by STEVE WEINTZ
When a routine Cold War operation went terribly wrong, two planes and seven men died, a village got contaminated and a hydrogen bomb disappeared.
The search and cleanup required 1,400 American and Spanish personnel, a dozen aircraft, 27 U.S. Navy ships and five submarines. It cost more than $120 million and a lot of diplomatic capital.
And it made an obscure 18th-century mathematical theorem a practical solution to finding veritable needles in haystacks.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/how-to-find-a-missing-h-bomb-aef5660ed51a
