and plutonium. On January 26, Dr. W. R. Laidlaw, the company’s vice president for research and engineering, arrived with the three thousand pounds of equipment, and the technicians to install it on a C-54 aircraft landed the following day.33
During four flights made between January 29 and January 31, five radioactive areas were discovered, with three of the detections considered to be the result of natural sources. Another hit was believed to be the result of the detonation of the conventional explosives on weapon number two. The fifth was judged to be the result of weapon number three’s explosives detonating or due to natural sources. While use of the detector was halted, other search methods—on land and in the air—continued. Those methods included almost every available PAC-1S detector, fifty-one of fifty-five, in Spain.34
According to an official history of the recovery operation, “sand, rocks, hills, ravines, every inch of this area of Spain was covered.” That history was referring to the search on land. But every inch in that area of Spain was also covered from space by the Corona spy satellite that had been launched on February 2. Dino Brugioni, a senior executive of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center at the time, recalls that “we didn’t see anything” in the images produced by the satellite. On March 3, Maj. Gen. Delmar Wilson informed SAC that “all land areas presenting even a remote possibility of success have been searched at least four times, and other areas have been covered seven or more times. Appraisal of all search efforts to date places increasing emphasis on the probability that the intact weapon went into the sea,” as had been suggested in a February 7 report by experts from the AEC’s Albuquerque office, Sandia, and the Air Force.35
Shifting the search to sea did not produce an immediate success, but it did yield success. Almost two months after Broken Arrow, the twenty-two-foot-long, 23,000-pound Alvin, a Navy deep-sea submersible vessel, located weapon number four, much of it covered by its parachute, resting in an underwater canyon 2,500 feet below the surface. One attempt to raise it, using an electronic recovery apparatus known as CURV (Cable-Controlled Underwater Recovery Vehicle), which had been developed in the early 1960s to recover test ordnance lost off California’s San Clemente Island, failed when the cable lifting the bomb snapped, and the bomb fell to 2,850 feet. But on April 7, the Navy succeeded in getting the weapon out of the Mediterranean so it could be shipped back to the United States—although not until EOD personnel had completed their render-safe work.36
On January 21, 1968, only a few days after the second anniversary of the Palomares incident, SAC was confronted with another Broken Arrow. This time a B-52 went down about seven hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, near Thule Air Base in ice-covered Greenland—the site of one of three Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radars designed to provide advance warning of a Soviet missile attack. SAC had instituted what it labeled the Thule Monitor Mission in August 1961, altering one northern route flown as part of its airborne alert program. One purpose of the “Hard Head” route was to allow SAC to determine the cause of any interruption in communications between the site and U.S. warning centers. There had been two outages in 1961 when the cable carrying the BMEWS data, which ran under North Atlantic fishing grounds, had been cut—either by accident or as the result of enemy action.37
Confronted with a fire in the navigator’s compartment that was raging out of control, the thirty-six-year-old pilot of the B-52, Capt. John M. Haug of Phoenix, Arizona, abandoned his attempt to make an emergency landing at the air base and ordered his crew to bail out. Haug and five other crew members were successful in escaping the plane and serious injury, except for the unfortunate crew member whose feet froze before he was rescued. Even less fortunate was the copilot, Capt. Leonard Svitenko, who was killed while bailing out. At a brief news conference about a week after the crash, Captain Haug explained that “we used up all our fire-fighting equipment and we even tried to smother the fire, but the smoke got so bad I had no choice but to bail out my crew.” When the plane crashed, 225,000 pounds of jet fuel exploded and the conventional high explosives in each bomb detonated.38
Like the B-52 that fell apart over Palomares, Haug’s plane carried four unarmed nuclear bombs, each capable of detonating with the force of over a megaton. With the crew quickly rescued, the next steps were to collect the wreckage, locate the bombs, and determine if any of Greenland had been contaminated by radioactivity—an effort designated Project Crested Ice. The SAC Disaster Control Team arrived at Thule approximately ten hours after the crash, as did an initial element from the Defense Atomic Support Agency’s Nuclear Emergency Team, which was there to provide radiation- and contamination-control support for the operation. To provide additional assistance, the AEC dispatched a three-man team, selected from Los Alamos, Sandia, and the AEC operations office in Albuquerque. By the evening of January 22, sixty-eight people had arrived at Thule for the disaster control operation, a number which grew to 565 within a few days. They faced conditions that included morning temperatures of twenty degrees below zero and winter darkness.39
There was no mystery as to where the plane crashed (about seven miles southwest of the Thule Air Base’s runway on the ice of Wolstenholme Fjord) or its velocity when it did (518 miles per hour). The recovered aircraft debris filled 163 drums, fourteen engine containers, and eleven large tanks with a total capacity of 14,720 cubic feet. Parts of the bombs, which had been blown apart when their conventional explosives had detonated, were found scattered within a one-mile-wide swath that extended about three miles south of where the B-52 had crashed.40
To determine whether the debris, ice, and snow in the vicinity of the crash site had been contaminated with plutonium from the fractured bombs, all of it needed to be removed, packed, and shipped back to the United States. On January 23, an eleven-man team of radiation monitors and EOD personnel, accompanied by their AEC advisors, traveled by dog sled to the crash site to do so. The snow, ice, and debris that was removed weighed in at 10,000 tons, and the entire effort would extend into the summer of 1968.41
A variety of devices would be employed to detect radiation. Over seventy of the PAC-1S alpha-ray monitors, also used at Palomares, would be enlisted in the effort. Other devices bore designations such as AN/PDR-27 and PAC-3G. A key element in identifying the contaminated territory was the emergency team’s use of six FIDLERs, FIDLER being an acronym for Field Instrument for Detection of Low Energy Radiations. At the time of the crash the device was being tested by Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which reported to the AEC. It could effectively plot plutonium contamination by measuring gamma radiation from americium-241, a by-product of plutonium production and plutonium decay.42
On July 11, 1970, an Air Force Athena missile was launched from Green River, Utah, toward a target in New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range. The missile, fifty feet tall and weighing 16,000 pounds, was part of an effort to study the reentry characteristics of warheads and other space vehicles. While the first part of the flight went smoothly, the second part did not. Pat Quinlan was in the Range Control building monitoring telemetry and radar data. He recalled that rather than the Athena coming into view in its usual spot to the north and about forty-five degrees above the horizon, “the glow appeared almost straight overhead and the reentry streak trailed to the south.”43
That southerly course took the missile to a crash landing in Mexico—just as the flight of a Pershing missile fired from Blanding, Utah, in September 1967 had ended up just across the border from Van Horn, Texas. The missile’s nose cone contained cobalt-57, an extremely dangerous radioactive substance used to measure the ablative material on the outside of the nose cone that burned off and protected the vehicle during its reentry phase. The presence of radioactive material exacerbated the difficult diplomatic situation created by the off-course missile.44
While it was clear that the missile had landed in Mexico, it was not clear exactly where in Mexico it was to be found. Initial estimates focused on an area 450 miles into Mexico, in the vicinity of the boundary between Durango and Chihuahua. On July 16, an Air Force team assigned to find the missile left to begin the hunt. Subsequently, the first estimate was refined and the missile’s nose cone was said to be in an area one and a half miles long and a half-mile wide, but the absence of reference points made it difficult to specify exact boundaries. Air Force personnel, along with Mexican government representatives, then began aerial surveys of the area where they hoped to locate the nose cone and its cobalt-57.45
Two weeks later, on July 30, the nose cone was still proving to be elusive. On that day, the AEC instructed one of its contractors, Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier (EG&G), to discontinue a survey of background radiation in Illinois that required use of an Aerial Radiological Monitoring System (ARMS) aircraft. The crew and plane were ordered to proceed to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico and then on to Torreón, Mexico, to assist in the effort to recover the nose cone. The aircraft was equipped with an assortment of detection equipment, including one calibrated for cobalt-57.46
The first mission was flown on July 31 to familiarize the crew with the search area and pinpoint the sector marked by ground personnel about 2.2 miles north of the impact point computed at White Sands. A second mission, flying over the mountains at three hundred feet and 200 miles per hour, followed on August 1 and detected radiation that was twice as great as the background level. On August 2, the ARMS aircraft, along with a ground party, found the missing nose cone.47
In the 1970s a new fear emerged. In addition to Soviet or Chinese agents with hidden atomic bombs, or bombs lost through accidents, there was the fear of terrorists. Terrorism had taken on a much higher international profile in the late 1960s, thanks to the activities of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other Arab terrorist groups.
In 1971, at a symposium concerning the prevention of a nuclear theft, an official from the AEC asked his audience to imagine what would happen if the mayor of New York received a note that read, “I’ve got two bird cages of plutonium and if you don’t release all your prisoners and leave Vietnam, I’ll blow up New York City.” The mayor, according to the AEC official, would seek help in understanding the meaning of “two bird cages” and learn that it was a reference to the shipping containers for bomb-grade plutonium, containers with welded tubular frames that separate and confine pieces of the silvery, heavier-than-lead substance to prevent them from becoming close enough to start a chain reaction. The writer would be claiming that he had a nuclear weapon and New York was his hostage.48
Then, on September 5, 1972, during the Olympic Games in Munich, seven members of the Black September organization, a secret branch of the PLO, seized eleven Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village, killing two in the process. They then demanded that Israel free 234 of their colleagues from prison in exchange for the nine surviving hostages.49
German authorities agreed to the terrorists’ demand that a plane be provided to transport them and their hostages to Cairo, although the intention was to have German snipers “take out” the kidnappers at the airport. Zvi Zamir, the chief of the Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service, watched as the Germans botched the operation. While some of the Black September terrorists were hit by the first wave of shots, several were able to kill the handcuffed hostages as they sat in the helicopters that had brought them to the airport.50
In Israel, Prime Minister Golda Meir and her chief advisors reacted by establishing a series of hit teams to hunt down and kill those involved in planning and carrying out the massacre, an operation designated Wrath of God. In the United States, James Schlesinger, a prominent defense intellectual and future director of central intelligence and secretary of defense, was serving as chairman of the AEC. He began to worry about terrorists arming themselves with weapons far more potent than the ones that Black September used in Munich. What if terrorists, he wondered, sought to go beyond guns and grenades all the way to nuclear weapons? A series of meetings that followed explored whether terrorists could steal plutonium and fashion it into a bomb, whether they could simply steal a bomb, and whether the United States would be able to find it before it turned an American city into a smoking, radiating ruin.51
Possibly Schlesinger’s concern was stimulated by hearing of the Nth Country Experiment, conducted by the AEC several years earlier. In April 1964 two young physicists, David Dobson and David Pipkorn (soon replaced by Robert W. Selden), were hired by Livermore Radiation Laboratory (later Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and given the job of designing an atomic bomb from scratch—with access to a good university library, a few competent machinists to shape uranium or plutonium, and an explosives team, to provide some technical assistance. By December 1965, they had designed a plutonium bomb, and nine months after that they had a final design. The hypothetical test of their device, in April 1967, proved a success.52
While the AEC was beginning to think seriously about nuclear terrorism, it was already enhancing its capability to respond to Broken Arrow incidents. On December 8, 1973, it established the Accident Response Group (ARG), employing personnel from laboratories such as Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore to operate the Surveillance Accident and Nuclear Detection System (SANDS). Among the contractors entrusted with helping to operate the system was EG&G, which in addition to operating the ARMS aircraft had photographed atomic explosions for the Manhattan Project during World War II and developed an expertise in weapons system design and analysis.53
That same day, the AEC Nevada Operations Office conducted an unannounced exercise, a “snap quiz,” to test EG&G’s capability to respond to a nuclear accident. It began with a phone call from Mahlon E. Gates to the Nevada headquarters rear guard station. Gates, a retired Army brigadier general, was the manager of the Nevada Operations Office. His nuclear experience began in early 1945 when he returned from service in the India-Burma theater and was assigned to the Manhattan Project as a special assistant to the district engineer in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Then, in September 1948, after obtaining a master of science from the University of Illinois, he joined the Armed Forces Special Weapons Projects in Washington, where he remained until September 1952.54
His message began:
This is Mahlon E. Gates, Manager, Nevada Operations Office. An Official NV/SANDS Emergency Response Exercise is now being initiated involving a hypothetical situation.
An emergency situation involving nuclear explosive has occurred in the general vicinity of Vik, Iceland. The EG&G SANDS Team should initiate plans to deploy equipment and personnel.55
The exercise focused on two areas: testing the SANDS Emergency Response Notification Procedures and the ability of EG&G to mobilize, pack, and transport the SANDS equipment—the gear for detecting and evaluating radiation as well as limiting its impact—from Las Vegas to Nellis Air Force Base so that it could be picked up and deployed to the accident site. While some minor deficiencies were noted, they were not considered significant.56
About nine weeks after that exercise, President Richard Nixon received a report produced by an ad hoc group that had been established in February 1971 when national security advisor Henry Kissinger signed National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 120, “United States Policy on Peaceful Applications of Atomic Energy.” In reading the report, Nixon was particularly struck by several conclusions, including the need to “weigh the possibilities of sabotage, plutonium contamination threats, and armed attacks (for example, by terrorists) along with the nuclear device threat,” and the requirement for “a continuing process of threat assessment and establishment of appropriate countermeasures.”57
At the time that Kissinger signed the directive, experts were particularly worried about the theft of, if not a bomb, then nuclear material that might be used by terrorists to build one. But for many years it would be extortionists, sometimes very young ones, rather than terrorists who would issue threats of nuclear destruction if the U.S. government did not comply with their demands.58
Even before Richard Nixon directed parts of the federal government to prepare for the threat of nuclear terrorism, several cities had been threatened with nuclear destruction. The city of Orlando, Florida, was the first, having received a letter promising to detonate a hydrogen bomb if the author’s demands were not met. What the letter writer wanted was not a change in U.S. foreign policy or the removal of American troops from his homeland, but money.
In October 1970, the Police Department of Orlando received a letter informing them that the writer was in possession of a hydrogen bomb and demanded, in exchange for not unleashing its deadly force, $1 million and safe passage out of the country. The letter also provided instructions on how to communicate. The Orlando police proceeded to do just that, but rather than accepting the demands, they challenged the author to provide some evidence that he was capable of more than writing threatening letters, that he actually had a working nuclear device at his disposal. City officials of Orlando were not about to shell out $1 million when all they really knew was that the author had good penmanship and had gained access to a piece of paper, a pen, an envelope, and a six-cent postage stamp.59
The extortionist complied. The letter the police received was postmarked October 28, 1970, and mailed from Orlando. The envelope and one-page letter were handwritten. Its first paragraph informed the police, “We will not call you so that you may trace the call” and “You can reply to this letter by writing to us at 1603 Mosher Drive, Orlando, which is a vacant house.” It also warned the police not to try to “catch us there” for if “one of our men gets stopped the deal is off.”60
The second paragraph repeated what was demanded and what would happen if the authorities failed to comply: “We will not settle for less than we stated in our first letter, one million in cash and safe passage out of the country. If we do not get this Orlando will be in ruins.”61
The final paragraph responded to the police department’s challenge: “Just to clear any doubts you may have about us having a hydrogen bomb, there is a drawing of it with this letter. You will need an expert in nuclear weapons to tell you if it is genuine, but believe me, it is.” The enclosed drawing showed a missile-shaped object—a rectangle tapering to a nose at the top—inside a missile-shaped object. The outer object was labeled “cobalt casing,” while the nose of the inner object was labeled “fuse.” In a short compartment below the fuse was a circular object with lines perpendicular to its edge, and a series of starlike objects inside, with a dark center. Lines were drawn and annotated: “TNT,” “U235,” “U238 tamper,” and “detonator.” The second, much longer, compartment in the inner object was labeled “lithium hydride.”62
The police rushed the sketch to McCoy Air Force Base, where an armaments officer took a look at it and proclaimed that “it would probably work”—a reaction apparently shared by Stanislaw Ulam, the co-developer of the hydrogen bomb, when the diagram was described to him. In the end though, the extortion scheme did not work. The police were ordered to deliver the requested $1 million to the vacant house. But eventually a fourteen-year-old high school science student, who had been observed mowing the lawn there, was arrested and confessed. Among the items discovered in his belongings was a small uranium souvenir that he had purchased at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the home of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, first established as part of the Manhattan Project.63
Despite his attempt at extortion, the diversion of resources to address it, and the nature of the threat, the teenager escaped without jail time. After sentencing, the judge suspended the sentence and placed him under the supervision of two scientists so that his talent would hopefully be channeled in a positive direction rather than in a negative one, which might well happen if he were sent to jail.64
The AEC was never consulted because news of the threat did not make it into AEC channels until after the event was resolved. And there were other threats. In July 1971, Manhattan was threatened with a 20- to 25-kiloton nuclear device—possibly the genesis of the AEC official’s discussion of a “hypothetical” threat to New York at the 1971 symposium. Then, in October 1972, the nation’s capital was threatened with an “atomic device.” In March 1973, somebody threatened to destroy both Chicago and Brussels.65
But none of those threats had produced federal action. It was a nuclear extortion threat issued well over three years after the Orlando incident that served as the catalyst to mobilize the United States to deal with such nuclear threats. Richard Nixon had approved a national security decision memorandum on domestic safeguards in April 1974, raising James Schlesinger’s concerns to the presidential level. Some of the language from the 1971 study memorandum made it into the decision memorandum. It again reported that Nixon had noted the need “to weigh the possibilities of sabotage, plutonium contamination threats, and armed attacks (for example, by terrorists) along with the nuclear device threat” and “to have a continuing process of threat assessment and establishment of appropriate countermeasures.”66
One of those already studying the threat of nuclear terror and how to defeat it was William Chambers. After the prolonged search for the fourth bomb at Palomares, Chambers wondered how much more difficult it would be to find a bomb that terrorists had hidden in a city. Probably it would be much more difficult, he thought. In the early 1970s, he helped establish an interagency working group—the Nuclear Material Detection Steering Committee—headquartered at the AEC, with representatives from the FBI, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and several Defense Department units. Meanwhile, scientists tried to determine the capabilities and limitations of devices made to detect nuclear materials and the impact of urban conditions on the radioactive emissions for which they would be searching.67
The work of the committee, Chambers, others at Los Alamos, and EG&G—which had produced a proposal for the support of long-range search efforts whose objective was to detect nuclear materials at a distance—led to a field experiment in 1973 comparing alternative radiation detection techniques against assorted nuclear weapon sources at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.68
Then in May 1974, the U.S. government received its first serious nuclear threat. A letter demanding that $200,000 be left at a particular location arrived at the FBI. Failure to comply, it claimed, would result in the explosion of a nuclear bomb somewhere in Boston. Chambers soon heard of the threat from the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), the successor to the AEC and the parent organization of Los Alamos. He was told, as if he was the head of Impossible Mission Force, to rush the best men and equipment east so they could search the city. Everyone was to assemble at Griffith Air Force Base in Rome, New York. Gathering everyone at such an obscure location, it was hoped, would keep both the press and the public in the dark.69
Just as Harold Agnew had called Chambers to ask him to pack a bag and head for Palomares, it was Chambers’s turn to make some calls. On the receiving end of one of those calls was Carl Henry, who had arrived at Los Alamos in June 1961 with a master’s in math and physics from the University of Wisconsin, planning to work there for the summer before returning to Wisconsin to earn his doctorate. Instead, he became a Los Alamos lifer. Henry recalls being home with his family one evening in May 1974 when “good old Bill Chambers called.” What Chambers wanted to know was could Henry “disappear for a few days.” Henry said he could and became part of the Los Alamos contingent that headed for Boston.70
Most of the people selected to participate came from Los Alamos and EG&G. The company’s Convair was loaded in Las Vegas and then stopped in Albuquerque to pick up the Los Alamos contingent. The plane next stopped in New York late in the evening on its way to Rome, apparently to pick up several people who had arrived on commercial airliners. Connections were missed so the personnel from Los Alamos went on to the air base by chartered bus to make early contact with the Air Force and FBI. The Convair arrived the next day.71
Reportedly, the following morning, after an FBI briefing, the search team hired a fleet of vans in which to hide their sophisticated detection equipment, which employed chemicals such as sodium iodide to signal the presence of neutrons or radioactive particles emitted by the uranium or plutonium in a nuclear device. They quickly discovered that they were missing the drills needed to install the detectors in the vans. “If they were counting on us to save the good folk of Boston,” NEST field director Jack Doyle reportedly said, “well, it was bye-bye Boston.”72
But according to William Chambers, the team never made it to Boston because the crisis was resolved before it was ready to go in. Carl Henry also recalls that they never made it past Rome Air Force Base and that he is “not sure that the FBI wanted scientists in lab coats wandering around until they needed them.” Jack Doyle also disputes the claim that he was ever so flippant about the survival of the people of Boston.73
In any event, the threat to Boston was no more real than the threat to Orlando. It did not even lead the U.S. government to part with real money. FBI agents left a bag with $200,000 in phony bills and staked out the area. When no one came to pick it up, they concluded that it was all a hoax. But President Gerald Ford was undoubtedly concerned by the slapdash, amateurish response to what could have been a very real threat. One result was a top-secret memo titled “Responsibility for Search and Detection Operations.”74
The memo, addressed to Mahlon Gates, who was still the manager of the Nevada Operations Office, was signed by Maj. Gen. Ernest Graves, the AEC’s assistant general manager for military application. Gates was “directed and authorized” to assume responsibility for the planning and execution of AEC field operations using AEC radiation detection systems for the “search and identification of lost or stolen nuclear weapons and special nuclear materials, bomb threats, and radiation dispersal threats”—a far more extensive mandate than simply cleaning up after a Broken Arrow.75
Graves further specified several actions Gates was to take in carrying out his new assignment. He was to develop plans for the deployment of search and identification capabilities, drawing on resources from the Nevada Operations Office as well as the Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore laboratories. He also needed to be prepared to take control of AEC and AEC-contractor personnel at the site during search and identification operations, as well as to contact and support the FBI agent-in-charge at the site—since the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 had made the bureau the lead agency in dealing with nuclear theft and extortion. In addition, Gates was to keep an accurate catalog of AEC special radiation detection systems and related equipment that could be used in operations. He was also directed to coordinate with the AEC weapons program the availability of scientific advisors and technical staff to be used in deployments.76
The use of personnel from the labs, particularly their weapons programs, as well as key AEC contractors—not on a full-time basis but when events required—would be a notable aspect of the effort for decades to come. When they were called upon, they would be operating not as representatives of their full-time employers, but as members of a new team—the Nuclear Emergency Search Team or NEST.
*During this era the concept of China’s seeking to provoke a war between the United States and Soviet Union and pick up the pieces was not uncommon in film and fiction. Peter George’s 1965 novel Commander-1 featured such a plot, as did the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice. A recent nonfiction book claimed that in 1968 rogue elements in the Soviet navy were going to use a missile attack from a submarine to instigate a war between the United States and China. See Kenneth Sewell with Clint Richmond, Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine’s Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S. (New York: Pocket Books, 2006).