The Bombs of Palomares and the Casa Americana
On January 17, 1966 I sat, disconsolate, in my office at the American Embassy. For six months I had been overseeing the creation of a new Casa Americana, the American cultural center in Madrid. The old Casa had been at the back of the Embassy, but it had been decided to turn it into the ambassador’s residence and recreate the Casa across the Avenida Castellana in an ornate palace that once belonged to a Spanish aristocratic family. The ambassador’s previous residence had been elsewhere in Madrid. There had been demonstrations there recently—oranges thrown, broken windows—and it had been decided, for security reasons, to place the official residence within the walled embassy compound at Serrano, 75.
Also, it was thought the Casa Americana would be more effective away from the embassy—purely cultural, divorced from political, economic, and military affairs. I liked that idea a lot. There would be a better chance of demonstrating that we Americans were not complete barbarians as some Spanish intellectuals believed.
One could understand some of their antipathy. The United States was, after all, intimately connected with the Franco government militarily—with air bases at Morón (near Seville) and Torrejón (outside Madrid) and a nuclear submarine base at Rota (near Cadiz). My Spanish friends tended to admire our popular culture but not our politics. Stereotypes of Americans also abounded. I would sometimes receive the left-handed compliment that I was simpatico because I was “not like other Americans.” Inquiring what other Americans were like, I would invariably be told: “blond, fat, and stupid.” It was my job as a cultural attaché to convince Spaniards otherwise.
A concert of American folk music held in the garden of the Casa Americana. The author is on foot on the right.
Why was I down in the dumps that day in January, 1966? A new diplomatic officer had joined the embassy cultural section. He outranked me and announced that he would direct the Casa Americana. I had done all the preparatory work; he would have all the fun. He would get the luxurious office that had been created—I thought for me—with its own balcony overlooking the Avenida Castellana and an elaborate, carved marble fireplace. I would remain within my ordinary embassy office and, enmeshed in the bureaucracy, push paper instead of running my own shop. I was angry; it wasn’t fair. Directing a cultural center is like managing an institute of some sort on a university campus, a way of being something like a “professor” in the government. There I could have freely hung out with Spanish writers and artists and intellectuals instead of the boring people diplomats often must deal with in their everyday work. Who would have suspected that my pleasure in my work was about to be enhanced by an event of sheer horror?
At 10:22 that morning a United States Air Force B-52 bomber collided with a KC-135 tanker over the Spanish coast. The tanker exploded in a ball of flame, and all four airmen aboard were lost. Three of the seven airmen on the B-52 were also killed. The others ejected and floated down by parachute into the sea, where they were picked up by Spanish fishermen, or onto the town of Palomares. The four hydrogen bombs the B-52 was carrying, each seventy-five times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but fortunately unarmed, also floated down, supported by their parachutes. Three bombs landed on Palomares. The other’s whereabouts would remain unknown for many weeks.
Palomares is located in one of the most isolated corners of the Province of Almeria. In 1966, no paved roads reached it. An arid, dusty town of 250 families, mostly tomato farmers, there wasn’t, in 1966, a single telephone in Palomares. Isolating it further, some of the debris descending from the two smashed planes, miraculously not hitting any houses or people, severed the power lines to the town so that, in addition to everything else, Palomares was temporarily without electricity.
What were these two American planes doing 31,000 feet above Spain? The world would soon learn that the United States sent squadrons of three B-52s twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, towards the borders of the Soviet Union. A squadron would fly in circles for some hours in what was popularly known as the “fail-safe” position. Relieved by a new squadron it would turn around and head back to the United States. These missions were considered necessary at the time under the Cold War principle of mutual deterrence vis-à-vis the Soviets. They would end in a few years when missiles replaced bombers. And now, thank goodness, many of the missiles have been deactivated too.
The bombers needed to have their tanks topped up en route to the Soviet Union and totally refueled as they limped back to the United States. This particular squadron, which had left an air base in North Carolina, had been refueled on the way over by a tanker from Torrejón and, on the way back, was about to be refueled by a tanker from Morón. Tanker planes, flying fuel tanks, customarily rendezvoused with B-52s at the edge of the Spanish coast.
The people of Palomares were used to seeing these planes several times a day high above the town. A B-52 would slow to 250 miles per hour and slide under a tanker. The tanker would send a long boom down into the B-52, fill its tanks, and then break off contact. This operation had been successively concluded thousands of times. But on January 17, 1966 a B-52 had apparently come up too fast under the tanker. There was a collision and, as the startled people of Palomares would say for years afterwards, “fire rained down from the sky.”
When the accident occurred, a colleague of mine, a young political attaché at the embassy, received the news in a telephone call from an air force officer at Torrejón Air Base. He ran into the office of Angier Biddle Duke, but the ambassador was downtown delivering a speech to the Spanish-American Chamber of Commerce. The young diplomat rushed there and stood in the back of the hall frantically waving his arms, but he couldn’t get the ambassador’s attention, and, when he did, the ambassador, annoyed, ignored him. Finally, he rushed up onto the platform and whispered in the ambassador’s ear, “Four of our hydrogen bombs have just fallen on Spain.” The ambassador gasped, stopped speaking in mid-sentence, and the two men rushed out without a word to those who had been listening to the speech.
A businessman friend later told me that people there thought President Lyndon Johnson had been assassinated. After all, John Kennedy had been assassinated only a bit more than two years before, and the shock from that had yet to wear off. Perhaps, they thought, assassinating presidents was becoming a habit.
Ambassador Duke decided to immediately call on the Spanish foreign minister. But, on arrival at the ministry, he discovered the minister was away at a funeral. Duke finally met with a lesser functionary and was able to officially report the accident and assure the Spanish government that the United States had not attacked Spain with nuclear weapons. One can only imagine Duke’s words: “Sorry for dropping four hydrogen bombs on you, boys. Not to worry.”
Later that day the ambassador called all embassy staff into an emergency meeting in the top floor conference room. That was when I found out about Palomares. I had read the 1962 novel Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler and seen Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy, Dr. Strangelove, both of which deal with similar nuclear events, but this was real.
The ambassador said, “We are in deep trouble. Did any of you know about these B-52s refueling above the Spanish coast, because I sure didn’t?”
No one raised their hands.
The ambassador’s secretary got some Air Force general at Strategic Air Command, Omaha, on the speaker phone. “Why didn’t I know this refueling operation was going on?” the ambassador demanded to know.
“Top secret,” the general responded.
Duke, normally a smooth, easygoing guy, got red in the face. “Whatya mean ‘top secret?’ I’m the ambassador. I’m the president’s personal representative in Spain. Who should know if I don’t know?”
“I can’t tell you that, Sir,” the general intoned.
“Well,” said Duke, “if you can’t tell me, you can go fuck yourself.” Never before or after did I hear the ambassador speak in that fashion.
The tension in the room was thick. Nothing in the world was more important at that moment than what was going on at Palomares and at the embassy. History was being made, and I was excited to be part of it—and scared. Scared that, no matter what, America’s relationship with Spain would thenceforth be more difficult and its position in the world seriously compromised. And scared personally too. It felt like World War III had just begun.
I also thought, Casa Americana or no Casa Americana, those bombs were surely going to undermine my work. I wondered whether I would still be welcome at Spanish universities and in cultural circles around the country. It would be difficult celebrating American culture in Spain when we had just dropped four hydrogen bombs on the country.
Fortunately, as I would learn, nuclear bombs are inert unless armed. To arm such a device six distinct procedures must be followed, and they can only be done in a certain sequence by two designated airmen aboard a bomber and only on the direct orders of the President of the United States. The codes for doing so changed daily. They were in the little black bag carried by an Air Force officer who accompanied the president everywhere. However, each bomb also has a small charge of conventional explosives to initiate the nuclear fission process. These conventional explosives will go off if a bomb comes down more rapidly than it should and strikes the earth.
One of the bombs floated down on its parachute and was later found intact in Palomares. But the parachutes of two of them were partially burned in the air disaster, so the bombs came down rapidly. When they landed at Palomares their conventional explosives went off. No one was hurt in these explosions—though one man said he was knocked off his feet. But the explosions cracked those two bombs open, releasing their plutonium into the air in small black clouds. Plutonium is one of the deadliest substances on earth. If one inhales a tiny amount death is certain within days. Even minimal exposure will almost guarantee lethal cancers years later. Luckily, a strong wind was blowing from an unaccustomed direction that day. It apparently dispersed the plutonium away from the people of Palomares and widely out over the Mediterranean.
For three days the combined forces of the United States Air Force, the American Embassy, and the Spanish government kept the Palomares story bottled up. The town was cordoned off, with only authorized people allowed into and out of Palomares. Nuclear experts from both countries arrived on the scene. Military personnel in the hundreds came to Palomares, most assigned to systematically walk every inch of the town and its surrounding fields with Geiger Counters or to collect debris from the two planes. The better part of both wings of the B-52 had landed—minus the motors but largely intact—one in a tomato field, the other in shallow water just off Palomares.
One of them would end up as “sculpture” on the wall of the dining room of a hotel in the hill town of Mojacar, a few kilometers down the coast from Palomares. I vacationed with my family in Mojacar in 1972, and we dined one evening at the hotel with that wing hanging over us. One of my children started crying. He was afraid the wing would fall on him, so we asked to change to a table some distance away. Today, the hotel is no longer there, and no one in Mojacar seems to know what happened to the wing.
By January 19th an enterprising newsman from Madrid had made his way into Palomares, and the next day the world knew what was going on there. Palomares would be the number one story in world media for weeks to come. Soviet media, in particular, would have a field day with the story, accusing the United States of intentionally dropping nuclear bombs on Spain.
The world’s attention was focused on the missing bomb, not the radiation issue, which was of more immediate concern to American and Spanish officials. Still, both governments were unwilling for six weeks to officially admit that one of the bombs was lost. The following colloquy, half-Orwell, half-Woody Allen, took place at a press conference held by a United States Air Force officer:
Reporter: “Tell me, any sign of the bomb?”
Air Force Spokesman: “What bomb?”
Reporter: “Well, you know, the thing you’re looking for?”
Air Force Spokesman: “You know perfectly well we’re not looking for any bomb. Just looking for debris.”
Reporter: “All right, any signs of what you say is not a bomb?”
Air Force Spokesman: “If you put it that way, I can tell you that there is no sign of the thing that is not a bomb.”
Because of concern over radiation, it was almost preferable that attention was diverted to the missing bomb. The people of Palomares were not allowed to harvest their tomatoes and other crops, nor to sell the tomatoes that had already been harvested and were in the warehouse. Six million kilos of tomatoes had been harvested the previous year. Now the current tomatoes and other crops rotted. One farmer refused to evacuate his field. He said to an American airman, “I don’t know what this radiation is. All I know is that this is my field and I refuse to go. I’ve got beans to pick.” The Spanish national police, the Guardia Civil, was called in to escort the protesting farmer off his land.
It would be years before the tomatoes, milk, and other agricultural products of Palomares would be entirely welcome in Madrid, Barcelona, and elsewhere in Europe. Some joked that they had a certain glow. This was the first known example of radioactive contamination of an inhabited area during peacetime since the beginning of the nuclear age.
While the people of Palomares were told that they would be fully reimbursed for their losses by the American government, and eventually were, meanwhile they had nothing to do. The farmers stood about aimlessly. At first they could not even feed their livestock, who, because of radiation fears, were proscribed from grazing in their accustomed fields. Even the fishermen from Garrucha, a town close to Palomares, would not be allowed to put to sea. Needless to say, the bars in both towns did a lot of business.
Most important was the health of the residents of the town. Urine tests had immediately been administered to every man, woman, and child. In test after test they showed a high level of contamination, even those whose immediate surroundings at the time the bombs came down showed no contamination at all. Finally, it was determined that the collection bottles themselves were contaminated. Once the bottles were cleansed of radiation, new urine samples showed no human contamination at all. Routine urinalyses of the residents of Palomares would, nevertheless, continue for many years afterwards and, it is rumored, continue to this day.
Six hundred and forty acres of Palomares would be bulldozed, including all the crops growing on them. This material would be pulverized and packed into 5,500 specially commissioned 55 gallon drums, loaded onto a ship, and taken across the Atlantic to an abandoned quarry in South Carolina, where it was sealed in. Fresh topsoil would be brought in to replace it and new houses constructed for the residents of the town. It is ironic that virtually all of the original Palomares is actually to be found today in the United States.
With the radiation issue seemingly under control, the missing bomb became the center of attention. There was no sign of it on land, so the emphasis switched to looking for it at sea. A fleet of some fifteen American naval vessels—including minesweepers and other ships with up-to-date sonar gear—assembled with 2,200 naval personnel, including 130 frogmen. Also available, having been flown over to Spain, were mini-submarines, straight out of Jules Verne, such as the Alvin that were capable of dives to great depths. The navy, its efforts hampered by the high winds and rough water of late winter, began combing the bottom of the Mediterranean over an area 12 miles out to sea and 10 miles along the coast, or 120 square miles, a vast area.
A Spanish fisherman, Francisco Simó Orts—who had picked up Major Larry Messinger, the pilot of the B-52, after he had been treading water for forty-five minutes—said he knew exactly where the bomb was, five and one-half miles out in the Mediterranean. But no one gave much credence to his story. Even if, as he claimed, he had seen it come down, how could a man at sea remember where on the water a bomb had fallen? Of course, as we would eventually learn, fishermen and others who go to sea regularly in a particular area know exactly where they are in the water at all times, much as the rest of us do on land.
As the United States Navy slowly reduced the area to be searched, another issue arose. What of the vital tourism in this whole region of Spain, famous for its beaches and resorts. It had already been determined there were no dangerous levels of radiation in the sea, but would the world believe that, especially with a lost bomb somewhere under the waves?
Ambassador Duke and Spanish Minister of Information and Tourism, Manuel Fraga Iribañe, decided to go swimming in the Mediterranean on March 8, 1966 to prove that the waters were not dangerous to health. Luckily, I had been sent down to Palomares as a courier during the night. This was not part of my normal embassy duties, but no diplomatic courier was then available and important papers had just been flown in from the White House related to Palomares that the ambassador needed to see. A briefcase was attached to my wrist with a device very much like a handcuff and chain. I was given an embassy car, and my driver drove through the night. I tried to sleep in the back seat, but the briefcase to which I was chained and my chafed wrist allowed me little rest.
I arrived in Palomares early in the morning. It looked like a war zone. American and Spanish military milled about. Ships were just off shore. Helicopters roared overhead, causing cows and sheep to bolt in terror, running this way and that. I soon learned that Ambassador Duke was not in Palomares but down the coast at the parador, or government hotel, on the beach below Mojacar, where he and staff from the embassy, some with wives and children, had spent the night. There were going to be two swim-ins. Duke would swim that morning at Mojacar, and Fraga, who was otherwise occupied, would join him in the water that afternoon at Palomares itself.
Arriving in Mojacar, I was relieved of the briefcase just in time to see the ambassador stride out of the parador in a bathing suit. Surrounded by staff and the international press, he walked very erect and dignified down the sand to the water’s edge. The air temperature was 58 degrees Fahrenheit. Lord only knows what the water temperature was after the long winter.
When Duke plunged into the sea there was confusion on the beach. If the ambassador was in the water, did it not behoove his staff to join him—in the interest of not compromising our careers if nothing else? Some embassy personnel were prepared for the occasion with bathing suits. They ran into the water after Duke. Having just come from Madrid, I was the only one on the beach in a suit, so I thought I was safe from criticism if I didn’t enter the water. But soon, other embassy staff were tearing off their clothes and running into the ocean in their underpants. One discovered immediately who among long term colleagues favored boxer shorts and who favored briefs, who was in good shape, and who flabby. Lots of surprises there.
Now I no longer had an excuse, so I quickly disrobed, laying my best wool suit on the sand. I had considerable difficulty with my tie. I finally tore it off, popping a button from my button down collar. I ran into the water as quickly as I could, partly because I was the last one in but, also, because I was not wearing a pair of my best underpants. In fact, the pair I was wearing was torn in—shall we say?—unacceptable, or at least embarrassing, places. I cursed myself for not having thrown it out long ago. Damn it, there were photographers on the beach! And women!
It was freezing, but those of us in the water splashed each other and laughed, as if on holiday. We were relieved when the ambassador decided he had had enough and headed out of the water, the rest of us following quickly up onto the beach. Maids from the hotel were waiting with towels. I grabbed two, wrapping the first around my waist, before using the other to dry off. Elegantly dressed waiters from the parador were on the beach with shots of cognac on little round trays, compliments of the house. We seemed to be having an impromptu cocktail party on that chilly beach.
I was not present when Duke and Fraga had their swim-in that afternoon; I was on my way back to Madrid. Because so much embassy staff was down at Palomares, there was only a skeleton crew in Madrid; I was needed there. The afternoon swim was the one that produced one of the most famous photographs of the 1960s: Duke and Fraga frolicking in the water. The event was dubbed by the press, “The Splash Heard Round the World.” But it was the morning swim-in that embassy staff would best remember, especially those of us who swam in our underpants. Not many years before I had been captain of my college swim team, but no race I ever participated in, even the time I broke the team and pool record, ever equaled the excitement of that March swim in the Mediterranean.
Meanwhile, the search for the missing bomb continued at sea, and American naval personnel, perhaps out of desperation, finally decided that Francisco Simó Orts’ story was worthy of attention. On March 15 the bomb was located 2,550 feet below the very spot he had seen it enter the water from the deck of his boat, the Agustin y Rosa. Ever since then, Simó has been something of a folk hero in Spain known as Paco de la Bomba (Paco, The Bomb Guy). Paco is the standard nickname for Francisco.
On March 24th, an attempt was made to haul the bomb to the surface. Almost immediately the cable snapped and the bomb again descended to the bottom. The Navy was not just dragging up a 5,000 pound bomb but the 20,000 pounds of water in the deployed parachute, and pulling it up with only one cable attached to the parachute.
It took days to relocate the bomb. It was now at a point 250 feet deeper. More serious: it was on a slippery slope close to a crevice 3,000 feet deep. If the bomb ever fell into that crevice there would be no way to get it out. While the Alvin was capable of descending to 6,000 feet, the crevice was too narrow to admit any submersible.
This time the Alvin attempted to attach multiple lines to the parachute, but, before it could do so, it became entangled in its shrouds. The two man crew was in danger of dying down there as their oxygen expired. The Alvin finally freed itself but nearly rammed the bomb. Had it been hit, the conventional dynamite charge might have exploded, destroying the Alvin and its crew and spreading the bomb’s plutonium into the sea.
Two days later an unmanned device, the CURV, was sent down. It too got entangled in the parachute, but not before attaching several lines to it. It was decided to try to winch up the bomb and parachute and simultaneously, use the power of the entangled CURV vehicle to help in the salvage attempt. After one hour and seventeen minutes, bomb, parachute, and vehicle had risen to 100 feet below the surface. Frogmen met it and disentangled the CURV from the parachute. On April 7, 1966, at 8:40 a.m. in the morning, the ten-foot long, twenty inches in diameter hydrogen bomb was hoisted aboard the USS Petrel. The casing of this bomb and of the other bomb that did not crack open upon landing on Palomares, are on display at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, New Mexico if any readers would like to see them.
The feature film, Men of Honor (2000), has scenes dramatizing the recovery of the fourth Palomares bomb, though a U.S. Navy diver, played by Cuba Gooding, Jr., comes upon the bomb while walking on the bottom of the ocean, impossible because the bomb was at a depth where no diver could survive and, as the reader already knows, this was not how the bomb was discovered and recovered.
Ambassador Duke argued that no one would believe the bomb had been found unless it was displayed to the world. The military felt this would compromise security. The White House was brought in to decide, and Duke prevailed. The international press was invited the next day to photograph the bomb aboard the ship with navy personnel proudly standing about. April 8 was Good Friday. It would be a very good Friday indeed. Eighty-one days had passed between the January 17th collision and the display of the fourth bomb.
The missing, fourth hydrogen bomb finally lifted from the sea floor of the Mediterranean and displayed aboard a United States Naval vessel, the USS Petrel.
During that time our entire embassy thought of virtually nothing but Palomares. This was not just a military but a political crisis of international magnitude. All the embassy’s resources were devoted to minimizing the damage to the reputation of the United States and to reassuring the Spanish public. There were occasional demonstrations outside the embassy. Colleagues worked round the clock under great stress. Even my immediate superior, who had said that he would be director of the Casa Americana, had been pressed into action.
Which is how I became Director of the Casa Americana. With everyone worrying about the bombs, culture wasn’t high on anyone’s list. Nevertheless, Ambassador Duke attended the Casa’s inaugural festivities. Minister Fraga attended one of its first public events. This was just after their swim in the Mediterranean but before the missing bomb had been definitively located and lifted from the sea floor. I suspect each man considered a cultural event a welcome diversion from Palomares and the immense embarrassment it caused both governments.
The Casa inaugurated, we proceeded to offer non stop events—jazz concerts, poetry readings, lectures, exhibits. At first, attendance was sparse. Few Spaniards wanted to associate with the United States at that moment. But after the missing bomb was brought to the surface attendance increased dramatically.
Two years later, shortly after I left the Spain embassy, someone put a bomb in the Casa Americana. I read about it in the American press and joked that certain Spaniards missed me so much that this was their way of expressing their displeasure at my absence. Considerable damage was done, and a wall of books fell on the woman who had been my librarian. She was injured but survived. That would have been an irony: to be a librarian and be killed by books. Some years later the Casa Americana on the Avenida Castellana was abandoned and a new one opened close to the University of Madrid.
Whenever I am in Madrid I pass by the place where my Casa Americana once stood. There is a skyscraper there now, the headquarters of an insurance company, I believe. At that very spot I once had a little cultural empire. And it was given to me by four nuclear bombs.
Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke on the right extending his hand and the author on the left at the inauguration of the Casa Americana.
Postscript. I am a bit embarrassed because when I first wrote this book, and it appeared in Spanish, I did not know of certain events concerning Palomares that have taken place in the past year or so. In 2009, the mayor of the little town of Palomares proposed the creation of a museum, a theme park, or both devoted to the incidents of 1966. However quixotic, he thought it would attract tourists and other visitors to the area. There was already a street in tiny Palomares named January 17, 1966. One of the main things the mayor wanted to put on display was the swimsuit Manuel Fraga wore for his dip with Angier Biddle Duke that fateful day in March 1966. Fraga’s swimsuit was reportedly still at his home in the Galicia region of Spain. I could also supply a pair of torn underpants to the mayor of Palomares should he want it—though not the originals.
There was also word in 2009 that the Walt Disney Company had plans for a film to be titled “Muchas Gracias, Bob Oppenheimer” (the scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, is known as the father of the hydrogen bomb). The film would be about an American serviceman who meets and falls in love with a girl from Palomares because of the accident of 1966. Palomares villagers were hoping the film, at least in part, would be shot on location—bringing much revenue to the area. Were the film actually made, the world would know about Palomares once again.
In 2010, Palomares was again back in the news. It had been discovered that in a low lying area of the town deadly radiation remains. Apparently, the cleanup of 1966 was not complete. Either someone made a mistake or got lazy, but there is, in this area, plutonium just under the surface of soil that had been used as fill. This location has now been cordoned off and, as I write this, the American and Spanish governments are in negotiations as to just how to deal with the problem. While fencing the area effectively keeps people out of it, it doesn’t stop small animals such as rabbits from burrowing and otherwise spreading about some of the radiation. Not to mention that this area was not closed off to people for the previous forty-four years.
My hunch is that with the rediscovery of radiation in Palomares, the mayor’s plans for a museum and theme park and Disney’s plans for a film will be dropped. Palomares is unlikely to ever attract tourists, nor would a romantic comedy make sense in an area where there is still deadly radiation.
For the present there is a more immediate concern: the farmers of Palomares are again having difficulty marketing their tomatoes.