The Palomares Incident: The Day America Dropped 4 Hydrogen Bombs on Spain

On January 17, 1966, a US Air Force B-52 bomber collided with its refueling tanker high over Palomares, a small farming village in southern Spain — and dropped four hydrogen bombs. This is the full story of the Palomares incident: the "broken arrow" that scattered plutonium across the village's fields, the H-bomb that vanished into the Mediterranean for 80 days, and the cover-up that outlived almost everyone involved.

Three bombs were found within a day. Two had cracked open on impact, blowing plutonium dust over hundreds of acres of farmland. The fourth was gone — carried out to sea under its parachute — and finding it became the most expensive search in naval history to that point, guided by a Spanish fisherman the Navy almost ignored.

But the real story is what happened after. The United States denied a bomb was missing for 44 days. An American ambassador swam off the beach for the world's cameras to "prove" the water was safe — while the plutonium sat in the soil, not the sea. Sixteen hundred servicemen shoveled radioactive earth with bare hands and no masks. And sixty years later, the contaminated soil is still fenced off in Palomares — with 1,600 new homes just approved beside it.

CHAPTERS
0:00 The Morning It Rained Fire
0:52 The Machine
2:40 Three Bombs and a Lie
4:08 The Eye of a Needle
6:45 "If This Is Radioactivity, I Love It"
8:28 The Airmen
10:03 Still There

Archival footage is US government / public domain (Strategic Air Command film via the National Security Archive, US Navy, National Archives). Narrated in the creator's own voice.

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— MORE FROM BROKEN ARROWS —
The Broken Arrows series — America's Lost Nukes:
▶ Goldsboro (1961) — one switch from disaster: https://youtu.be/NU9UUHrs_lY
▶ Thule (1968) — the accident Denmark buried: https://youtu.be/egFPRfkwquI
???? Full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ0PHg8a7lTw