Mapping the American Nuclear Disaster in Spain

One week after AHA Atlanta, Palomares commemorates 50 years as “the most radioactive town in Europe.” Listed with Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island in Time‘s top-ten list of the world’s “worst nuclear disasters”—labeled the worst nuclear weapons accident in history—Palomares has none of their international notoriety. As my current project demonstrates, the cover-up and whitewash were figurative, also literal. Though they promised to cleanup completely after a B52 collided with its refueling plane and dropped four hydrogen bombs, U.S. authorities left behind and buried highly hazardous radioactive contaminants, discovered in 2008. When high-pressure water hosing failed to decontaminate local homes, U.S. servicemen whitewashed them, simply painting plutonium into the surfaces of houses. The Franco dictatorship colluded.

This brief critical cartography asserts that successive mapmaking exercises fostered cultural amnesia, obscuring the grave dangers for people in Palomares, many of whom subsequently emigrated. It evaluates imperial toponyms from 1966 to the present, notably the nomenclature of the four bombsites, numbered not in the order of impact or magnitude, nor in the order found by local first-responders, but rather by U.S. servicemen arriving hours later. It examines a fundamental paradox: U.S. military claims that, on the one hand, the Saddle Rock refueling area had been meticulously selected for its low population density and, on the other, decontaminating the town of 2000 was hampered by a dearth of maps. Finally, the paper asks: After a London Telegraph map depicted concentric circles of potential Iberian and north African nuclear destruction, how did generations of American and Spanish mapmakers reduce fears? How did they circulate myths of a zero-line of radiation, of innocuousness and inconsequentiality, of Cold War military-industrial safeguards and scientific expertise?