*Still image from ‘Camp Century’ film (1963)
Greenland is a big place. Things get lost, forgotten, hidden, and some things noone ever notices.
Last week was the fiftieth anniversay of a catastrophic event, the details of which were not public until an investigation by the Danish parliament almost thirty years later. On the afternoon of January 21, 1968, a B52 bomber was attempting an emergency landing at the American Thule Air Base, in remote northwest Greenland. At the time – the height of the cold war – the bomber had been flying visual surveillance of the bases’ ballistic missile early warning system. But a cabin fire had broken out. Unable to control it, the crew managed to fly within sight of the airbase before they were overwhelmed by smoke and had to eject. The station chief, looking out across the dark star-lit bay, saw a huge fireball light up the sea ice as the plane expoded on impact, only 12 km away. The aircraft was carrying four 1.1 megaton plutonium bombs.
Although not a nuclear blast, the fire had triggered the highly explosive components of the nuclear weapons, sending plutonium into an 850 metre high plume of burning jet fuel (Danish National Board of Health, 2011). In the aftermath, the dense black cloud carrying particulate plutonium from the disintegrated bombs drifted and dispersed past the base and across the sea. Although much was removed in the cleanup, the secondary stage of one of the bombs – carrying the nuclear material that generates a fusion blast – has never been found.
These armed surveillance missions had the tacit approval of the Danish government of the time, in direct contravention of its own, widely publicized 1957 policy banning nuclear weapons in its territories.
And what about Camp Century – heard of that? Camp Century was an experimental project in northwest Greenland about 200 km east of the Thule Air Base. It was run by the American military from 1959–1967 to test the feasibility of launching ballistic missiles from within the ice sheet and was powered by a mobile nuclear-generator under the ice. Camp Century was one of five such sites built inside the ice sheet, originally with further plans for an under-ice railway system to support 600 ballistic missiles. All five sites were abandoned with “minimal decommissioning” (Colgan et al., 2016). In other words, almost everything was left behind on the assumption that it would remain buried forever in the ice. That was a poor assumption. Today Camp Century is estimated to be about 36 m below the ice surface, but recent climate changes mean that it and other such former bases are likely to be exposed by increased ice melt and run-off, perhaps within a lifetime. This threatens release – directly into the environment – of the approximately 200,000 litres of diesel, 24 million litres of grey water including sewage in unlined sumps, radiological waste (coolant from the nuclear generator), organic chemicals including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and other waste. It’s all still there, and that’s only what’s at Camp Century. No cleanup plans have been agreed.
What else happens out there? A friend who worked for the Danish Sirius Patrol in the 90’s got his own small insight. The Sirius Patrol is an elite military unit in which pairs of soliders with a dog sled team are deployed for three months at a time to conduct long-range reconnaissance of northeast Greenland, year-round, to maintain and enforce Danish sovereignty. Northeast Greenland is vast, unpopulated, and environmentally extreme. Most of the time these guys encounter the odd fox, wolves, or more often nothing at all. On one such reconnaissance, my friend skied over the crest of a hill to the sight, in the valley below, of a temporary American base with dozens of soldiers, a plane, extensive infrastructure. Noone had informed the Danish military patrol. Standing alone, in vast wilderness a thousand miles from anywhere, he cautiously pulled out his rifle.
“Am I going to have to shoot these guys?” he wondered. And if he had, who would know?
