Lasting from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War was among the most dangerous periods in all of human history. For over four and half decades, the communist east and the capitalist west eyed each other suspiciously across the Iron Curtain, locked in a deadly game of nuclear brinksmanship known as Mutually-Assured Destruction or MAD. Maintaining this balance of terror involved a vast fleet of aircraft, submarines, and missiles, armed with enough nuclear firepower to annihilate human civilization dozens of times over. It was a complex and delicate system, one in which even a minor mishap could spell disaster. And while mercifully all-out nuclear war never broke out, the Cold War saw plenty of near-misses, with one of the worst and most controversial being a plane crash which threatened to destroy an entire Arctic ecosystem and strained diplomatic relations between two NATO members to the breaking point. This is the forgotten story of the 1968 Thule [“Tool-ay”] incident.

On October 4, 1957, history changed forever when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite. While the beachball-sized craft did little more than transmit a series of beeps, its mere presence filled American military planners with existential dread. For the same rocket that carried Sputnik into orbit, the R-7 Semyorka, could also place a nuclear warhead anywhere in the continental United States within 30 minutes, wiping out the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal without warning. And unlike manned nuclear-armed bombers, such Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles or ICBMs could not be intercepted or shot down, making them the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Almost overnight, the balance of the Cold War shifted firmly in the Soviets’ favour.

In response to this new threat, in 1958 General Thomas Power, commander of the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command or SAC, initiated a system of airborne alert in which a fleet of nuclear-armed Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers would be kept in the air at all times. This way, even if the rest of the U.S. nuclear arsenal was wiped out by a Soviet surprise attack, SAC could maintain second-strike capability. The largest of these operations, codenamed Chrome Dome, was launched in 1960. For nearly eight years, up to twelve B-52s taking off from eight SAC bases within the United States flew continuously along one of three long-range routes: one northwest around Alaska and Japan, one northwest over Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, and one east over the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas. This brought the aircraft as close as possible to Soviet territory, allowing them to dash across the border and attack their designated targets the moment the order was given. These gruelling missions could last up to 24 hours – a feat made possible through the use of air-to-air refuelling by KC-135 tanker aircraft.

In August 1961, a fourth route was added to Chrome Dome known as Hard Head or Thule Monitor, which called for a single B-52 to orbit Baffin Bay and keep watch on the the U.S. Air Force Base at Thule, Greenland. Perched high above the Arctic Circle halfway between Washington, D.C. and Moscow, the island of Greenland – an autonomous Danish territory since 1814 – was of vital strategic importance to the United States – so much so that in 1946 the U.S. Government attempted to purchase it from Denmark. While the Danes refused the offer, as staunch NATO allies they nonetheless allowed the U.S. military to station aircraft on the island, resulting in the construction of Thule Air Force Base between 1951 and 1953. In 1958, Thule became home to the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System or BMEWS, a network of powerful radars and computers designed to provide early warning of a Soviet ballistic attack over the North Pole. In the eyes of North American Aerospace Defense or NORAD, the BMEWS radars at Thule would likely be the first site to be targeted by a Soviet surprise attack. The job of the Thule Monitor was thus to continuously confirm that the Air Base was still intact and whether any loss of communication was due to a Soviet attack or just regular technical difficulties – and for more on another bizarre incident involving this site, please check out our previous video That Time the Moon Nearly Started World War 3 (and Other Silly Cold War Shenanigans)

As can be imagined, so many nuclear-armed aircraft in the air 24 hours a day was a massive and complex task – and a dangerous one. Accidents could – and did – happen. The first major incident took place on January 17, 1966, when a Chrome Dome B-52G collided with a KC-135 tanker aircraft during a mid-air refuelling over the Mediterranean Sea. The tanker exploded, killing all four crew aboard, while four of the seven crew aboard the B-52 managed to eject safely. The bomber was carrying a standard load of four B28 thermonuclear gravity bombs, each with a yield of 1.1 megatons of TNT. Thermonuclear or “Hydrogen” bombs comprise two main sections: a conventional nuclear warhead called a primary and one or more secondary stages containing Lithium Deuteride fusion fuel. When the bomb is detonated, radiation from the primary converts the fusion fuel in the secondary stages into hydrogen and compresses it, fusing the hydrogen and releasing massive amounts of energy – and for more on these terrifying weapons, how they work, and how they were developed, please check out our previous video Who Invented the Hydrogen Bomb? One of the B28 bombs from the disintegrating bomber plunged into the Mediterranean, sinking in 780 metres of water, while the three others fell to earth near the small fishing village of Palomares, Spain. The conventional explosives in two of these weapons detonated on impact with the ground, vaporizing the plutonium cores and contaminating nearly 3 square kilometres of Spanish countryside. Thankfully, due to numerous built-in safeguards, this did not trigger a full-scale nuclear detonation. While the remains of these three bombs were quickly located and cleaned up, recovery of the fourth took considerably longer, the weapon finally being raised on April 7, 1966 after a two and a half month search by a fleet of nearly 30 U.S. Navy vessels – and if this sounds somewhat familiar, yes: the search for the lost Palomares bomb is a major plot point in the 2000 film Men of Honour starring Robert de Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr.

The 1966 Palomares crash dramatically revealed the extreme risks involved in Operation Chrome Dome. At the same time, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara pushed to cancel the operation altogether, arguing that the BMEWS radars and newer, more sophisticated ICBMs like the LGM-30 Minuteman made the scheme redundant. SAC and the Joint Chiefs of Staff vehemently opposed this suggestion, but eventually agreed to a scaled-down version of Chrome Dome which involved fewer aircraft but retained the Thule Monitor mission. Barely two years would pass before McNamara finally got his wish, thanks to another deadly accident whose fallout – both literal and political – dwarfed even that of the Palomares Incident.

Around noon on January 21, 1958, a B-52G of the 380th Strategic Bomb Wing with the callsign HOBO 28 took off from Plattsburgh Air Force Base, New York, and headed north to take up its station on the Thule Monitor route. Aboard were seven men: pilot and commander Captain John Haug; copilot Captain Leonard Svitenko; radar navigator Major Frank Hopkins; Electronic Warfare Officer or EWO Captain Richard Marx; gunner Staff Sergeant Calvin Snapp; substitute navigator Captain Curtis Criss; and mandatory third pilot Major Alfred D’Amario. Like the aircraft in the Palomares crash, HOBO 28 was armed with a standard load of four 1.1-megaton B28 thermonuclear gravity bombs.

The flight to Thule and the first air-to-air refuelling were uneventful, and at around 6PM local time HOBO 28 arrived on station and began flying a long, figure-eight shaped orbit along the length of Baffin Bay at an altitude of 10,600 metres. Though the cabin heaters were turned up to full blast, the crew soon grew uncomfortably cold. This prompted Major D’Amario, the spare pilot, to open an engine bleed valve, which vented hot air from the aircraft’s jet engines into the cabin heating ducts. Unfortunately, a malfunction caused this bleed air to barely cool before it entered the ducts, and over the next few minutes the cabin grew uncomfortably hot,. Then, at 6:22, Captain Marx, the Electronic Warfare Officer, reported smelling burned rubber. Searching around the cabin, the crew quickly discovered a small fire burning under the instructor navigator’s seat at the rear of the lower cabin deck. Shortly before takeoff, Major D’Amario had stuffed a number of cloth-covered foam-rubber cushions under this seat; unfortunately, it happened to sit directly over one of the cabin heating vents, and under the full blast of the hot bleed air from the engines, the cushions had ignited.

The cabin quickly filled with thick black smoke, prompting Captain Criss, the navigator, to open the celestial navigation astrodome in an attempt to clear the air. While the crew fought heroically to smother the flames with fire extinguishers, stowage bags, clothing, and other pieces of gear, the blaze soon spread out of control. Captain Haug alerted Thule of his situation and steered the aircraft towards the air base, hoping to make an emergency landing. But at 6:30 the fire burned through a bundle of cables, causing the bomber’s electrical system to fail. At 6:37, upon spotting the lights of Thule directly below, Haug ordered the crew to bail out. Of the seven men aboard, six managed to eject safely, while the seventh, co-pilot Svitenko, was on a rest break on the lower deck and not strapped into an ejection seat. He attempted to bail out through a lower escape hatch but struck his head on the way out, suffering fatal injuries.

The now-pilotless aircraft kept flying northwards before making a 180 degree turn and plummeting earthward. At 6:39 it slammed into the sea ice covering North Star Bay at a speed of 900 kilometres per hour, the 102 tonnes of jet fuel aboard erupting into a massive fireball. As in the Palomares crash, the conventional explosives in the hydrogen bombs detonated on impact, scattering Plutonium across the ice – though once again no nuclear detonation was triggered.

Thanks to Captain Haug’s airmanship, all but two of HOBO 28’s crew landed within 3 kilometres of the Air Base. Haug and D’Amario actually landed among the buildings of the base itself, and informed base vice commander Colonel Paul Copher of the crash within minutes of each other. All available personnel and even the Base’s fleet of taxis was mustered to search for and rescue the other airmen. However, the combination of winter darkness, rough ice conditions, and -30 degree temperatures made this an exceedingly difficult task. Colonel Copher thus turned to Jens Zinglersen, the local representative of the Royal Greenland Trade Department, who organized teams of local Greenland Inuit to search the ice using dogsleds. In this manner, three of the surviving airmen were rescued within two hours of the crash while the body of Captain Svitenko was discovered after eight hours. The last man, gunner Staff Sergeant Snapp, had landed nearly ten kilometres south of Thule. He wrapped himself in his parachute and spent a very uncomfortable night on an ice floe before finally being rescued 21 hours later, alive but suffering from hypothermia. For his actions, Zinglersen was later awarded the Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal.

Meanwhile, over the following nineteen hours helicopters from the 54th Air Rescue and Recovery Squadron flew nine sorties over North Star Bay to survey the crash site. Debris was strewn over an area of nearly seventy-five square kilometres, while smoke from the burning jet fuel had blackened an area of ice stretching one kilometre downwind of the impact area, heavily contaminating it with jet fuel and pulverized plutonium and uranium from the hydrogen bombs. Spotting none of the larger pieces which usually survive plane crashes – such as the tail and wingtips – observers initially reported that the aircraft had broken through the ice and sunk to the bottom of the bay.

Within hours of the crash, the incident was reported to civilian and military authorities in the United States and officially declared a Broken Arrow – U.S. military terminology for a major incident involving nuclear weapons but which carries no risk of triggering a nuclear war. Other related terms include Bent Spear – a minor incident involving nuclear weapons or materials; Empty Quiver – the loss or theft of a functional nuclear weapon; Nucflash – the accidental, unauthorized, or unexplained deployment or detonation of a nuclear weapon; and Dull Sword – a minor incident which impairs the function or deployment of nuclear weapons. But apart from the loss of one airman and four nuclear weapons and the massive environmental hazard posed by the toxic and radioactive materials scattered across the ice, the Thule crash was also a major diplomatic disaster. Since 1957, Denmark had maintained a nuclear-free policy outlawing nuclear weapons on all Danish territory – including Greenland. However, the United States Air Force concluded internally that the Chrome Dome overflights were permitted under the 1951 U.S.-Danish defence agreement, even though this agreement did not mention nuclear weapons. And while the Danes were not informed of the Greenland overflight and Thule Monitor missions, they were aware that the U.S. Air Force operated nuclear-armed bombers in the general area. Indeed, in the years leading up to the 1968 crash, several Chrome Dome B-52s had made forced landings at Thule, though given the emergency nature of these events they were not considered violations of Denmark’s nuclear-free policy. The timing of the Thule crash was particularly unfortunate, coming only 48 hours before a Danish national election. Wishing to avoid an international scandal, the U.S. Embassy in Denmark urged the Air Force:

“… to stress that [the] crashed plane was ‘diverted’ to Thule and not on [a] ‘routine flight to Thule’.”

This would remain the official narrative of the event for nearly two decades.

Four days after the crash, a meeting was convened between U.S. and Danish officials and technical experts to assess the situation and develop a decontamination plan. Those in attendance included Dr. Wright Langham, Biomedical Research Leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory; Dr. H.D. Bruner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Division of Biology and Medicine; Professors Jürgen Koch and Otto Kofoed-Hensen, physicists from the University of Copenhagen; H.L. Gjorup, a health physicist from the Danish Atomic Research Establishment; and Dr. Per Grende, director of the Radiation Hygiene Laboratory at the Danish National Health Service.

Eager to place responsibility squarely on the Americans, the Danish delegation was initially bullish in their demands, insisting that not a single piece of debris should be thrown or allowed to fall into North Star Bay, that every square centimetre of contaminated ice and snow be removed and transported to the United States, and, according to U.S. delegation member Colonel Jack C. Fitzpatrick:

“…for us to promote to do a long term (many years) ecological study in which they could participate – this would be of academic scientific interest but is not at all necessary nor indicated and was not mentioned at all by our group.”

However, as more data became available about the crash site, the Danes gradually relaxed their stance. For example, core samples revealed that nearly all the uranium and plutonium from the hydrogen bombs was securely frozen within the crust of blackened ice and did not pose an inhalation or ingestion hazard. It was also determined that the aircraft had not, in fact, gone through the ice; rather, the sheer force of the impact along with the detonation of the onboard ordnance had all but obliterated the airframe, leaving few large pieces of debris aside from the engines and landing gear wheels. The Danes thus agreed to a scaled-down decontamination whereby only the ice at the impact site down to the water and the black crust on the remaining ice would be removed. It was estimated that this would recover up to 90% of the contamination. The rest would be allowed to melt and enter the Bay, where dilution in nearly 50 cubic kilometres of water would bring concentrations down below acceptable levels for drinkability. The Americans also agreed to a smaller-scale environmental monitoring project, focusing on keystone species like plankton, mussels, little auk, and seals.

The delegates also had to decide what to do with the hundreds of tons of contaminated snow and ice that would be collected in the cleanup operation. The initial plan called for it to be melted, the contaminants filtered out, and the decontaminated water returned to the environment, but this was rejected as too expensive. Instead, the Americans proposed storing the contaminated water in oil drums and burying them in permafrost just outside the base. This, too, was rejected – this time by the Danes – so a compromise was reached whereby the drums would be temporarily stored at Thule and gradually transported back to the United States for disposal.

With an agreement hammered out, the enormous task of decontaminating the crash site could finally begin. The operation, officially codenamed Project Crested Ice but nicknamed “Dr. Freezelove” was placed under the command of USAF General Richard Hunziker. A large base of operations dubbed Camp Hunziker was built next to the crash site, with dormitory huts, radio communications facilities, latrines, generators, and a heliport. In addition to nearly 700 military and civilian personnel, large numbers of Greenland Inuit were also recruited. They not only participated in the cleanup operations themselves but also constructed igloos at Camp Hunziker and provided dog sled transport to and from the crash site until a pair of ice roads could be completed. As General Hunziker later remarked:

“…one of man’s most technically complex endeavours had gone astray and that recovery from its effects must depend upon the most primitive of methods.”

This infrastructure allowed for 24-hour operations – a vital capability as the rapidly-approached spring thaw threatened to release the trapped contaminants into the bay.

Four days after the crash, a “zero line” was established around the crash site outside of which no significant radioactive contamination could be detected. This was used throughout the operation as a decontamination checkpoint; all men and vehicles crossing the line were decontaminated by scrubbing them down with water or by removing their protective clothing, which was then packed into containers for disposal. Biological uptake of radioactive material was also monitored via nose swabs and urine samples, though according to official reports none showed plutonium contamination above acceptable levels. However, many personnel who participated in Project Crested Ice later claimed that few such precautions were taken, and that they suffered lifelong health issues as a result- but more on that later.

Phase I of the operation – removal of all debris not embedded in the ice – was underway by mid-February and was completed within a month, whereupon Phase II – removal of contaminated snow and ice – began. Graders and other heavy equipment was used to scrape off the top blackened layer of ice and dump it into wooden boxes, which were then transported to a special area of Thule Air Base known as the “tank farm”. Here, the contaminated material was transferred into more robust metal containers for temporary storage and eventual transportation back to the United States. Clear weather allowed for speedy progress, but perpetual winter darkness, temperatures as low as -40 degrees Celsius and high winds of up to 40 kilometres per hour caused endless problems, including constant breakdowns of heavy equipment and radiation monitoring instruments. Indeed, one of the three daily work shifts had to be devoted entirely to keeping this equipment up and running. Yet despite these challenges, Operation Crested Ice succeeded in collecting more than 400 cubic metres of contaminated snow and ice, which were packed into 11 large fuel tanks, 14 engine containers, and 163 50-gallon fuel drums. These and the collected aircraft debris were gradually shipped back to the United States, with most of the contaminated water being sent to the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina for permanent storage and the recovered hydrogen bomb components to the Pantex nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility near Amarillo,Texas. According to contemporary estimates, this material accounted for nearly 93% of the total contamination at the site – even better than the operation planners had hoped for.

But among that unrecovered 7% was a very important – and sensitive – piece of material. Within weeks of Operation Crested Ice getting underway, it became clear that the bomb debris recovered from the crash site accounted for only 3 of the 4 weapons aboard HOBO 28. The fourth, it appeared, had melted through the ice and lay somewhere at the bottom of North Star Bay. In August, the Air Force sent a recovery ship carrying a General Dynamics Star III submersible to search for the missing bomb. Due to top-secret nature of the weapon’s design, the purpose of the search mission was not disclosed to the Danish government, with an internal USAF memo from July 1966 stating that:

“Fact that this operation includes search for object or missing weapon part is to be treated as confidential NOFORN [no disclosure to foreign governments]…For discussion with Danes, this operation should be referred to as a survey repeat survey of bottom under impact point.”

Unfortunately, the search was plagued by technical difficulties and eventually abandoned, with William Chambers, a former nuclear weapons designer at Los Alamos later explaining that:

“There was disappointment in what you might call a failure to return all of the components … it would be very difficult for anyone else to recover classified pieces if we couldn’t find them.”

Officially, the United States Air Force maintained that all four bombs had been completely destroyed, and that no major components had sunk intact to the seafloor.

Project Crested Ice officially ended on September 13 when the last container of contaminated water from the crash site was loaded on a ship bound for the United States. All told, the operation is estimated to have cost $9.4 million – around $82 million in today’s money. Among the stranger items on the bill were the number of polar bear skins to replace traditional Inuit pants contaminated in the cleanup.

While many of the major effects of the Thule Incident took decades to emerge, others were more immediate. The day after the crash, Secretary of Defense McNamara ordered all nuclear weapons removed from airborne alert flights, effectively bringing Operation Chrome Dome to an end. And while unarmed alert missions continued to be flown for several years, in a bid to placate the Danish government SAC B-52 crews were instructed to avoid Greenland airspace.

The Thule Crash revealed to military planners a disturbing possibility which had not previously been considered: if HOBO 28 had crashed into the BMEWS radar antennas instead of the sea ice, the sudden loss of communications from both the aircraft and Thule Air Base would have been indistinguishable from the effects of a Soviet first strike, potentially triggering a nuclear exchange. To help avoid this possibility, on September 30, 1971 the United States and Soviet Union signed the Agreement on Measures to Reduce the Risk of Nuclear War, in which each side agreed to inform the other of any similar incidents involving nuclear weapons. In support of this agreement, much-needed upgrades were made to the Moscow-Washington Hotline – and for more on this legendary and often misunderstood system, please check out our previous video Did the US President Ever Actually Have a ‘Big Red Phone’ Connected Directly to Moscow?A satellite communications link was also installed at Thule in 1974 to supplement its unreliable submarine cable link to the mainland. Finally, the Thule Crash revealed that the explosives used in nuclear weapons were not chemically stable enough to survive a plane crash, prompting a massive redesign of the United States nuclear arsenal.

While at the time the Thule Crash triggered significant public outrage in Denmark, the U.S. response was sufficiently swift and thorough that friendly relations between the two nations were preserved and the incident soon faded from memory. But rumours of a cover-up continued to circulate, and nearly two decades later in 1987 the Danish press revealed for the first time that not all the bombs aboard HOBO 28 had been fully accounted for, and that parts of one might still lie at the bottom of North Star Bay. In response, Danish officials and scientific experts, including University of Copenhagen physicist Otto Kofoed-Hensen, repeated the official narrative that all four bombs had been completely obliterated in the crash. At the same time, however, the Danish parliament commissioned the Danish Institute of International Affairs or DUPI to conduct a more detailed investigation. The Institute’s report, released in 1995, was a political bombshell, revealing not only that HOBO-28’s incursion into Greenland airspace had been routine and not an anomalous diversion, but that the Danish government had been fully aware of the Thule Monitor and other Chrome Dome missions. The report blamed then-Danish Prime Minister Hans Christian Hansen, who in a 1957 meeting with U.S. Ambassador Val Peterson over the construction of the BMEWS radar, failed to explicitly mention Denmark’s nuclear-free policy, effectively giving the United States tacit permission to deploy nuclear weapons on Greenland.

Shortly after the report’s publication, Danish Foreign Minister Niels Petersen reassured the Danish press that while nuclear weapons had been flown through Greenland airspace, none had ever been deployed on the island itself. However, a few days later Petersen received a letter from the U.S. government informing him that this was not the case, and that nuclear weapons had, in fact, been stationed at Thule. Faced with a major political scandal, the Danish government took the unusual step of admitting guilt and allowing access to hundreds of previously-classified documents in the Danish National Archives. These documents confirmed that nuclear weapons had indeed been deployed at Thule on two separate occasions: the first in 1958 when two airborne alert weapons and 15 non-nuclear weapon components were stored on the base for eight months; and the second between 1959 and 1965 when 48 nuclear-armed AIM-4 Falcon air-to-air missiles were deployed for defence against Soviet strategic bombers. This revelation that the Danish government had knowingly pursued two contradictory national policies regarding nuclear weapons eroded the Danish people’s trust in their democratic institutions, triggering a political scandal known as – naturally – “Thulegate.”

At the same time, however, the DUPI report concluded that, just as American and Danish experts had long maintained, no large, intact bomb components had survived the crash and sunk to the bottom of North Star Bay, famously declaring that:

“There is no bomb, there was no bomb and the Americans were not looking for a bomb. No nuclear weapons have been left on the bottom of the sea in Thule, nor was any secondary left.”

Rather, the Star III submersible deployed in August 1968 was only searching for the “spark plug” – a cylindrical rod of uranium at the centre of the bomb’s secondary capsule which helps initiate the fusion reaction.

But what of the greatest potential legacy of the Thule Crash: its environmental impact? Samples taken over the intervening six decades have revealed measurably increased levels of plutonium as far as 20 kilometres from the impact site, while the bodies of marine animals such as mussels, fish, birds, and seals have exhibited plutonium concentrations as high as 3000x normal levels. However, according to current models, even these elevated levels likely pose little threat to the environment – and to learn more about the horrifying way we discovered how much plutonium is too much, please check out our previous video That Time US Scientists Injected Plutonium Into People Without Their Knowledge.

But the human cost of the Thule Crash may be far greater – though more difficult to measure. While official records claim that every measure was taken to limit exposure to toxic and radioactive contaminants, many personnel who participated in the cleanup remember differently, with Jeffrey Carswell recalling:

“I was never given any protective equipment; I just went out in whatever you normally wore at work. You had this special team with the airmen in full protective equipment climbing on top of these 50,000 gallon drums and containers and I was down there, on a daily basis, (with) no protective equipment.”

Like many of the workers, Carswell later developed various mysterious illnesses:

“I was referred to a specialist and they discovered I had a particular condition that needed to be operated [on] straight away…My doctor said that my particular condition was caused by exposure to radiation and plutonium.As we found out when we started talking to colleagues, a lot of those of us who were there at the time had problems of various types, all sorts of shocking problems that is, for sure, linked to what happened at Thule.”

Indeed, in 1986 Danish prime Minister Poul Schlüter commissioned the Danish Institute for Clinical Epidemiology to conduct a health impact study of Danish decontamination workers at Thule. The Institute’s final report, released one year later, concluded that cancer rates among these workers was 40% higher than those who had visited Thule before and after the crash, and 50% higher than the general Danish population. While the Institute could not definitively link these cancers to radiation exposure at Thule, these findings prompted 200 former cleanup workers to sue the United States government for damages in 1987. While the lawsuit was ultimately unsuccessful, it did lead the government to declassify thousands of documents, triggering a chain of revelations that would eventually lead to Thulegate. It also prompted the various branches of the United States Military to carry out regular health monitoring of personnel who come into contact with radioactive material.

In 1995, another study found that of 1,500 former Thule cleanup workers sampled, 410 had died of cancer. In response, the Danish government paid 1,700 workers compensation of 50,000 kroner – around $7,000 American – each. However, all subsequent attempts to obtain compensation from the Danish government have failed, with a 2011 report by the Danish Board of Health concluding that:

“…the total radiation dose for representative persons in the Thule area for plutonium contamination resulting from the 1968 Thule accident is lower than the recommended reference level, even under extreme conditions and situations.”

But the workers and their representatives are not convinced, with Jens Zieglersen, head of the Association of Former Thule Workers, stating:

“I think it’s a cover-up. We are getting older and the Danish authorities and the Danish government will wait and keep their mouths sealed for another 15, 20 years; then there’s no-one left that remembers and who was a part of the accident back in the days of ’68.”

But perhaps the worst-affected by the 1968 Thule Crash were the Greenland Inuit who live around the Air Base, and who rendered such valuable service during the cleanup operations. Despite the claims of the Danish and American governments, the Inuit have noticed higher rates of cancers and other radiation-related illnesses among their people and the animals they subsist on, with local hunter Ussaaqqak Qujaukitsoq stating:

“There were two times when I hunted, when the seal’s insides were dried out. Something must have happened to them…If we think about the walruses and the other birds that have eating grounds on the bottom of the ocean, we will see the impact of it.”

Sadly, this is but one of many injustices the Greenland Inuit have suffered at the hands of the United States and Danish governments, who in 1957 displaced two of their villages 100 kilometres in order to make way for Thule Air Base – today known as Pituffik Space Base. Due to its strategic location, Pituffik remains as vital as ever to North American Aerospace Defense, with the original BMEWS radars being replaced in 2001 with a far more sophisticated, $40 million AN/FPS-132 Solid State Phased Radar Array System or SSPARS. Though the 1968 Thule Crash was one of the worst nuclear weapons accidents in history in terms of long-term environmental, health, and political impacts, it was far from the only one.

As covered in our previous videos That Time the Moon Nearly Started World War 3 (and Other Silly Cold War Shenanigans), When Dropping a Wrench Almost Cause Armageddon, as well as Did a Scientific Experiment Really Nearly Start WWIII in 1995? over on our sister channel Highlight History, the tense, highly-complex environment of Cold War nuclear brinksmanship resulted in dozens of perilous accidents and near-misses that brought the world within a hair’s breadth of total disaster. It’s a wonder we survived the 20th Century at all.