The Day We Lost the H-Bomb: Cold War, Hot Nukes, and the Worst Nuclear Weapons Disaster in History Read online

  FOR BRIAN

  I think I hear the helicopter.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  JANUARY

  1. Mighty SAC

  2. The Accident

  3. The First Twenty-four Hours

  4. The Ambassador

  5. Parachutes

  6. Call In the Navy

  FEBRUARY

  7. Villa Jarapa

  8. Alvin and the Deep, Dark Sea

  9. The Fisherman's Clue

  10. Guest Charts a Course

  11. The Fisherman's Catch

  12. Radioactividad

  MARCH

  13. Spin Control

  14. The Photograph

  15. POODL versus the Bomb

  APRIL

  16. Hooked

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  Francisco Simó Orts stood on the deck of his fishing boat, squinting at the Spanish coastline. It was midmorning and the sky was a brilliant blue, the bright sun blazing as it climbed toward noon. Simó, tall and square-shouldered with a head of thick dark hair, looked more like a movie star than a shrimp fisherman. Like a bronzed Kirk Douglas, said a reporter much later, playing the role of captain. He even had the perfect dimple in his chin.

  Despite his marquee looks, Simó was indeed just a fisherman, and at the moment he was deciding whether to lift his shrimp nets from the sea. Having worked the waters off southeastern Spain since he was a boy, he was a seasoned sailor and, at the age of thirty-eight, also a shrewd and prosperous businessman. Simó owned two sturdy fishing boats with the latest sounding gear and was known as a big man around town. And his town, the coastal village of Aguilas, was no backwater. It was a growing seaside resort with a whiff of worldliness, a bit out of character for this part of rural Spain. Aguilas even had a four-story building—more than other nearby towns could say.

  But even in this rising city, Simó's self-confidence set him apart. His family had originally come from Catalonia, an independent-minded region on the northeastern coast of Spain. Even today, people from there think of themselves as Catalonian first and Spanish second, if at all. They prefer speaking Catalan to Spanish and are widely known for their business sense. Simó, by all accounts, had inherited the enterprising spirit of his ancestors. He had that quality that admiring Americans call “hustle.” The other fishermen in Aguilas, not altogether kindly, called him “El Catalan.”

  On this particular Monday, January 17, 1966, Simó had left Aguilas at dawn and trundled some forty miles down the Spanish coast to the shrimp banks off the small town of Palomares. Simó's boat dropped her nets and puttered slowly, scooping shrimp from the sea. The ship, named Manuela Orts Simó after Simó's mother, sailed parallel to the shore, about five miles off the coast. A bit farther out to sea was Simó's other boat, the Agustín y Rosa, steered by his older brother Alfonso. Closer to shore chugged the Dorita, captained by another Aguilas fisherman named Bartolomé Roldán Martínez. By 10:22 a.m., the three boats had been trawling for two hours and were preparing to raise their nets. Simó looked at the desert hills on the shoreline to get his bearings. He had learned to find his position by certain landmarks, and he knew the coastline by heart. Lining up a particular mountain with an abandoned chimney, for instance, and a familiar building with a certain hill, allowed him to establish his location precisely. Now he stood on his swaying boat, looking at the scrubby brown hills around Palomares and the bright, cloudless sky above. Then he saw an explosion.

  High above the hills, an orange fireball flashed in the blue sky, followed by a deep, thunderous rumble. A rain of debris showered the Spanish countryside, and black smoke rose from the town of Palomares. Moments later, Simó saw five parachutes floating out to sea. They drifted for long minutes, hanging in the sky. Two chutes hit the ocean close to shore, near the Dorita. Another sailed high over Simó's head and landed far out to sea. And two splashed down near Simó—one about twenty-five yards toward shore, another about seventy-five yards seaward. Before they hit the water, Simó got a good look at them. Each seemed to carry a grisly cargo. The closer parachute seemed to hold a half a man, with his guts trailing from his severed torso. The other seemed to carry a dead man, hanging still and silent. Hoping the dead man might simply be unconscious, he steered his boat to the spot where his chute had hit the sea. But when Simó arrived, the dead man had already disappeared under the waves, parachute and all. Simó glanced at the coast and noted his position. Then he turned his boat to the Dorita, sailing as fast as his trailing shrimp nets would allow.

  1.

  Mighty SAC

  Twenty-four hours earlier, across the ocean, Captain Charles Wendorf sat in Saint Luke's Methodist Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, teaching his weekly Sunday school class to a group of lanky teenagers. Thirty years old, blue-eyed, and athletic, Wendorf sported a blond buzz cut and a relaxed confidence that belied his years. Wendorf had it all—a wife, three kids, a house, and a great job flying B-52 bombers. He also held a deep, earnest faith in God, America, and the U.S. Air Force, a faith tempered by an easy, self-deprecating manner and a gentle sense of humor. He had the disarming habit of starting sentences with the phrase “Well, I guess …” When asked if the kids in his Sunday school class looked up to him, a hotshot pilot, he chuckled and said in his aw-shucks way, “Well, I guess I suppose they did.”

  When the class finished, Wendorf got into his car with his wife, Betty, for the drive back to their home on Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. It was early in the afternoon. Wendorf had to be at squadron headquarters for a preflight briefing at 3:30 p.m., and he wanted to get home in time for a quick nap. In the car, Betty spoke up. She had a bad feeling about tonight's flight and wished Charlie could get out of it. Wendorf reassured his wife; he had flown this mission more than fifty times before, it was perfectly routine, there was nothing to worry about. She dropped the subject. There was no point in arguing; they both knew that the Air Force always won.

  Wendorf had been in the Air Force his entire adult life, starting with ROTC when he was a student at Duke. He had entered flight training right after graduation and earned his wings in October 1959. His Air Force supervisors called him a born pilot. Wendorf had spent the last five and a half years behind the controls of B-52s, logging 2,100 flying hours in that plane alone. Initially disappointed to be assigned to the lumbering B-52, rather than a glamorous fighter plane, he eventually came to believe it far more challenging to manage a seven-man crew than a fighter plane and rose to become the youngest aircraft commander in the Strategic Air Command (SAC), his part of the Air Force. He also came to love his plane. “The airplane is huge, it's mammoth,” he said. “But if you could fly that airplane like I could, you could thread a needle with it.”

  Wendorf got home from church around 2 p.m. and took his nap. When he woke up, he put on his olive green flight suit, grabbed his flight gear and briefcase, and headed to squadron headquarters. There, he checked his box for messages, found nothing, and met up with the rest of his crew for the preflight briefing. On this mission, Wendorf would be sharing pilot duties with two other men. His copilot was twenty-five-year-old First Lieutenant Michael Rooney. Only four years junior to Wendorf, Rooney had a hard-partying lifestyle that made him seem younger. One writer described the pilot as a jolly bachelor who enjoyed chasing skirts in nearby Raleigh. Rooney said the writer should have included Durham, Charlotte, and Goldsboro as well
. His bachelor status made him a fish out of water in SAC, where most of the airmen were married with kids. SAC wives like Betty Wendorf fussed over the young man, inviting him for dinner and stuffing him with home-cooked food. Rooney's close friendship with the Wendorf family led to a lot of easy banter between the two men. Rooney had graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a longtime rival of Wendorf's Duke, and for the two pilots, trashing the other's alma mater was an endless source of amusement.

  Like many young men, Rooney had joined the Air Force with dreams of becoming a fighter pilot. His grades in flight school had put that dream out of reach, at least temporarily. He respected the B-52 but didn't enjoy flying it; it was too much like driving a truck.

  That morning, while Wendorf was teaching Sunday school, Rooney, a practicing Catholic, went to Mass. (“I may have been doing something wild the night before,” he said, “but I'm not telling.”) Then he changed into uniform and drove his big, white 1963 Chevy Impala convertible to headquarters. The parking lot was nearly empty that Sunday, so he parked illegally in a senior officer's spot. He figured he'd be back before the officer showed up for work.

  The third pilot that day was Major Larry Messinger, at forty-four the oldest and most experienced member of the crew and less inclined to joking around. He was on board as the relief pilot, standard practice for long flights. Messinger had served in the Air Force for more than twenty years, collecting a cluster of medals along the way. When the United States entered World War II, he signed up for the Army Air Forces right away and was soon rumbling over Germany in a B-17 bomber. On his sixth mission, while bombing an oil refinery, he took fire and lost an engine. Headed for a crash landing in a wheat field, his plane's left wing caught a wire strung between two telephone poles. The B-17 cartwheeled end over end, finally crashing on its back. Messinger and the copilot were suspended upside down, hanging from their seat belts. They unfastened their belts and dropped into the wreckage, finding themselves in the no-man's-land between the German and American lines. Badly injured, the two men struggled to the U.S. side and huddled on the front lines with the Seventh Armored division for a week before they were airlifted out. Messinger spent two months in an English hospital before getting back into the air, flying twenty-nine more missions before the end of the war. He later flew B-29s over Korea, where he “got shot up a bunch of times but never shot down.” In his two combat tours, he flew seventy missions. Now he worked as an air controller at Seymour Johnson, filling in as a relief pilot when needed. Tall and trim, he had a long face and serious, steady eyes.

  After the briefing, the three pilots walked out onto the tarmac, looked over their B-52, and then went to the bomb bay to inspect the four hydrogen bombs they'd be carrying that day. Each bomb packed 1.45 megatons of explosive power, about seventy times as much as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Rooney put a hand on each of them and gave a good tug, just to make sure they were locked in tight. Then the pilots climbed inside the plane with the rest of the crew to begin the systems check. They found two small problems: the UHF radio wasn't working right, and neither was one of the oil pressure gauges. By the time these were fixed, the crew was running eleven minutes late. The plane lumbered down the long runway and crept into the air, just after 6 p.m. Once they were airborne, Wendorf lit up a cigarette and settled in for the ride.

  It was a perfectly ordinary Sunday in Cold War America. The big news stories were an army coup in Nigeria that had left two government ministers dead and a proposed $3 billion spending hike for President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. Also, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, facing a failed “peace offensive” in Vietnam, told reporters that the U.S. government would consider “all necessary military measures” against Communist aggression in Southeast Asia. News analysts were trying to figure out exactly what that meant. And 35,000 feet above it all, Wendorf turned his plane east and headed toward Russia.

  Over the next twenty-three hours or so, Wendorf and his crew, in tandem with another B-52, planned to fly across the Atlantic, circle over the Mediterranean, and then—unless they heard otherwise—turn around and come home. Wendorf's flight, part of a program called airborne alert, was a key activity of the Strategic Air Command, the nuclear strike component of the U.S. Air Force. In 1966, most Americans still assumed that the United States and the USSR stood, at all times, on the brink of nuclear war. Many believed—with an unshakable, almost religious fervor—that it was SAC, and these highly visible bomber flights, that kept the Soviets in check.

  SAC's growth over the two previous decades had been explosive. In 1945, when America had dropped “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, SAC didn't exist and the United States owned exactly two atomic bombs. By 1966, SAC was the most powerful force in military history. The primary guardian of America's nuclear arsenal, it controlled the bulk of the nation's 32,193 nuclear warheads, as well as 674 bombers, 968 missiles, and 196,887 people. The commander of SAC directed the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, which selected America's nuclear targets. SAC supplied much of the military intelligence and got the lion's share of the United States' defense money. To many inside and outside the military, SAC seemed all-powerful and unstoppable. Their influence was so great that it seemed perfectly reasonable—even necessary—for pilots to fly toward Russia, during peacetime, with four hydrogen bombs in their plane.

  The story of the Strategic Air Command—its origin, mission, and philosophy—lay at the heart of the Cold War. And the story of SAC, and thus the story of Charles Wendorf's ill-fated flight, began during World War II, before humans had invented nuclear bombs, before people dreamed of nuclear war, and before the U.S. Air Force even existed. World War II launched the Air Force into being and spawned the atomic weapons that made it preeminent among the services. The war also shaped the military ideas of a tough young general named Curtis Emerson LeMay, teaching him the lessons he needed to turn SAC into the most powerful fighting force the world had ever seen.

  At dusk on March 9, 1945, on an airstrip on the South Pacific island of Guam, an American B-29 Superfortress sped down a runway and lifted off just as the sun dropped below the horizon. One minute later, another B-29 followed, its four churning propellers roaring it into the sky. Again and again, American bombers took off from two runways in Guam, one minute after another for almost three hours. At the same time, bombers lifted off from nearby Saipan and Tinian. By 8:10 p.m., 325 American planes were flying toward Tokyo, filling the sky in a massive, roaring herd. That night, the bombers would make history in the deadliest bombing raid of World War II. This mission over Tokyo would cement the future of the Air Force and the legend of Curtis LeMay.

  The bombing raid was a gamble. LeMay, a tough, reticent, thirty-eight-year-old general, was well known for his ability to solve problems and whip struggling outfits into shape. He had done it earlier in the war in Europe and China, and now he was in charge of the ailing 21st Bomber Command in Guam. LeMay had been running the show since January, but so far he hadn't fared much better than his predecessor, who had been fired. LeMay knew that if he didn't get results soon, he would be sent packing as well.

  LeMay's assignment in Japan was the same one he had had in Europe: bomb the enemy's factories, gas depots, and ports and destroy its ability to wage war. But Japan had thrown him a few curveballs. First, the weather over the country was terrible for bombing—clouds covered the major cities almost every day, making accurate visual targeting nearly impossible. And at 35,000 feet, the powerful jet stream blew bombers (and bombs) off course and forced planes to use an inordinate amount of fuel. Each four-engine B-29 needed twenty-three tons of fuel just to get from Guam to Tokyo and back, leaving room for only three tons of bombs. In his first two months in the Pacific, LeMay had learned these facts the hard way, through a series of embarrassing missions where his bombers hit only a few targets by chance.

  Sensing impatience from Washington, LeMay devised a daring plan for the March 9 mission. He would send t
he bombers in at night at a low altitude—under 10,000 feet—to avoid the jet stream and surprise the Japanese. If a bomber didn't have to fight the jet stream, LeMay calculated, it would use about two and a half tons less fuel. And he could save an additional two tons by stripping the planes of most of their guns, gunners, and ammunition. These two changes—flying at low altitudes and basically unarmed—would allow each plane to double its payload and drop bombs more accurately. It would also put the pilots at greater risk from Japanese antiaircraft fire, but LeMay concluded that it was a fair gamble. The Japanese air defenses were weaker than those he had seen in Europe. He thought his pilots could pull it off.

  LeMay was used to tough decisions, but this was one of the toughest. If this strategy worked, it could shorten the war and maybe prevent an invasion of Japan. But if he had miscalculated, he would be sending hundreds of young men on a suicide run. On the night of March 9, after seeing the planes off, the mission weighed heavy on his mind. At about 2 a.m., an Air Force PR officer named St. Clair McKelway found LeMay sitting on a wooden bench beneath the mission control boards. “I'm sweating this one out,” LeMay told McKelway. “A lot could go wrong. I can't sleep. I usually can, but not tonight.”

  LeMay knew that there was much at stake: his reputation, the lives of all those men, possibly the outcome of the war. But something else hung in the balance, too—the future of an independent Air Force.

  When World War II began, there was no such thing as the U.S. Air Force. Planes and pilots served under the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF), which provided firepower, transport, and supplies—what's called tactical support—to Army troops on the ground, where the real fighting was going on. The airplane was just another tool for ground warfare, and it had no mission or role beyond what the Army assigned it.