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The largest remaining piece of a US jet tanker after a collision with a B-52 bomber over southeastern Spain, January 18, 1966.
Early in the morning of January 16, 1966, a B-52 Stratofortress bomber launched from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina.The bomber with four nuclear weapons on board made its way to Europe, where it was to patrol near the border with the then Soviet Union as part of the Operation Chrome Dome - a program from the Cold War that was launched to enable the US Case of war 24 hours a day are prepared and can strike back immediately.During the return to the US the next day, the B-52 was scheduled to meet with a KC-135 tanker over Spain to fill the Treifftofftank. Captain Charles Wendorf, the 29-year-old Air Force pilot in charge of the bomber, asked another pilot, Maj. Larry Messinger, to take over as the crew approached the meeting place.A few minutes after 10 clock on 17 January, the two aircraft then approached at 9,500 kilometers altitude. Messinger noticed that something was going bad.
"We were behind the tanker and a bit too fast, so we caught up with him," Messinger recalled, according to the magazine American Heritage."There is a clear refueling process when the boom operator notices you are getting too close and the situation becomes dangerous. Then he calls and says: Cancel, cancel, cancel ", Messinger stated. "There was no such call, so we did not know it was a dangerous situation. But suddenly the tanker broke off. "The B-52 collided with the tanker. The belly of the KC-135 was torn open and fuel spilled over the tanker and the bomber. There were explosions that damaged both aircraft. The tanker blew up, killing all four crew members on board. Three more men died in the back of the bomber, the remaining four crew members operated the ejection seat.Capt. Ivens Buchanan burned in his ejection seat because the fireball hit him. He fell to the ground but survived. The parachutes of Wendorf and Richard Rooney opened at 4,200 meters altitude. They fell into the sea and were rescued by fishermen.Messinger injured his head while skidding. "I opened the parachute myself. I should not have done that. I should have just dropped and the parachute opened at 4,000 meters anyway, "he said. "But I did it anyway, probably because of my head injury." He also floated out to the sea where fishermen rescued him.A Spanish fisherman eight kilometers from the coast said he had seen the blast and the debris. Then he saw the five parachutes-the three surviving crew members of the bomber, as well as two others, calling a "half man whose guts spilled out" and the other a "dead man."All the Air Force officers stationed in Spain assembled troops - including cooks, musicians and employees - and bussed them in the direction of Palomares, a farming village on the coast in southeastern Spain.
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The wreckage of a US Air Force KC-135 tanker that collided with a B-52 bomber over southeast Spain. Spanish officials in background are searching for bodies, January 18, 1966.
"It was a mess," recalls John Graham, a police officer, talking to the New York Times. "There were rubble everywhere in the village. A large wreckage of the bomber crashed into a schoolyard. "On the evening of January 17, all crew members were captured and it was recorded that no villagers had been injured. But the US personnel still had to keep looking - after the four nuclear warheads that had been aboard the B-52.Day long searchThe bombs - which were 100 times more explosive at 1.45 megatons than the bomb detonated over Hiroshima - were not sharp, meaning they could not have caused an atomic explosion.A bomb was recovered completely intact, but two bombs went very well. The explosions resulted in house-sized craters on the outskirts of the village, causing plutonium to be scattered and contaminating the crop and fields."There has never been a word about radiation or plutonium or anything," said Frank B. Thompson, a 22-year-old trombonist, the "New York Times" in 2016.
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Nuclear-search-team members have lunch at Camp Wilson in Palomares Beach, Spain, February 17, 1966.
Thompson and others spent days in the field without protective clothing and without changing clothes at all. "Everyone told us it was safe, and we were stupid enough to believe them," he said.
The fourth bomb could not be found even after days of searching - which was not only embarrassing for the US, but also dangerous for the people in the region.
The Pentagon commissioned engineers from the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico to calculate with all available data where the lost bomb might have landed. The circumstances of the collision and the countless variables made this estimate very difficult.
The researchers started from a landing in the sea, but there was simply not enough data to tell exactly where.
An H-bomb lost in the crash of two US Air Force planes in January 1966, seen during a recovery operation on April 8, 1966
A survey of the fisherman who saw the five crew members brought the big
breakthrough.The alleged "dead man" was in fact the bomb that hung on a parachute. And the supposedly "half man whose guts spilled out" was an empty parachute bag, its loops blowing in the air.This information helped the engineers to calculate a smaller radius for a possible crash site of the bomb. In the end, we talked about an area of 69 square kilometers, where in some places you could see only up to six meters deep into the water.On February 11, the Navy moved in with Alvin, a seven-meter-long, 2.5-meter-wide and 13-ton submersible, which can dive 1,800 feet deep. In it, a helmsman and two observers had space, as well as several cameras and a gripping arm.Alvin's primitive technology made the search very difficult. There was no progress until March 1, when a trail was found on the seabed.
Two more weeks passed before the submersible found the bomb - 770 meters below the water surface, pretty much at the point the fisherman had described as a potential crash site. On March 24, the crew of the submersible then managed to attach a sling to the ropes of the bomb's parachute. At 8 o'clock in the evening, a Navy ship began to retrieve the bomb. An hour later, the rope ripped and the bomb landed again at the bottom of the sea.On April 2, she was found again, approximately in the same area, 100 meters lower. The Navy tried another recovery plan with an unoccupied dive boat, but caught in the bombshell. On April 7, the admiral then instructed the crew to lift the bomb as a whole.The arduous process that followed, and where combat divers also participated, eventually brought the bomb to the surface, ending the 81-day Tour de Force.The crew of Alvin was heralded as a hero, but that's the only beautiful part of the story."They told us everything was safe"
US soldiers harvested more than 240 acres of crops in Palomares for disposal in the Savannah River nuclear complex in South Carolina.The US government paid $ 710,914 to settle out of court with 536 Spanish plaintiffs. The fisherman, who wanted a share because he found the bomb, sued the US Air Force for $ 5 million and was awarded 14,566. The Madrid government has called on the US Strategic Air Command to postpone its flights over Spain following protests by the population (Yankee murderers had been shouted). The Operation Chrome Dome program was finally discontinued in 1992.The US crew involved in the search and the Spaniards in the area feel the aftermath of the accident well over half a decade after it happened.Although the grain and soil were removed immediately after the accident, tests in the 1990s revealed a high level of americium in the village, a material that results from the decay of plutonium. Further tests showed that 50,000 cubic meters of the soil remained radioactive. The US agreed in 2015 to clear more land in the village.Many of the US veterans involved in the search have health problems because of the plutonium intoxication suffered. It is difficult to associate cancer with radiation, and there is no study that clearly establishes a connection, but in the years that have passed since then, a clear picture has emerged.
An unidentified US soldier looks through the material found after a US B-52 bomber collided with a tanker plane during aerial refueling, January 17, 1966.
Of the 40 veterans involved in the search and tracked down by The Times in 2016, 21 had cancer-nine had already died of cancer.Many of the men blamed the Air Force, which sent them to the crash sites to clean up without protective gear. In addition, the soldiers had to eat the grain from Palomares (the Spaniards refused). An officer should have a plastic bag in his hand pressed with the request to collect the radioactive fragments by hand.The Air Force concealed tests from that time, which clearly showed that the men had been exposed to a high level of plutonium."It took me a long time to understand that my problems could be related to the cleanup of the bombs," said Arthur Kindler, who was a store clerk at the time.He was so full of plutonium during the cleanup that the Air Force told him to wash himself in the sea and take off his clothes. Four years later he got testicular cancer and a rare pneumonia. Three times since then cancer has already appeared in his lymph nodes."You have to understand that they told us everything was safe," said Kindler. "How were young, we trusted them. Why should they lie? "You might also be interested in this:
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