The Bomb Is Found

The fisherman who plucked three U.S. airmen from the water off Spain's south coast last Jan. 17 remembered seeing "another parachute with half a man" fall into the sea after a nuclearladen B-52 had collided with a jet tanker. The "half a man" was a 20-megaton H-bomb, and luckily the skipper of one fishing sloop was sure he knew the exact spot where the bomb fell-five miles off the coast near Palomares. Other sea going Spanish witnesses were equally sure the site was elsewhere, but the U.S. Navy routinely put down a marker buoy just the same.

Already, the 15 vessels of Task Force 65, the largest and most sophisticated search group in naval history, had gathered in the area. While 120 Navy divers made a shoulder-to-shoulder search along five miles of coastal water, ships equipped with ultra-sensitive sonar crisscrossed the 120-sq.-mi. search zone. But Rear Admiral William S. Guest, 50, commander of the task force, ordered three weird-looking submersibles, especially designed for deep-sea research, to pay special attention to the spot around the buoy.

They did, and one day last week the Alvin, a 22-ft. submarine equipped with special underwater cameras and a mechanical "claw," brought up film of an object it had spotted at 2,500 ft. Once developed, the film set off jubilation in Madrid and Washington, for the pictures clearly showed the H-bomb, apparently completely intact, partly covered by its own grey parachute. The recovery plan called for nudging the bomb along the sea's bottom for some distance until it rested on level ground. When that was done, the Alvin would use her claw to slip a cable around the bomb, and the U.S.S. Hoist would winch it on board for immediate trans port to the U.S.

The discovery was a fantastic mixture of technical skill and luck. It matched finding a needle in a haystack -or "perhaps in a hayfield," as one official put it. For all the tips from fishermen and experts' calculations, the bomb could have landed just about anywhere over an area of scores of square miles, and the parachute could have acted as a sea anchor in the swift coastal cur rents, tugging the bomb into less accessible depths. Then, too, the sea floor's shifting mud might have ultimately hidden the bomb from view.

As the Navy worked to recover the nuke, the shore side of the massive search was also drawing to a close. The Air Force, which recovered the three H-bombs that fell on land, had finished scraping 1,500 cu. yds. of contaminated topsoil into steel drums, was preparing to ship them aboard an American freighter to the U.S. for burial in the Aiken, S.C., nuclear-disposal plot. To celebrate an unpleasant job well done, the Air Force brought in a band that tootled prettily as airmen began striking their tent city near Palomares.

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