Decades Later, Sickness Among Airmen After a Hydrogen Bomb Accident
Alarms sounded on United States Air Force bases in Spain and officers began packing all the low-ranking troops they could grab onto buses for a secret mission. There were cooks, grocery clerks and even musicians from the Air Force band.
It was a late winter night in 1966 and a fully loaded B-52 bomber on a Cold War nuclear patrol had collided with a refueling jet high over the Spanish coast, freeing four hydrogen bombs that went tumbling toward a farming village called Palomares, a patchwork of small fields and tile-roofed white houses in an out-of-the-way corner of Spains rugged southern coast that had changed little since Roman times.
It was one of the biggest nuclear accidents in history, and the United States wanted it cleaned up quickly and quietly. But if the men getting onto buses were told anything about the Air Forces plan for them to clean up spilled radioactive material, it was usually, Dont worry.
There was no talk about radiation or plutonium or anything else, said Frank B. Thompson, a then 22-year-old trombone player who spent days searching contaminated fields without protective equipment or even a change of clothes. They told us it was safe, and we were dumb enough, I guess, to believe them.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/us/decades-later-sickness-among-airmen-after-a-hydrogen-bomb-accident.html
MADem
(135,425 posts)There's a lot of cancer in parts of Spain, and I do think our relationship with Franco (he gave us free rein within specified areas, pretty much) where we had ammo storage areas and places for nuclear powered subs to re-supply and repair had something to do with that.
We also dumped an aircraft with weapon cores into the Med over a decade earlier and that a/c was never recovered---the Russians were eager to get their paws on our shit. For all we know, maybe they did! Ah, the Cold War! Broken Arrow! Such uncertainty and drama!
I am being a bit sardonic (it is hard to read "tone" in the written word at times). We've lost a large number of a/c with nuclear payloads, and it is a little-known truth that MANY of them were never recovered.
FairWinds
(1,717 posts)there are around 250,000 US atomic veterans.
Not to mention hundreds of thousands of exposed civilian
downwinders, technicians, construction workers.
Does the National Security State care? No, not a whit.
Veterans For Peace