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By Root 1053 0

put a barbed-wire fence around the Area 51 subparcel, marked it with HAZARD/DO NOT ENTER/NUCLEAR MATERIAL signs, and moved on to the next weapons test. The bustling CIA facility five miles downwind would be relatively safe, the nuclear scientists and the weapons planners surmised. Alpha particles are heavy and would rest on the topsoil after the original dust cloud settled down. Furthermore, almost no one knew about the supersecret project, certainly not the public, so who would protest? The closest inhabitants were the rank and file at the CIA’s Groom Lake facility next door, and they also knew nothing of Project 57. The men there followed strict need-to-know protocols, and as far as the commission was concerned, all anyone at Area 51 needed to know was to not venture near the barbed-wire fence marking off Area 13.

And yet the information gleaned from a cleanup effort would have been terribly useful, as was revealed eight years and eight months after Project 57 unfurled. On the morning of January 17, 1966, a real-life dirty bomb crisis occurred over Palomares, Spain. A Strategic Air Command bomber flying with four armed hydrogen bombs—with yields between 70 kilotons and 1.45 megatons—collided midair with a refueling tanker over the Spanish countryside.

On the morning of the accident, an Air Force pilot and his six-man crew were participating in an exercise that was part of Operation Chrome Dome, something that had begun in the late 1950s as part of Strategic Air Command. In a show of force inherent to the military doctrine of the day—something called mutual assured destruction, or MAD—airplanes regularly circled Earth carrying thermonuclear bombs. The idea behind MAD was that if the Soviet Union were to make a sneak attack on America, SAC bombers would already be airborne to strike back at Moscow with nuclear weapons of their own, thereby assuring the mutual destruction of both sides.

That morning, the bomber lined up with the tanker and had just begun refueling when, in the words of pilot Larry Messinger, “all of a sudden, all hell seemed to break loose” and the two aircraft collided. There was a massive explosion and the men in the fuel tanker were instantly incinerated. Somehow Messinger, his copilot, the instructor pilot, and the navigator managed to eject from the airplane carrying the bombs. Their parachutes deployed, and the men floated down, landing in the sea. The four nuclear bombs—individually powerful enough to destroy Manhattan—also had parachutes, two of which did not deploy. One parachuted bomb landed gently in a dry riverbed and was later recovered relatively intact. But when the two bombs without parachutes hit the earth, their explosive charges detonated, breaking open the nuclear cores. Nuclear material was released at Palomares in the form of aerosolized plutonium, which then spread out across 650 acres of Spanish farmland—consistent with dispersal patterns from the Project 57 dirty bomb test. The fourth bomb landed in the sea and became lost. Palomares was then a small fishing village and farming community located on the Mediterranean Sea. As fortune would have it, January 17 was the Festival of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of Palomares, which meant most people in the village were at church that day and not out working in the fields.

Five thousand miles away, in Washington, DC, President Johnson learned of the disaster over breakfast. He’d been sitting in his bedroom sipping tea and eating melon and chipped beef when a staffer from the White House Situation Room knocked, entered, and set down a copy of his daily security briefing. On the first page, the president read about the war in Vietnam. On the second page he learned about the Palomares incident. The daily brief said nothing about widespread plutonium dispersal or about the lost thermonuclear bomb. Only that the “16th Nuclear Disaster Team had been dispatched to the area.” The “16th Nuclear Disaster Team” sounded official enough, but if fifteen nuclear disaster teams had preceded this one or existed concurrently, no record of any of them