1030m on January 17, 1960s, an enormous explosion shattered the silence over the small farming village of Palomores in Spain.

An enormous fireball erupted in the sky ahead, and pieces of flaming debris began raining down over the surrounding countryside.

Two U.S. Air Force aircraft had collided during a routine aerial refueling operation, killing all but four of the 11 men on board.

Within hours, the Spanish province of Almeria was crawling with U.S. military personnel.

One of the two aircraft, Boeing B-52 Stratafortress, strategic bomber, had been carrying

four hydrogen bombs with a yield of 1.1 million tons of TNT each.

One of the bombs landed intact in a riverbed, while the conventional explosives

aboard two others detonated on impact, contaminating large areas of Spanish countryside with toxic

plutonium. The fourth bomb, however, was nowhere to be found. What followed was one of the largest

peacetime naval operations in history as a fleet of U.S. Navy vessels scoured the deep waters

of the Mediterranean for the missing bomb. scoured the deep waters of the Mediterranean

for the missing bomb. This is the forgotten story of the 1966 Palomare's incident.

The Cold War, which lasted from 1945 to 1991, saw the world locked in a deadly game of

nuclear brinksmanship as the Soviet Union, United States, and their respective allies

sought to gain global supremacy.

The first United States held the upper hand, having been the first to develop nuclear weapons.

But on August 29, 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb, RDS1, the Semi-Palatinsk

test site in Kazakhstan, years ahead of Western predictions.

Over the following decade, both sides developed ever more sophisticated and

powerful nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, long-range strategic bombers to deliver these weapons,

and networks of radars, computers, interceptor aircraft, and surface-to-air missiles, able to detect,

track, and shoot down each other's bombers. But this uneasy stalemate was shattered on October 4,

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