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SESSION V
this was done. So, the first group that flew in by helicopter looked
to see if there had been any indication of a criticality yield and then
started searching for the injured and the dead. There were seven
American Air Force people killed and three injured.
The next effort
was to find the weapons, primarily because they included a lot of
secrets, so-called, of our weapon technology, and so they were to
be found at all costs,
THE SEARCH FOR THE LOST H-BOMBS
LANGHAM:
Within two or three days a base camp was organized
on the shores of the Mediterranean which grew to house 850 people
before the operation was over,
Almost immediately a search was
started on land with these people lining up finger tip te finger tip and
walking across the countryside looking for something that looked like
a nuclear weapon even though, of course, nobody in the crowd had
ever seen a nuclear weapon,
They searched 49 square miles three
times by this technique and part of that 49 square miles they searched
seven times trying to find one lost weapon.
The Bureau of Mines flew
out a team which even inspected all of the old mine shafts and all of
the old wells.
It was obvious that some of the weapons, one or two of them, could
have dropped inthe sea. So, the Navy was brought in on the operation and within two or three wecks the Navy Task Force had grown to
14 ships. They brought in the Alvin and the Aluminaut and the experimental devices that are used for deep sea recovery; and this turned
out probably to be the greatest Navy exercise in deep sea salvaging
and recovery that has ever occurred.
The sandy beach was a part of the economic and psychological
aspects of the incident. The mines having run cut, this was a de-
pressed region.
It has eight miles of the most beautiful Mediterranean
beach you will ever see, All one would have to do is clean up some of
the slag dumps and things left by the miners and one would have a resort possibility that could actually rival the French Riviera. The
Spanish Government had actually underway a developmental program
to develop this into one of the tourist resorts which are doing so much
now for the economy in Spain. One can imagine the great concern of
the Spanish Government; here was this development, and if there was
a hydrogen bomb lurking around somewhere just waiting to go off, the
tourists might not come. And so, this incident could jeopardize their
entire program to relieve this depressed area by making it a tourist
area.