Keep It Hush-Hush
In Almería province there is a fishing village with an evocative name, Palomares. The name means dovecotes, and brings to mind the cooing of doves and peaceful surroundings. In Spain its name brings to mind midnight minus two seconds.
In 1966 Franco was a firm ally of the United States. After all, through the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II, the United States brought much- needed relief to a country that had not been able to recuperate from a bestial Civil War ten years earlier and punishment inflicted during the World War for being an ally of the Axis powers. Franco was a shrewd dictator and knew when to cut his losses and make an international about face. As the War drew to a close, and it was obvious his friend Hitler was going to lose, Franco decided Spain wasn't going down with the ship. He cut his ties and turned to the Allies as a neutral. He was admitted into the club and was given relief. In return, he ceded territory for the United States to use as air bases at the beginning of the Cold War. Spain was strategically placed, being the westernmost country of western Europe, and therefore now a valuable ally, however Fascist its leader may still have been. One of the airbases was at Morón de la Frontera, near Sevilla in Andalucía. It is still a U.S. airbase.
On the 17th of January, 1966, forty-nine years ago, there was an Air Force exercise or airborne alert mission called Chrome Dome being enacted. Air Force planes were to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, approach the Soviet Union, and return home. This mission involved two refuelings over Spain. A KC-135 tanker out of Morón was to refuel the two B-52's involved in the mission. On that day, as one of the B-52's approached the refueling boom, there was a mistake, the boom struck the B-52 and caused an explosion. The refueling plane was lost, the crew killed. Four of the seven crew members of the B-52 were able to eject from the fighter and survived. The fighter fell in the area of Palomares, along with three of the four hydrogen bombs it carried. The fourth fell in the sea and was recuperated intact by the Navy in the month of April. Two of the bombs that fell on land had their conventional parts explode. However, about half a kilo of plutonium escaped in that explosion. The last one was fairly intact. The ones that exploded acted like dirty bombs, in which pyrophoric plutonium was spewed throughout the area, but there wasn't a thermonuclear explosion because the nuclear heads didn't explode. The area contaminated was about two square kilometers.
Though Franco tried to keep everything under wraps as much as possible, he knew that by the 1960's he was in an age in which if he didn't say anything, others would. So he allowed the usual censored reports. All of them said the contamination was minimal and had been contained. To show the world at large that there was absolutely no problem whatsoever, the Minister of Information and Tourism (a telling amalgamation of intents), Manuel Fraga Iribarne and the
U.S. ambassador, Angier Biddle Duke, went for a swim at a beach near Palomares, appropriately filmed and photographed. If they weren't afraid to swim there, then there was no problem for anybody who chose to do so, much less for the inhabitants of the area. But then, the Minister and the Ambassador were only there for a few hours. The locals weren't hoodwinked, though they were effectively silenced for many years.
However, Franco wasn't open to having this happen again, and by the end of January, the U.S. was prohibited from flying over Spanish territory carrying nuclear weapons. Other countries decided to follow suit. But this did little for Palomares and its residents. The contamination was still there. The Department of Defense originally scraped off an upper layer of 1.6 million tons of earth and shipped it off to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. They considered the area clean. But it wasn't.
Some of the area contaminated was agricultural land, and some was hillside. The agricultural land had the topsoil lifted off and taken away. What was left was plowed and mixed, and the resulting analyses gave results within normal limits. But not all contaminated topsoil was apparently taken away. The hillside that was difficult to clean had trees that were washed off. The trees and rocks and earth that couldn't be cleaned, were submerged in a pit dug to warehouse them. At that time tractors were rare and people stuck to the center of villages to build their houses. Though some few buildings, mostly barns and sheds close to the fields, had been affected and had been demolished. Their materials were also buried in the pit.
After that everything was put under wraps. There was a joint follow-up of the area over the years, between the U.S. and Spain, but nothing was made public. Apparently, some of the neighbors were also followed medically, but no information was released, not even to the people involved. Some locals say there was a greater incidence of cancers and other illnesses possibly linked to high radiation exposure, but nothing was ever investigated or made public. So things were left to wither away from the public mind. Farmers continued to use some of the affected fields to plant their tomato crops, assured that it was now safe. There was a silent check every now and then that turned up elevated levels of radiation but, since it didn't go above the limits for public safety, nothing more was done. Until the building boom at the beginning of the century.
Around the year 2000, building contractors began their business of building vacation homes and resorts along the Mediterranean (and everywhere else in this country). An eye was given to Palomares, as had been to the tiny fishing village of Benidorm thirty years earlier (tiny and fishing no longer). In 2001 they began looking for permits to build just outside the town limits, in the area where the bombs had fallen. Samples were taken of the soil and the air and the results that came back were alarming. While, apparently, there was no immediate threat to health or life, there was no way that place was appropriate for building vacation homes where families would spend a good deal of their time. So the whole shebang was kicked to the central government which started talking again with the Department of Energy about doing something. The first thing done was the expropriation of the contaminated land and building a fence around it. The next was to get the U.S. government to pay and finish decontaminating the area. Of course, all this was done when it was seen that a profit could be made from the land. The villagers all by themselves didn't matter so much.
And so things have been until today, with John Kerry, Secretary of State, on an official visit to Spain. Today an agreement has been signed in which the United States agrees to look into removing fifty thousand cubic meters of earth and take it to a site in Nevada. The agreement has been playing in the air since last year, at the least, but it was considered better to wait until the Secretary of State came to Spain just before the general elections in December. It made for a better photo op.
And that's exactly what it was. The agreement is not even firm. It's simply an agreement to sit down and make decisions together. Now the logistics have to be ironed out. By the time the earth is dug up and taken out probably more than a couple of years will elapse, so maybe by the year 2018 the area will be clean. Over fifty years after the nuclear accident.
If they wait any more, the isotopes will reach their half-life before anybody cleans up anything. Maybe that's what they're waiting for.
In 1966 Franco was a firm ally of the United States. After all, through the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II, the United States brought much- needed relief to a country that had not been able to recuperate from a bestial Civil War ten years earlier and punishment inflicted during the World War for being an ally of the Axis powers. Franco was a shrewd dictator and knew when to cut his losses and make an international about face. As the War drew to a close, and it was obvious his friend Hitler was going to lose, Franco decided Spain wasn't going down with the ship. He cut his ties and turned to the Allies as a neutral. He was admitted into the club and was given relief. In return, he ceded territory for the United States to use as air bases at the beginning of the Cold War. Spain was strategically placed, being the westernmost country of western Europe, and therefore now a valuable ally, however Fascist its leader may still have been. One of the airbases was at Morón de la Frontera, near Sevilla in Andalucía. It is still a U.S. airbase.
On the 17th of January, 1966, forty-nine years ago, there was an Air Force exercise or airborne alert mission called Chrome Dome being enacted. Air Force planes were to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, approach the Soviet Union, and return home. This mission involved two refuelings over Spain. A KC-135 tanker out of Morón was to refuel the two B-52's involved in the mission. On that day, as one of the B-52's approached the refueling boom, there was a mistake, the boom struck the B-52 and caused an explosion. The refueling plane was lost, the crew killed. Four of the seven crew members of the B-52 were able to eject from the fighter and survived. The fighter fell in the area of Palomares, along with three of the four hydrogen bombs it carried. The fourth fell in the sea and was recuperated intact by the Navy in the month of April. Two of the bombs that fell on land had their conventional parts explode. However, about half a kilo of plutonium escaped in that explosion. The last one was fairly intact. The ones that exploded acted like dirty bombs, in which pyrophoric plutonium was spewed throughout the area, but there wasn't a thermonuclear explosion because the nuclear heads didn't explode. The area contaminated was about two square kilometers.
Though Franco tried to keep everything under wraps as much as possible, he knew that by the 1960's he was in an age in which if he didn't say anything, others would. So he allowed the usual censored reports. All of them said the contamination was minimal and had been contained. To show the world at large that there was absolutely no problem whatsoever, the Minister of Information and Tourism (a telling amalgamation of intents), Manuel Fraga Iribarne and the
However, Franco wasn't open to having this happen again, and by the end of January, the U.S. was prohibited from flying over Spanish territory carrying nuclear weapons. Other countries decided to follow suit. But this did little for Palomares and its residents. The contamination was still there. The Department of Defense originally scraped off an upper layer of 1.6 million tons of earth and shipped it off to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. They considered the area clean. But it wasn't.
Some of the area contaminated was agricultural land, and some was hillside. The agricultural land had the topsoil lifted off and taken away. What was left was plowed and mixed, and the resulting analyses gave results within normal limits. But not all contaminated topsoil was apparently taken away. The hillside that was difficult to clean had trees that were washed off. The trees and rocks and earth that couldn't be cleaned, were submerged in a pit dug to warehouse them. At that time tractors were rare and people stuck to the center of villages to build their houses. Though some few buildings, mostly barns and sheds close to the fields, had been affected and had been demolished. Their materials were also buried in the pit.
After that everything was put under wraps. There was a joint follow-up of the area over the years, between the U.S. and Spain, but nothing was made public. Apparently, some of the neighbors were also followed medically, but no information was released, not even to the people involved. Some locals say there was a greater incidence of cancers and other illnesses possibly linked to high radiation exposure, but nothing was ever investigated or made public. So things were left to wither away from the public mind. Farmers continued to use some of the affected fields to plant their tomato crops, assured that it was now safe. There was a silent check every now and then that turned up elevated levels of radiation but, since it didn't go above the limits for public safety, nothing more was done. Until the building boom at the beginning of the century.
Around the year 2000, building contractors began their business of building vacation homes and resorts along the Mediterranean (and everywhere else in this country). An eye was given to Palomares, as had been to the tiny fishing village of Benidorm thirty years earlier (tiny and fishing no longer). In 2001 they began looking for permits to build just outside the town limits, in the area where the bombs had fallen. Samples were taken of the soil and the air and the results that came back were alarming. While, apparently, there was no immediate threat to health or life, there was no way that place was appropriate for building vacation homes where families would spend a good deal of their time. So the whole shebang was kicked to the central government which started talking again with the Department of Energy about doing something. The first thing done was the expropriation of the contaminated land and building a fence around it. The next was to get the U.S. government to pay and finish decontaminating the area. Of course, all this was done when it was seen that a profit could be made from the land. The villagers all by themselves didn't matter so much.
And so things have been until today, with John Kerry, Secretary of State, on an official visit to Spain. Today an agreement has been signed in which the United States agrees to look into removing fifty thousand cubic meters of earth and take it to a site in Nevada. The agreement has been playing in the air since last year, at the least, but it was considered better to wait until the Secretary of State came to Spain just before the general elections in December. It made for a better photo op.
And that's exactly what it was. The agreement is not even firm. It's simply an agreement to sit down and make decisions together. Now the logistics have to be ironed out. By the time the earth is dug up and taken out probably more than a couple of years will elapse, so maybe by the year 2018 the area will be clean. Over fifty years after the nuclear accident.
If they wait any more, the isotopes will reach their half-life before anybody cleans up anything. Maybe that's what they're waiting for.
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