How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

Two years before the Thule accident, a B-52 crashed over the Spanish village of Palomares while carrying four hydrogen bombs, each seventy-five times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Part of the plane landed 80 yards from an elementary school, another chunk hit the earth 150 yards from a chapel. The conventional explosives went off in two of the bombs, sowing plutonium dust into the tomato fields for miles. The third bomb landed intact. But the fourth? It was nowhere to be found. Officials searched desperately for nearly three months. The hunt had “all the makings of a James Bond thriller,” The Boston Globe reported. In fact, it bore an unnerving resemblance to Thunderball, the Bond film about missing nuclear weapons that was dominating the box office at the time. When the military finally found the bomb resting on the seabed, it proudly showed it off for the cameras—the first time the public had seen a hydrogen bomb.