NEWS: Spanish town still haunted by its brush with Armageddon

Fascinating piece in the International Herald Tribune about the Spanish town that very nearly became ground zero for a nuclear holocaust in 1966, after a B-52 carrying nuclear weapons exploded above it in midair ...

On the morning of Jan. 17, 1966, a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber returning from a routine Cold War alert mission exploded during airborne refueling, sending its cargo of B28 hydrogen bombs plummeting toward earth.

One went into the azure waters of the Mediterranean and three others fell around this poor farming village, about 200 kilometers, or 125 miles, east of Granada.

Seven crew members on the air force planes perished in the fireball, while four parachuted to safety. No one on the ground was killed. The nuclear warheads, many times more powerful than those that fell on Hiroshima, did not go off - exactly.