CRITICA 2016

On January 17, 1966—fifty years ago—four atomic bombs, 75 times more destructive than those dropped on Hiroshima, fell on a small town in Almería, which from that moment on became stigmatized: Palomares.

Fortunately, the bombs did not trigger a nuclear chain explosion, but two were broken, contaminating a wide area, while another fell into the sea, prompting a massive search-and-rescue operation by the U.S. Navy under the strictest censorship imposed by the Pentagon and Franco’s dictatorship.

The details and consequences of the accident—one of the most dramatic of the Cold War—have been deliberately obscured or distorted, to the point that the files of the Nuclear Energy Board disappeared. This work reveals the truth that was silenced for decades.

Rafael Moreno has recovered and uncovered hundreds of documents that had been kept hidden or secret in Spanish and U.S. archives, allowing the definitive reconstruction of why it happened, what really occurred, and the attitude of both Spanish and American authorities throughout all these years of silence and disinformation.