Monday, January 16, 2012

Manuel Fraga Iribarne, a Spanish...

...politician, died at age 89. Never heard of him? Me neither. But I can't believe I'd never heard of this (my emphasis):

In 1966, Mr. Fraga engaged in a famous effort at damage control when four American hydrogen bombs fell on the southern Spanish village of Palomares after a midair collision between a B-52 bomber and a refueling plane.

None of the bombs exploded, but radiation was strewn when the plutonium-containing detonators on two of them did. Those two bombs, and a third that had also hit the ground, were found within a day. The fourth bomb had fallen into the sea and eluded recovery for 75 days.

While crews were frantically searching for it, Mr. Fraga, a portly man in baggy swim trunks, joined the United States ambassador, Angier Biddle Duke, in taking a much-publicized swim off Palomares’s beach to show it was safe to go into the water.

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