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The Palomares Nuclear Accident (Spain 1966) and Its International Impact

Mon, July 13, 9:15 to 10:45am, EFI, 1.50

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

On January 17, 1966, after a failure during an aerial refuelling manoeuvre, four nuclear bombs carried by a U.S. B-52 aircraft fell along the coast of the village of Palomares, in southern Spain. Two of the bombs ruptured, contaminating a vast area with plutonium and turning Palomares into one of the sites with the highest radioactive contamination in the world. The American and Spanish governments coordinated with each other to manage the crisis, undertake some clean-up of the area and limited public access to information on the hazards of the radioactive contamination. Although the case remains relatively unknown outside Spain, recent historical research has shown that the environmental samples and data on the radioactive exposure by the residents of Palomares had a significant impact on the establishment of radiological protection standards and protocols in other sites contaminated with plutonium (such as the Thule, Greenland, and the Marshall Islands). Through case studies on countries such as Finland, France, Greece, and Spain, this session will explore the impact of the Palomares accident on two levels. First, it will examine how the accident was received in different countries, and to what extent Franco’s dictatorship and the U.S. nuclear programme shaped dissemination of information through various channels. Second, the session explores the influence of Palomares on the configuration of “nuclear cultures” both in Spain and abroad over the sixty years that have passed since the accident.


Abstracts of individual papers

Palomares in the Finnish and French press: from Cold War geopolitics towards nuclear energy controversies

Markku Lehtonen (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

This paper will explore the reporting of the Palomares accident in mainstream press in Finland and France – two highly different but in their distinct ways central countries in the Cold War politics. Both countries sought to demonstrate their independence and mediating role between Washington and Moscow. Firmly anchored in the Western camp, France at the same time sought strategic autonomy building a national nuclear deterrent, seeking to avoid reliance on the American umbrella. While formally a neutral, Western-leaning democracy, Finland practiced a policy of voluntary self-restraint towards its Soviet neighbour – a policy often described as “Finlandisation”. Finland firmly rejected nuclear weapons, positioning itself as a committed supporter of arms control. Both countries embraced civil nuclear power, Finland ordering two reactors from the USSR and two from its neighbouring Sweden, and France launching a massive civil nuclear power programme in the 1970s, as a prolongation to its nuclear weapons programme.
Against this backdrop of Cold War politics and the development of civilian nuclear power, this paper explores the press media reporting on the Palomares accident in Finland and France from 17th January 1966 until December 2025. The study uses the toolkit for socio-informatic analysis centred around the Prospéro software developed and used by French pragmatic sociologists for the analysis of the evolution of public controversies. The analysis highlights the role that Palomares played at the same time in Finland’s and France’s Cold War geopolitics and in the intensifying controversies over the civilian nuclear programmes.


Swims in Palomares and Strawberries in Athens: Or, How to Get Away with a Nuclear Accident

Loukas Freris (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)

In this paper, I explore the multifaceted impact of the 1966 Palomares nuclear accident on Greek public life, focusing on how the Palomares swim--this striking performative act--circulated culturally during the Cold War and how it resurfaced unexpectedly after the Chernobyl disaster. I first trace the ways Palomares entered Greek social and political discourse in the late 1960s and 1970s, not only through the press but also through music, satire, and political caricature. As I show through examples such as Mikis Theodorakis' song and illustrations in satirical magazines, the Spanish accident became a powerful symbolic vehicle for articulating Greek anxieties about American military power, nuclear danger, and broader Cold War tensions. I then examine the legacy of Palomares in Greece by analysing how its strategies of reassurance reappeared two decades later. During the Chernobyl crisis, members of the Greek Atomic Energy Commission publicly consumed strawberries, a fruit widely rumoured to be contaminated--an act that, as I argue, directly echoed the dramatic "public swim" staged in Palomares. In essence, I argue that the Palomares performance illuminates how scientific authority is co-produced with political spectacle, and how local communities become sites where global nuclear anxieties are negotiated. The Palomares performative act thus offers a powerful lens for understanding how states, experts, and publics jointly construct "safety" in the face of invisible contaminants--making it a crucial case for grasping its broader transnational resonances in the history of science.


Radioactive Art? Cultural Expressions about the Palomares Nuclear Accident (1966)

Clara Floresns (Institució Milà i Fontanals, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas)

An engraving of the Palomares accident not exhibited in Spain until 2017, a theater play about the Palomares accident first premiered in German Democratic Republic in 1970, literary stories on the accident written by different Spanish writers, comic strips on the accident, fiction films with Palomares as its setting….
The aftermath of the Palomares nuclear accident triggered several artistic, literary and visual representations that aimed at portraying the effects of the accident in Palomares inhabitants or the invisibilization of nuclear risk. These representations often encountered problems with censorship and other forms of limiting its dissemination both in Spain and abroad.
In this paper, I will analyze some of the artistic expressions that surfaced after the Palomares nuclear accident to understand how this episode created or influenced “nuclear cultures” in Spain and internationally. In addition, this paper aims to understand how Spanish Dictatorship shaped these cultural creations through censorhip, fear, or exile and how the US censored some of them through other democratic means, in order to control public nuclear risk perception.


Palomares in Transition: The Role of the Accident in the New Democratic State public sphere

Miquel Carandell Baruzzi (Institut d’Història de la Ciència, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Following the death of dictator Francisco Franco in November 1975, Spain entered a period of political transformation from a forty-year dictatorship to a new democratic state. During the 1980s, up to seven new nuclear power plants were launched. As other scholars have shown, together with countercultural movements and other forms of ecological activism, this period witnessed the rise of a powerful anti-nuclear movement in Spain. Likewise, with the arrival of democracy, the demands of the people of Palomares for compensation and safety were reactivated. During this period, organizations such as Ecologistas en Acción and Greenpeace supported the legal, public, and political claims of the residents of Palomares.
This paper analyses the role of the Palomares accident in shaping nuclear risk perception in the Spanish public sphere and in the raise of the anti-nuclear movement. It aims to understand how Palomares influenced the dissemination and perception of nuclear risks among general audiences and how it was presented in activist forums. It will explore how Palomares appeared in the discourses related to the construction of Spanish nuclear power plants, and to the opposition to them, and how it resurfaced in public discourses when other major nuclear accidents happened, particularly Chernobyl (1986) and the Vandellòs I nuclear power plant accident in 1989.

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