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  • Revisiting a Cold War Crisis: The Pentagon’s 1966 Search for a Missing Hydrogen Bomb
  • Paul S. Boyer (bio)
Barbara Moran. The Day We Lost the H-Bomb: Cold War, Hot Nukes, and the Worst Nuclear Weapons Disaster in History. New York: Random House, 2009. xi + 218 pages. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $26.00.

One of history’s little tricks is the way it bestows lasting fame on otherwise obscure places: Waterloo, Verdun, Gettysburg, and the little town of Bethlehem come to mind. The village of Palomares on Spain’s Mediterranean coast may not rank with these others, but in the annals of the Cold War, it enjoys a certain celebrity. On January 17, 1966, a U.S. B-52 strategic bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed over Palomares while engaged in a mid-air refueling maneuver. While the bombs were “unarmed,” and thus presumably in no danger of actually setting off a thermonuclear blast, they did contain conventional explosives and a highly radioactive plutonium core. While relatively harmless on the skin’s surface, plutonium (with a half-life of 24,360 years) can be deadly if ingested.

Three of the bombs fell on land and were quickly recovered. Two had disintegrated on impact, however, spewing plutonium over a wide area. The fourth fell in the sea, triggering a frantic and increasingly frustrating search by the U.S. Navy. The missing bomb was finally located in mid-March, teetering on the edge of a steep declivity in 2,500 feet of water five miles offshore. With infinite care and frustrating setbacks, it was finally raised to the surface on April 7, with no leakage of plutonium.

The B-52 that crashed was part of the airborne-alert program of the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC). This initiative had been inaugurated in 1961 amid worries that a preemptive Soviet attack could cripple America’s nuclear retaliatory capacity. (War-gamers at the Air Force–funded RAND Corporation in Pasadena, California, contributed to these fears.) Under this SAC program, at least twelve of SAC’s more than 1,600 long-range bombers armed with hydrogen bombs were airborne at all times, flying patterns over Europe within striking distance of the Soviet Union. Presumably immune to any Soviet preemptive attack, they fulfilled the “deterrence” objective of U.S. [End Page 139] nuclear strategy, while vastly increasing the risks inherent in the nuclear arms competition, as the 1966 crash graphically demonstrated.

The Palomares accident attracted intense media attention and inspired two 1967 books by prominent journalists: Flora Lewis’s One of Our H-Bombs is Missing and Tad Szulc’s The Bombs of Palomares. However, amid growing attention to the Vietnam War, the black freedom struggle, and protests in America’s cities and university campuses, the incident receded from historic memory and is today largely forgotten. The Day We Lost the H-Bomb brings it vividly back to our awareness. While utilizing relevant secondary sources, the work also reflects Barbara Moran’s exhaustive research in an array of primary sources, including recently declassified government documents and nearly a hundred interviews with surviving participants (including the three members of the seven-man B-52 crew who survived the crash) and experts in various technical fields.

Moran, a Boston-based science journalist, has published in New Scientist, Technology Review, and similar periodicals and has researched science episodes for Nova and other PBS programs. The present book was initially planned as an article for the journal Invention and Technology. Given this background, it is unsurprising that the book’s strength lies in the story’s technical aspects, from the aerodynamics of parachutes to the physics of plutonium-based hydrogen bombs 700 times more powerful than the uranium-based Hiroshima bomb. One learns a lot about underwater searches, which in this case involved Alvin, a two-person deep-sea vehicle later involved in the exploration of the Titanic; the Aluminaut, a mini-sub funded by the head of the Reynolds Aluminum Corporation, an underwater exploration enthusiast; the Westinghouse Ocean Bottom Scanning Sonar (OBSS); and CURV, an experimental technology for recovering errant torpedoes.

Moran also details the history and technology of mid-air refueling—a process many know...

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