Atomic bomb recovery off Spain

Brief reference. One of the Alvin's military-era missions located a US Air Force atomic bomb dropped off Spain, with Soviet competitors also searching.

So the Mansfield Amendment in '72, the Navy had to give up a lot of the stuff. The Alvin had multi-purpose use; it had some military purposes. One of the Alvin missions found the atom bomb that the Air Force had dropped off Spain — the Soviets were out looking for it, we were out looking for it. Supposedly the Alvin was the one that finally located the warhead. But the Alvin got transferred over to the National Science Foundation. Actually, the vessel was until recently still owned by the Office of Naval Research. The Office of Naval Research was founded in 1946 by the US Navy, because it took three or four years to get the legislation through to found the National Science Foundation. When the National Science Foundation was founded in 1948 or '49, it was modeled after what the US Navy had already started three years before.

Briefly cited to explain why the Office of Naval Research wanted deep-sea capability in the early 1960s — an American plane dropped a nuclear warhead in the Atlantic near Spain, and the recovery race against the Soviets drove the Alvin program.

The reason we never built a titanium submarine — well, we did build titanium submarines. The Alvin, the nice little Alvin submarine, the one that goes down and finds the Titanic and such. Originally built out of steel in the 1960s and 1970s. Who owned the Alvin originally? Actually, who still owns the Alvin? Originally it was owned by the Office of Naval Research. The US Navy built it for deep-sea work, and they were interested in deep-sea work because in the early sixties an American plane not too far from Spain dropped a nuclear warhead in the ocean by accident. It wasn't open — soon as a big oops, and the Soviets, all their ships, converged in that area of the Atlantic. Fortunately we found it before the Soviets found it, so we got our weapon back. There have been times the Soviets lost some things in the ocean, and we actually got some of those things back.