U.S. Credibility and Lost Bomb

What has been overlooked in context of the military’s long-delayed revelation that a hydrogen bomb was lost overboard in foreign waters from the carrier Ticonderoga on Dec. 5, 1965, is that on Jan. 17, 1966, a little more than a month later, our Air Force in Spain lost not one, but four H-bombs and allowed the story of the crisis, and their recovery, to be told.

My friend, roving editor John G. Hubbell of Reader’s Digest, won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Outstanding Magazine Reporting with “The Story of the Missing H-Bomb” in the September, 1966, issue. The military extended to him an extraordinary level of cooperation.

A B-52 had collieded with a KC-135 refueling plane over southern Spain. As John reported, the U.S. had before then experienced 11 “Broken Arrows,” code for a nuclear accident, but none in foreign territory, at least none that were revealed until we learned recently about Ticonderoga. Four unarmed H-bombs scattered below from the doomed B-52, which then crashed.

Unlike Ticonderoga, relatively invisible at sea, this incident became very public and the Spaniards were understandably frightened. Three of the bombs were quickly recovered in the Spanish countryside, but it took almost 80 days and a mammoth effort of 3,000 men and a veritable fleet of air and sea equipment to finally recover the fourth and “missing H-bomb” in deep water off Palomares on the southern coast of Spain.

Credit for finally spotting the missing bomb went to the crew of Alvin, a deep submersible shipped to Spain from the Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. Alvin was one of many unique and futuristic resources employed by the military to conduct the extraordinary search.

In Spain, as international media pressure mounted, our recovery efforts were kept under strict security while Maj. Gen. Delmar E. Wilson, commander of the 16th Air Force, with enormous assistance from the Navy and other organizations, struggled day and night for nearly three months to find the missing fourth bomb. It’s a credit to our government, however, that our military allowed the full story to be told within the same year, unlike the Ticonderoga incident, which they apparently felt was best kept secret, and could be, for a long, long time.

ROBERT N. WOLD

Los Angeles