The rest of the world has mostly forgotten, but a brush with nuclear Armageddon is seared in the minds of residents here and still festers, 42 years later.
In 1966, one of four unarmed hydrogen bombs from a damaged American plane dropped into the Mediterranean, off the beach near Palomares, Spain. Three others fell around the town.
Later that year, a Spanish official, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, center, and the American ambassador, Angier Biddle Duke, left, swam in the sea to demonstrate that the waters were safe.
On the morning of Jan. 17, 1966, a United States Air Force B-52 bomber returning from a routine mission exploded during airborne refueling, sending its cargo of hydrogen bombs plummeting toward land. One went into the azure waters of the Mediterranean, and three others fell around this poor farming village, about 125 miles east of Granada.
Seven crew members died in the fireball, while four parachuted to safety. No one on the ground was killed. The nuclear warheads, many times more powerful than those that fell on Hiroshima, did not go off.
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