1966 Palomares B-52 crash

The 1966 Palomares B-52 crash, also called the Palomares incident, occurred on 17 January 1966, when a B-52G bomber of the United States Air Force's Strategic Air Command collided with a KC-135 tanker during mid-air refueling at over the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Spain. The KC-135 was completely destroyed when its fuel load ignited, killing all four crew members. The B-52G broke apart, killing three of the seven crew members aboard.
At the time of the accident, the B-52G was carrying four B28FI Mod 2 Y1 thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs, all of which fell to the surface. Three were found on land near the small fishing village of Palomares in the municipality of Cuevas del Almanzora, Almería, Spain. The non-nuclear explosives in two of the weapons detonated upon impact with the ground, resulting in the contamination of a area with radioactive plutonium. The fourth, which fell into the Mediterranean Sea, was recovered intact after a search lasting months.
Accident.
The B-52G began its mission from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina, carrying four B28FI Mod 2 Y1 thermonuclear bombs on a Cold War airborne alert mission named Operation Chrome Dome. The flight plan took the aircraft east across the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea towards the European borders of the Soviet Union before returning home. The lengthy flight required two mid-air refuelings over Spain.
At about 10:30 am on 17 January 1966, while flying at , the bomber commenced its second aerial refueling with a KC-135 out of Morón Air Base in southern Spain. The B-52 pilot, Major Larry G. Messinger, later recalled,
The planes collided, with the nozzle of the refueling boom striking the top of the B-52 fuselage, breaking a longeron and snapping off the left wing, which resulted in an explosion that was witnessed by a second B-52 about a mile () away. All four men on the KC-135 and three of the seven men on the bomber were killed.
Those killed in the tanker were boom operator Master Sergeant Lloyd Potolicchio, pilot Major Emil J. Chapla, co-pilot Captain Paul R. Lane, and navigator Captain Leo E. Simmons.
On board the bomber, navigator First Lieutenant Steven G. Montanus, electronic warfare officer First Lieutenant George J. Glessner, and gunner Technical Sergeant Ronald P. Snyder were killed. Montanus was seated on the lower deck of the main cockpit and was able to eject from the plane, but his parachute never opened. Glessner and Snyder were on the upper deck, near the point where the refueling boom struck the fuselage, and were not able to eject.
Four of the seven crew members of the bomber managed to parachute to safety: in addition to pilot Major Messinger, aircraft commander Captain Charles F. Wendorf, copilot First Lieutenant Michael J. Rooney, and radar-navigator Captain Ivens Buchanan. Buchanan received burns from the explosion and was unable to separate himself from his ejection seat, but he was nevertheless able to open his parachute, and he survived the impact with the ground. The other three surviving crew members landed safely several miles out to sea.
The Palomares residents carried Buchanan to a local clinic, while Wendorf and Rooney were picked up at sea by the fishing boat "Dorita". The last to be rescued was Messinger, who spent 45 minutes in the water before he was brought aboard the fishing boat "Agustin y Rosa" by Fernando Simó. All three men who landed in the sea were taken to a hospital in Águilas.
Weapons.
The weapons lost during the accident were four B28FI Mod 2 Y1 thermonuclear bombs.
The letters FI indicated B28 bombs configured in the full fuzing internal configuration. A full fuzing capability means the weapons could be delivered via all of bomb delivery options including free-fall airburst, retarded airburst, freefall groundburst and laydown groundburst delivery. In this configuration the W28 warhead was fitted between a Mk28 Mod 3F shock absorbing nose and a Mk28 Mod 0 FISC rear end containing a parachute. The shock absorbing nose enabled the weapon to survive laydown delivery while the parachute slowed the weapon down in retarded airburst and laydown delivery.
The Mod 2 nomenclature indicates the hardened version of the weapon designed to survive laydown delivery as earlier Mod 0 and Mod 1 weapons could not survive the forces involved. The Y1 nomeculture indicates a W28 warhead with a yield of .
Weapons recovery.
The aircraft and weapons fell to earth near the fishing village of Palomares. This settlement is part of Cuevas del Almanzora municipality, in the Almeria province, Spain. Three of the weapons were located on land within 24 hours of the accident—the conventional explosives in two had exploded on impact, spreading radioactive contamination, while a third was found relatively intact in a riverbed. The fourth weapon could not be found despite an intensive search of the area—the only part that was recovered was the parachute tail plate, leading searchers to postulate that the weapon's parachute had deployed, and that the wind had carried it out to sea.
During early stages of recovery after the accident the 66th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing, flying RF-101C Voodoos out of RAF Upper Heyford near Oxford, England, provided aerial photographs to assist in the recovery operation and to document the crash site.
On 22 January, the Air Force contacted the U.S. Navy for assistance. The Navy convened a Technical Advisory Group (TAG), chaired by Rear Admiral L. V. Swanson with Dr. John P. Craven and Captain Willard Franklyn Searle, to identify resources and skilled personnel that needed to be moved to Spain.
The search for the fourth bomb was carried out by means of a novel mathematical method, Bayesian search theory, led by Dr. Craven. This method assigns probabilities to individual map grid squares, then updates these as the search progresses. Initial probability input is required for the grid squares, and these probabilities made use of the fact that a local fisherman, Francisco Simó Orts, popularly known since then as ("Bomb Paco" or "Bomb Frankie"), witnessed the bomb entering the water at a certain location. Simó Orts was hired by the U.S. Air Force to assist in the search operation.
The United States Navy assembled the following ships in response to Air Force request for assistance:
Additionally, the aircraft carrier and various other units of the Sixth Fleet made a brief stopover at Palomares on the morning of 15 March 1966, with Forrestal anchoring at 09:03 and departing at 12:19.
The recovery operation was led by Supervisor of Salvage, Capt Searle. "Hoist", "Petrel" and "Tringa" brought 150 qualified divers who searched to with compressed air, to with mixed gas, and to with hard-hat rigs; but the bomb lay in an uncharted area of the Rio Almanzora canyon on a 70-degree slope at a depth of . After a search that continued for 80 days following the crash, the bomb was located by the DSV "Alvin" on 17 March, but was dropped and temporarily lost when the Navy attempted to bring it to the surface. After the loss of the recovered bomb the ship's positions were fixed by Decca HI-FIX position-locating equipment for subsequent recovery attempts.
"Alvin" located the bomb again on 2 April, this time at a depth of . On 7 April, an unmanned torpedo recovery vehicle, CURV-I, became entangled in the weapon's parachute while attempting to attach a line to it. A decision was made to raise CURV and the weapon together to a depth of , where divers attached cables to them. The bomb was brought to the surface by . The was diverted from its Naples destination and stayed on scene until recovery and took the bomb back to the United States.
Once the bomb was located, Simó Orts appeared at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York with his lawyer, Herbert Brownell, formerly Attorney General of the United States under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, claiming salvage rights on the recovered thermonuclear bomb. According to Craven:
 The Air Force settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. In later years, Simó was heard to complain that the Americans had promised him financial compensation and had not kept that promise.
Contamination.
At 10:40 UTC, the accident was reported at the
Command Post of the Sixteenth Air Force, and it was confirmed at 11:22.
The commander of the U.S. Air Force at Torrejón Air Base, Spain, Major General Delmar E. Wilson, immediately traveled to the scene of the accident with a
Disaster Control Team. Further Air Force personnel were dispatched later the same day, including nuclear experts from U.S. government laboratories.
The first weapon to be discovered was found nearly intact. However, the conventional explosives from the other two bombs that fell on land detonated without setting off a nuclear explosion (akin to a dirty bomb explosion). This ignited the pyrophoric plutonium, producing a cloud that was dispersed by a wind. A total of was contaminated with radioactive material. This included residential areas, farmland (especially tomato farms) and woods.
To defuse alarm of contamination, on 8 March the Spanish minister for information and tourism Manuel Fraga Iribarne and the United States ambassador Angier Biddle Duke swam on nearby beaches in front of press. First the ambassador and some companions swam at Mojácar — a resort away — and then Duke and Fraga swam at the "Quitapellejos" beach in Palomares.
Despite the cost and number of personnel involved in the cleanup, forty years later there remained traces of the contamination. Snails have been observed with unusual levels of radioactivity. Additional tracts of land have also been appropriated for testing and further cleanup. However, no indication of health issues has been discovered among the local population in Palomares.
Political consequences.
President Lyndon B. Johnson was first apprised of the situation in his morning briefing the same day as the accident. He was told that the 16th Nuclear Disaster Team had been sent to investigate, per the standard procedures for this type of accident. News stories related to the crash began to appear the following day, and it achieved front page status in both the "New York Times" and "Washington Post" on 20 January. Reporters sent to the accident scene covered angry demonstrations by the local residents. On 4 February, an underground Communist organization successfully initiated a protest by 600 people in front of the U.S. Embassy in Spain. The Duchess of Medina Sidonia, Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo (known as the "Red Duchess" for her socialist activism), eventually received a 13-month prison sentence for leading an illegal protest.
Four days after the accident, the Spanish government under Franco's dictatorship stated that "the Palomares incident was evidence of the dangers created by NATO's use of the Gibraltar airstrip", announcing that NATO aircraft would no longer be permitted to fly over Spanish territory
either to or from Gibraltar. On 25 January, as a diplomatic concession, the U.S. announced that it would no longer fly over Spain with nuclear weapons, and on 29 January the Spanish government formally banned U.S. flights over its territory that carried such weapons. This caused other nations hosting U.S. forces to review their policies, with the Philippine Foreign Secretary Narciso Ramos calling for a new treaty to restrict the operation of U.S. military aircraft in Filipino airspace.
Palomares, and the Thule Air Base B-52 crash involving nuclear weapons two years later in Greenland, made Operation Chrome Dome politically untenable, leading the U.S. Department of Defense to announce that it would be "re-examining the military need" for continuing the program.
As of 2008, there was no museum or monument dedicated to the accident in Palomares, and was noted only by a short street named "17 January 1966".
Cleanup.
Soil with radioactive contamination levels above 1.2 MBq/m2 was placed in 250-litre (66 U.S. gallon) drums and shipped to the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina for burial. A total of was decontaminated by this technique, producing 6,000 barrels. of land with lower levels of contamination were mixed to a depth of by harrowing and plowing. On rocky slopes with contamination above 120 kBq/m2, the soil was removed with hand tools and shipped to the U.S. in barrels.
In 2004, a study revealed that there was still some significant contamination present in certain areas, and the Spanish government subsequently expropriated some plots of land which would otherwise have been slated for agriculture use or housing construction.
On 11 October 2006, Reuters reported that higher than normal levels of radiation were detected in snails and other wildlife in the region, indicating there may still be dangerous amounts of radioactive material underground. The discovery occurred during an investigation being carried out by Spain's energy research agency CIEMAT and the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. and Spain agreed to share the cost of the initial investigation.
In April 2008, CIEMAT announced they had found two trenches, totaling , where the U.S. Army stored contaminated earth during the 1966 operations. The American government agreed in 2004 to pay for the decontamination of the grounds, and the cost of the removal and transportation of the contaminated earth has been estimated at $2 million. The trenches were found near the cemetery, where one of the nuclear devices was retrieved in 1966, and they were probably dug at the last moment by American troops before leaving Palomares. CIEMAT informed they expected to find remains of plutonium and americium once an exhaustive analysis of the earth had been carried out.
In a conversation in December 2009, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos told the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that he feared Spanish public opinion might turn against the U.S. once the results of the study on nuclear contamination were to be revealed.
In August 2010, a Spanish government source revealed that the U.S. had stopped the annual payments it has made to Spain, as the bilateral agreement in force since the accident had expired the previous year.
On 19 October 2015, Spain and the United States signed an agreement to further discuss the cleanup and removal of land contaminated with radioactivity. Under a statement of intent signed by Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the two countries will negotiate a binding agreement to further restore and clear up the Palomares site and arrange for the disposal of the contaminated soil at an appropriate site in the U.S.
Aftermath.
The empty casings of two of the bombs involved in this incident are now on display in the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
While serving on the salvage ship during recovery operations, Navy diver Carl Brashear had his leg crushed in a deck accident and lost the lower part of his left leg. His story was the inspiration for the 2000 film "Men of Honor".
In March 2009, "Time" magazine identified the Palomares accident as one of the world's "worst nuclear disasters".
There has been a marked long-term occurrence of cancer and other health defects among the surviving USAF personnel who were directed to the site in the days following the accident to clean up the contamination. Most of the afflicted personnel have had difficulty securing any type of compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs due to the secretive nature of the cleanup operation and the Air Force's refusal to acknowledge that adequate safety measures to protect the first responders may not have been taken.
In June 2016, "The New York Times" published an article on the 50th anniversary lingering legacy of the Palomares accident.
In December 2017, one of the airmen involved in the clean-up, Victor Skaar, sued the Department of Veterans Affairs in the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. Skaar was appealing the Department's refusal of medical treatment for leukopenia that Skaar believes was caused by his exposure at Palomares. He also petitioned for the Court to certify a class of veterans "who were present at the 1966 cleanup of plutonium dust at Palomares, Spain[,] and whose application for service-connected disability comp based on exposure to ionizing radiation [VA] has denied ore will deny." The certification of this class was granted by the Court in December 2019. This one of the first cases ever granted class-action status by the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims.
In popular culture.
The incident inspired the light-hearted 1966 film "Finders Keepers", starring Cliff Richard backed by his band The Shadows.
This incident was given the movie treatment in a semi-serious 1967 film, "The Day the Fish Came Out", which covers the story of a plane crash alongside a Greek (not Spanish) Island and the surreptitious attempts by plainclothes U.S. Navy personnel to find the missing bombs.
In November 1966, the plot of an 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 an atomic weapon which crashed over a remote Italian village.
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 U.S. Air Force settled for "at least $20 million" when they lost a previous hydrogen bomb in the late 1960s.
In 2000, the U.S. film "Men of Honor" focused on the life of the first black American master diver, Carl Brashear, in the U.S. Navy. The film begins and ends with the Palomares bomb recovery by U.S. Navy personnel.
In April 2015, the Palomares incident was mentioned in the Danish film "The Idealist", a film about a similar incident, the 1968 Thule Air Base B-52 crash.
In August 2015, the Palomares incident was the subject of a 2-minute animated film, made by Richard Neale, that was a finalist in the BBC's WellDoneU competition for amateur film makers.