Managing the Political Fallout

...Minutes later what was to be a routine fueling operation turned into a fiery end for both aircraft...

...As the word radioactividad began to spread around the countryside, the nation and the world, life at Palomares came to a complete standstill...

...He cradled it back in the hole where it had lain for three generations...

...fleet massed in the Mediterranean...

...Now my neighbor will say that piece of land is his...

...Miss Lewis finds him the embodiment of the warmth and forbearance which typified the people of the region during their long ordeal...

...As it is, One of Our H-Bombs Is Missing skims the surface of a near-tragedy in breathless, Sunday-supplement fashion...

...Francisco Simo Orts, captain of one of the trawlers, expresses his sorrow at not reaching the other American, "the dead man," who was "rigid in the air and sank . . . fast, parachute and all...

...On its way home, over the southern coast of Spain, it rendezvoused with a tanker from the usaf Base at Moron, near Seville...

...She also stresses the valuable information he gave the Navy when it became clear that the "dead man" he had seen in the air was really the missing bomb under its fully deployed parachute...

...Working from sac's black-covered manual of instructions on information policies to be followed in nuclear accidents," Szulc writes, "the Sixteenth Air Force at Torrejon [a U.S...

...Quite obviously Miss Lewis did not set out to fire a depth charge in the troubled waters that are still washing the hamlet of Palomares on the southern coast of Spain...

...base in the Spanish capital] refused for days to confirm, or even discuss, the possibility that hydrogen bombs were aboard the B-52...

...At this point one must turn to Tad Szulc's The Bombs of Palomares...

...for a period of 15-30 years...

...Szulc disagrees...

...Three men in the bomber were killed...

...It's not the same,' the farmer mourned...

...Indeed as one reads on it seems a pity that he did not give his intuition more leeway, especially with the story's human elements...

...If in the wave of publicity that followed the accident the fisherman was persuaded to sue the United States for nothing less than $5 million, the fact remains that he collaborated in the rescue operations and was honored by Ambassador Duke in what seemed to be good faith...

...At the height of the contamination scare, Szulc points out, the aloof and tight-lipped military turned a deaf ear to the hapless villagers, whose unknown fears were growing by the hour...

...One of Palomares' tomato farmers, its male and female schoolteacher, a Civil Guard, several housewives, the village priest, and a Catalan architect vacationing nearby all relive the moments when an orange flash lit up the sky and a rain of flaming metal descended on the village, miraculously missing men, women, children and even animals...

...And yet there are strands in Miss Lewis' sampler that add an extra dimension to Szulc's book...

...Of Simo's ability to pinpoint the area in which the bomb fell, Miss Lewis says: "It was uncanny navigation, using only what the Navy calls the Mark I eyeball...

...As fate would have it, the drama of Palomares was played out in a nation which does not lack a feeling for theater or a taste for Judgment Day...

...Miss Lewis' focus is on the eyewitnesses to the crash...

...In fact...

...Her greatest asset is a sense of highly developed narrative that suggests the author's talents lie in the realm of fiction...

...But rumors of a fourth "object" (the Americans would use no other word) persisted...

...In short, Miss Lewis has written what is known in the trade as a "woman's book": grave in mien but sweeping, emotional and peculiarly concerned with subjective values...

...All four crewmen on the tanker died instantly...

...European and American newsmen descended on the village and an entire U.S...

...Ambassador in Madrid...

...As "Broken Arrow"????the code for a nuclear accident????is urgently flashing in Madrid and Washington, two fishing boats are picking up the American flyers at sea...

...On January 17, 1966, a Strategic Air Command B-52 carrying four H-bombs took off from Golds-boro, North Carolina, on an air-alert mission to the ends of Western Europe...

...and to the inquiries of a supposedly free American press...

...Szulc, however, is bent on marshaling facts and arriving at conclusions...

...it was "arrogant Americanism" at its worst...

...It has been moved...

...Or it might serve as the scenario for a Bergman-type discourse on the ends and means of the human race...

...Letting her imaginative eye roam over the countryside, she occasionally discovers what a poet has called "the irrelevance that amounts to revelation...

...No one, least of all the Spaniards, expected the Madrid government to treat the situation openly...

...For once the Palomares dust had begun to settle, figuratively and literally, a chilling question arose: What kind of dust was it...

...Soon dazed village folk were watching battalions of uniformed Americans trample through their fields while helicopters and planes swooped overhead????and while the tomatoes, Palomares' only crop, rotted on the vines...

...Where Miss Lewis blandly ascribes the weeks-long censorship to fiat of the Spanish government, Szulc points to the unpleasant truth that it was the Pentagon, and not Madrid, that rang down the curtain of secrecy over the American beachhead in Almeria...

...Jose Maria Otero Navascues, President of the Junta de Energia Nuclear, spilled the beans in an interview printed and distributed by a Spanish news agency...

...Szulc traces the history of the dusty, poverty-stricken Almeria region from the days of the early Phoenician settlers to the bloody months of the Civil War, when it held out as a Republican stronghold...

...She was content to gather the technical data about the accident itself, to look around the Almeria countryside for dramatis personae who, whether she was aware of it or not, might have stepped out of the York or Chester Cycles, and then to splice time and eternity together...

...For weeks the villagers were not informed of the real meaning of the air collision that had shattered their peace...

...But there seemed little doubt, even miles away in Castile where the hostility could be cut with a knife, that the Americans had clamped the lid on first...

...To those of us who followed the story in the Spanish press his harshness seems somewhat excessive...

...Breathtaking as the Navy and Air Force's technical achievements were, the atmosphere that surrounded them, accurately described by Szulc...

...A farmer, for example, weeping bitterly at finding that the plot-line on his field has been removed by a search party of American airmen: " 'That is my marker,' the farmer said through his tears...

...No amount of sentiment is going to put him off the trail of the greatest American blunder in Palo-mares????the news blackout...

...Nor should his subsequent commercialization-in-earnest detract from his emergence as the true folk-hero of Palomares?the little village on the coast of Almeria where "things are not the same any more...

...No amount of cross-stitch can embellish that...

...His eye for things Spanish is rare for an American...

...Otero's revelations...

...That was the end of my land, my father's land, my grandfather's land...

...to an urgent request for information from the U.S...

...Having sounded the human leitmotiv loud and clear, Miss Lewis proceeds to work it in and out of a fast-moving tale...

...The news blackout was to blame not only for the mounting anxiety of the villagers, but also for the wave of anti-American resentment that swept across Spain...

...How can I prove it is mine?' " 'Bud' White, a freckled, tow-headed Texas farmer before he went in the Air Force, bent down and picked up the boulder in his big, powerful hands...

...Where were they...

...Before long three metal cylinders turned up in and around the hamlet, looking like harmless monsters half asleep in the sand...

...Who but a genuine Spain-fancier would have noted the existence of an abandoned foundry known as "The Hunger Factory...

...Had they detonated...

...Reviewed by CARMEN IRIZARRY Author, "The Thirty Thousand: Modern Spain and Protestantism" If morality plays ever come back, Flora Lewis' book on the nuclear accident over Spain might provide the framework for a stark and stirring auto...

...As it turned out a Spaniard, Dr...

...was anything but heartening...

...None of the invaders gave the slightest hint of what they were doing...

...After that, the red-faced Americans could do nothing but issue a communique sheepishly echoing Dr...

...Szulc, the New York Times correspondent in Madrid, writes admirably and admiringly of the fantastic rescue operation that gives Miss Lewis her most suspense-filled moments...

...He wastes few words and even less sympathy on Simo, whom he evidently regards as a man out to make a fast buck...

...The brisk officers were tight-mouthed and their troops were under strict no-fraternization orders...

...the maximum period in which cancer from alpha radiation may conceivably develop...

...In handling the question of plu-tonium contamination, Szulc also outscores Miss Lewis both in content and form...

...She proffers the picture of a village child raising her pale blue eyes from an embroidery hoop to ask: "Papa, are we all going to die...

...He details the dangers inherent in the tnt explosions of two of the bombs...

...The B-52 was carrying four H-bombs...

...Was there radioactivity in the area...

...The fact that she misses the major political as well as humanitarian implications of the accident will not disturb the casual reader, who is in on a real thriller...

...Simo's gruff suggestion that the Navy let him bring up the bomb by himself for the "bargain" price of $1 million can be taken with a grain of salt...

...of the remaining four, all of whom bailed out, one drifted down on Spanish soil while the other three splashed down in the Mediterranean...

...Szulc concludes with the news that the Spanish Government will not close the claims against the U.S...

...It was caused by the all too real danger of plutonium contamination, and????in some ways more depressing ????the posture of the American Military Establishment...

...My grandfather put it there...

...But he makes clear from the beginning that the real chaos at Palomares did not revolve around the loss and recovery of an H-bomb...

...Things are not the same here any more.'" The two books differ sharply, though, on their treatment of Francisco Simo Orts, the fisherman-hero of the operation...

...Then he recalls at greater length the case of the Lucky Dragon, a Japanese fishing boat caught in the fallout from an American test-blast in 1954, whose radio operator died six months later, possibly from radiological contamination...

...Her greatest weakness is a blurred and formless prose that makes one wonder if she would not or could not consider the drudgery of rewriting...