The beautiful sunny Andalucia in southern Spain is well-known as a holiday destination thanks to its nature, beaches, tapas and wine. It is much less known as the location of one of the biggest nuclear accidents of the 20th century. Hard to believe, but here is what happened.
These were the times of the Cold War. The skies above Andalucia were patrolled daily by the world's most modern war machines. As part of the US operation “Chrome Dome” to prevent the Soviets from striking first, between 12 and 24 nuclear-armed B-52 bombers were kept in the air 24 hours a day. You don’t want to think about it but sometimes nuclear weapons go astray. In the military they are nicknamed "Broken Arrows". On the 17th of January 1966, a tiny fishing village of Palomares got four of them.
On this cold winter morning US Air Force B-52G bomber collided with a KC-135 tanker during mid-air refueling over the Mediterranean Sea. Both planes were destroyed. The B-52G was carrying four 1.5 megaton thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs, all of which fell off the plane. No one on the ground was injured. The American airmen were less lucky - all four men on the refuelling plane died and three of the seven men on the B-52G were killed.
Immediately after the incident, the Palomares and its surroundings became a base for a large-scale military operation involving 700 American airmen and scientists who went looking for the bombs. Within 24 hours, three of the four bombs were found on land. The non-nuclear explosives in two of the weapons detonated upon impact with the ground and as a result a total of 2.6 square kilometres was contaminated with radioactive plutonium. This included residential areas, tomato farms and woods. Immediate cleanup was required. In the following days, US airmen removed the top soil from the most contaminated areas, sealed it in barrels, and shipped it to a storage facility back in the US. Despite the cost and the number of personnel involved in the cleanup operation, traces of contamination remained as late as forty years later.
Photo: barrels of contaminated soil collected at Palomares for removal to the United States, from Wikimedia Commons
The fourth bomb - which became known as the "lost H-bomb” - fell into the Mediterranean Sea. It raised a lot of concerns, and not only from the contamination point of view. The design of these bombs was top-secret. The US Navy deployed more than 20 ships, including mine-sweepers and submersibles, in an attempt to find it. While they were searching, Soviet spy ships were circling around. The situation was tense. Finally, after several months of rigorous search, the “lost H-bomb” was recovered intact.
Photo: recovered “lost H-bomb”, from Wikimedia Commons
The Palomares incident and another B52 crash involving nuclear weapons two years later in Greenland, made operation “Chrome Dome” politically untenable, leading the US Department of Defense to announce that it would be "re-examining the military need" for continuing the program.
There is no museum or monument dedicated to the accident in the town of Palomares, but there is a street named "17 January 1966”.
Of course, the incident inspired the movie-makers. Late in 1966, one episode of the espionage-themed American television series I Spy entitled "One of Our Bombs is Missing" was devoted to the search for an American Air Force plane carrying nuclear weapons which crashed over a remote Italian village. Another movie came out a year later, “The Day the Fish Came Out”, which tells a story of a plane crash alongside a Greek Island and the attempts by US Navy personnel to find the missing bombs. In Episode 12 of the fourth season of Archer, the main protagonists race against time to recover a lost hydrogen bomb near the Bermuda Triangle, with references being made to how the US Air Force lost a previous hydrogen bomb in the late 1960s.
