“Spain’s defense should not be left in the hands of the United States or NATO, although we may join this organization in the future. Spain needs itself nuclear deterrent”. This opinion belongs to Manuel Díez-Alegría, who was Chief of Staff from 1970 to 1974, and shows the extent to which Franco considered, and even broke his horns, getting into one of Spain’s most elite, influential and, of course, one of the clubs. The foundations of international politics in the second half of the 20th century: that of nuclear-powered nations equipped with atomic bombs.

Even a 1974 CIA report states that Spain was supported by the United States, the USSR, or in those days France and the United Kingdom to manufacture a nuclear device and achieve a new status on the geopolitical chessboard.

spain caressed atomic dream.

She chased after him in a grueling dance that took decades, full of back and forth steps.

It has come to make it difficult for more than one Washington official to sleep.

And disappeared with them.

Almost sixty years later, the question remains: Why did Francisco Franco want an atomic bomb? How close are you to achieving this? And why was the project abandoned?

B28RI nuclear bomb seized after Palomares incident

The dictatorship’s flirtations with nuclear bombs date back to the 1960s, when then-vice president and government heavyweight Agustín Muñoz Grandes commissioned José María Otero Navascués, chairman of the Nuclear Energy Board (JEN), to prepare a study on the feasibility of these nuclear bombs. The country that developed a “made in Spain” weapon. The mission would end at the desk of a man trusted and firmly trained by the Director, Guillermo Velarde, an Air Force soldier, physicist, academic, and even a graduate of nuclear physics in the United States.

The task was so difficult, so complex that in a gesture with a very clear traditional scent that well reflected the spirit he was undertaking, Velarde decided to christen it Proyecto Islero, the same name of Miura years ago. The bullring of Linares put an end to Manolete’s life. “I felt it he was going to kill me with disgust in the end”, He would later confess.

It wouldn’t go that far, but the path to reach the nuclear weapons whims Velarde had to travel through in the years that followed was by no means simple.

The soldier devoted himself to seeking the best way for Franco’s Spain to supply him with nuclear weapons. The difficulty was brought in and doubled, in fact: there was the design and manufacture of the atomic bomb, of course; as well as the construction of a reactor, fuel elements and extraction plant. Another important question they had to clarify before starting work was what materials to use. Plutonium or uranium?

Both options had pros and cons. Spain, for example, has reserves of uranium ore, but enriching it required complex, costly work that could hardly escape the radar of international control, one of the priorities of the Francoist Executive who wanted the Islero Project to be run in strict secrecy. . With all these disadvantages in balance, the uranium option was cast aside and the controls favored plutonium.

By the end of 1964 Velarde had already received his report, and copies of it were distributed among the main patrons of the regime, including Franco himself and ministers Muñoz Grandes and Gregorio López Bravo. But it’s another thing to have an intuition and know for sure where to start and decide to put all the meat on the grill and embark on the adventure.

Continuing Velarde’s own metaphor of bullfighting, Islero returned to the stables.

It was in limbo for about a year, until a bomb-shaped shock fell from the sky at the beginning of 1966, setting the project in motion. And literally. resulting in the Palomares affair four thermonuclear bombs The influx of the United States into Spanish territory and several generations left the image of Manuel Fraga in a swimsuit imprinted on his retina, helping to revive the project. Velarde and other patriotic experts saw an overnight opportunity to take a closer look at American artifacts.

The explosion of a nuclear weapon as part of the Manhattan Project.

Velarde certainly knew how to take advantage of this opportunity. In Palomares, he discovered a type of “black stone” that allowed him to unravel the explosion mechanism of hydrogen bombs of the Ullam-Teller configuration, one of the great mysteries of the Cold War.

Neither this disclosure nor Velarde’s reliance on JEN will benefit Project Islero much. Before the end of 1966, Franco met with the physicist and ordered him to brake indefinitely. Fear: Nuclear plans Spain is testing carry a secretWithout raising the international rabbit, it would impose new sanctions that would trigger US alarms and, yes, deal a blow to the weak Spanish economy.

As if the fear of international retaliation wasn’t enough, the nuclear program also had an exorbitant cost, with a loss of about 60,000 million pesetas reinforced the suspicion that some heavyweights of the Franco regime, such as López Bravo, had seen it.

The dictator’s veto, yes, was not total. Franco made two decisions that showed he wasn’t willing to shelve. Spain’s atomic aspirations —Decided not to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allowed investigations to continue, yes, separately from the Armed Forces—; but his decision was a setback for Velarde anyway.

The project would be pulled out of the drawer a few years later, in 1971, when Díez Alegría commissioned the physicist to restart it with clear urgency: “Spain needs its own nuclear deterrent”. Islero was once again lauded for his distinctive dance of steps forward and backward, when in mid-1973 he ascended to the presidency of the project’s proponent Carrero Blanco Government.

How serious Spain’s claims are is illustrated by the fact that the CIA has labeled itself Europe’s nuclear “possible replicator”: “It has medium-sized domestic uranium reserves and an extensive long-range nuclear power program – three operating reactors, seven under construction. , plus 17 planned and one pilot chemical separation plants.” The idea was that the plutonium needed for the bombs would be secretly produced at Vandellós.

By the end of 1973, Velarde was convinced that Spain was ready for production. three plutonium bombs per year and Carrero Blanco even presented the results to US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, with whom he held a meeting on the eve of the ETA attack that ended his life. A year later, his successor, Arias Navarro, breathed new life into the project to reach an arsenal of 36 fission bombs weighing 20 kilotons.

Even then, things didn’t get out of hand.

After the project wobbled between different administrations and several years in which Franco was already buried, in 1981, the Calvo-Sotelo government agreed to the implementation of IAEA security measures, and at the end of the same decade, in 1987, the socialist government signed the Non-Existence Agreement. The Expansion Treaty and Spain’s atomic claims definitively shelved.

The million dollar question at this point is:why did you want spain Have your own atomic bomb? The answer lies in the geopolitical picture of the second half of the 20th century. Spain had signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States in 1955, but as Díez-Alegría admitted, it wanted to have its own security. With nuclear status, Spain could even win a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

In the background were the Cold War and its international tensions, the arms race, Spain’s special and strategic role on the continent, and above all complex relations with Morocco, which had been independent since 1956 and which Madrid wanted to deter from any territory. Longing for lands outside the peninsula, such as the Sahara.

But Islero remained on paper.

And as one craziest weapon episodes Francoist Spain.

Pictures | Wikipedia and the United States Department of Energy