Dropping the Apocalypse: The Palomares Broken Arrow Incident. Collisions, Plutonium, and the Desperate Radiological Cleanup of a Spanish Farming Village, 1966

During the height of the Cold War, the United States military operated under the "Chrome Dome" protocol-keeping B-52 bombers armed with live thermonuclear weapons in the air 24 hours a day to guarantee a retaliatory strike against the Soviets. It was a terrifying strategy that almost resulted in the accidental annihilation of a peaceful European village. In January 1966, a B-52 bomber collided with a tanker plane during mid-air refueling over Palomares, Spain.
The plane disintegrated, dropping four hydrogen bombs directly onto the farming community below. While the failsafes successfully prevented an atomic detonation, the conventional explosives inside two of the bombs detonated on impact, shattering the casings and covering the village in highly toxic plutonium dust. This book chronicles the absolute chaos of the ultimate Broken Arrow incident. We detail the massive, desperate U.
S. military cleanup operation involving thousands of soldiers scraping radioactive dirt into barrels, and the agonizing, weeks-long submarine hunt to retrieve the final bomb from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Witness the true cost of nuclear paranoia. A harrowing true story of the day the American military accidentally nuked its own ally.