Exploring Greenland

Cold War Science and Technology on Ice

Ronald E. Doel, Kristine C. Harper, Matthias Heymann, Ronald E. Doel, Kristine C. Harper, Matthias Heymann, Ronald E. Doel, Kristine C. Harper, Matthias Heymann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137596888
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Using newly declassified documents, this book explores why U.S. military leaders after World War II sought to monitor the far north and understand the physical environment of Greenland, a crucial territory of Denmark. It reveals a fascinating yet little-known realm of Cold War intrigue and a delicate diplomatic duet between a smaller state and a superpower amid a time of intense global pressures. Written by scholars in Denmark and the United States, this book explores many compelling topics. What led to the creation of the U.S. Thule Air Base in Greenland, one of the world's largest, and why did the U.S. build a nuclear-powered city under Greenland's ice cap? How did Danish concern about sovereignty shape scientific research programs in Greenland? Also explored here: why did Denmark's most famous scientist, Inge Lehmann, became involved in research in Greenland, and what international reverberations resulted from the crash of a U.S. B-52 bomber carrying four nuclear weapons near Thule in January 1968?

© The Author(s) 2016

Ronald E. Doel, Kristine C. Harper and Matthias Heymann (eds.)Exploring GreenlandPalgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology10.1057/978-1-137-59688-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Exploring Greenland’s Secrets: Science, Technology, Diplomacy, and Cold War Planning in Global Contexts

Ronald E. Doel¹ , Kristine C. Harper¹ and Matthias Heymann²

(1)

Department of History, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

(2)

Centre for Science Studies, Department of Mathematics, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

End Abstract

Smoke was rapidly filling the cockpit. The plane—a massive US Air Force B-52 bomber flying a secret reconnaissance mission, its seven crewmembers now quite alarmed—was roughly six miles above the ice cap crowning the enormous expanse of Greenland. Local time was nearly 4 p.m. That far north in midwinter (21 January 1968, a Sunday), the sky was already bluish-purple dark. A gleaming last-quarter moon hung low in the south. The only hint of civilization on the dim icy landscape below was lights belonging to the US Thule Air Base in northwestern Greenland, some 500 miles from the North Pole, a tiny, comforting glow on the distant horizon.

Only later would crewmembers realize what had caused the fire. One of the seven, trying to free space in the cramped cockpit, had stuffed three foam pillows under his seat. There, further wedged in by a metal box, the pillows blocked airflow from a crucial heating vent. As the B-52’s cockpit grew frigid in flight, a shivering crewmember toggled an emergency heater. Hot air blasted in from the engine manifolds. It struck the foam pillows, igniting them as if by a blowtorch. Flames leapt out from under the seat. Crewmembers shouted to one another over the roar of the engines, aiming fire extinguishers on the blaze. When the flames instead intensified, the plane’s pilot radioed Thule, requesting an emergency landing. ¹

The Thule base toward which the crippled B-52 was descending was one of the largest military bases the USA had ever constructed. But at the time, relatively few Americans knew that it existed, and fewer still understood the great strategic significance Greenland had gained in the Cold War struggle between the USA and the Soviet Union. World War II veterans who had served in the North Atlantic theater remembered Greenland as a crucial refueling stop in the air ferry route from North America to Britain and Western Europe, midway between Newfoundland and Iceland.

By the early Cold War, new technological advances in long-range bombers had led to new missions. In 1952, American audiences opening the pages of Life magazine read about the construction of the Thule base—requiring the labor of more than 10,000 soldiers and engineers to complete. Less than ten years later, they marveled about a unique nuclear-powered city American military forces had constructed under the ice cap. Camp Century (so-named since it was situated 100 miles east of Thule) was revealed to them in dramatic footage aired on the popular Sunday evening television show, “The Big Picture.” ² But why did Greenland—so remote, so close to the North Pole—really matter? For leaders in the Pentagon, geography was key. Midway between North America and Northern Europe, Greenland was situated just 3000 miles (4800 km) away from the vital Soviet cities of Moscow, Murmansk, and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg)—a short distance for bombers (See Chap. 2). ³

Danish citizens were also concerned about Greenland during the early Cold War (Denmark had long ruled Greenland), but they heard little about military activities there. The stories that most intrigued and concerned Danish citizens were not the same as those broadcast to American audiences. Danes knew that after Denmark fell to the Nazis in 1940, Denmark’s ambassador to Washington had made an agreement the following year, allowing the USA access to Greenland until “it is agreed that the present dangers to the peace and security of the American continent have passed.” ⁴ This vague diplomatic phrase had seemed a good idea at the time—indeed, it made possible the forceful and fateful Allied push into France and Western Europe after 1944. But many Danes became wary after the USA remained firmly entrenched in Greenland after World War II ended in 1945, and became even more concerned after word leaked that US Secretary of State James Byrnes had horrified Denmark’s Foreign Minister in 1946 by asking whether it might sell Greenland to the USA for $100 million (3.1 billion 2015 USD), hoping that Denmark would welcome the boost its treasury would receive. ⁵ While Denmark had remained firmly aligned with the West during the Cold War—it was a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949—extensive activities in northern Greenland by the US military seemed to Danish citizens (and not a few leading politicians) a violation of their national sovereignty. The construction of nuclear-powered Camp Century carved into the ice cap in 1959–60—celebrated as a technological achievement in the USA—instead irritated the Danish people, who believed their country had embraced a no-nuclear policy at home. ⁶

But neither American nor Danish audiences before 1968 fully appreciated the extent of US military activities in Greenland in the early Cold War. Danish leaders had suspected, but never felt certain, that the US military had been storing nuclear weapons on its territory. This indeed was the case, and had been for some time. The burning B-52 descending toward Thule, just one asset in the Pentagon’s northern arsenal, was carrying four atomic weapons. Each had a yield of 1.1 megatons, roughly 80 times the explosive force that had devastated Hiroshima a generation before. The mission of the now-crippled B-52 bomber—part of the US-devised North American Continental Defense strategy—was to closely monitor the Ballistic Early Warning System at Thule, one of the most strategic sites for North American continental defense. If communications between it and warning centers in the USA were broken for any reason, the B-52 Stratofortress was to investigate—and then be ready to strike Soviet targets if so ordered. ⁷

Yet this was only part of the reason why American military leaders were so deeply invested in Greenland in the early Cold War. An equally covert—and crucial—Pentagon goal was to carefully assess Greenland, indeed the entire Arctic, as a potential theater of war. Since the shortest great circle route between the Soviet Union and North America bisected the high Arctic, military planners realized a hot war might occur in this newly strategic, frigid space. (Veteran polar explorer Richard Byrd argued that if the USA failed to take advantage of Greenland for possible air attacks against the Soviets and to defend against Soviet attacks, “it is my opinion that this Nation is courting military disaster.” ⁸ ) Yet a vast gap yawned between what Western researchers needed to know to operate weapons and monitoring systems successfully in the Arctic, versus what they actually knew. How did storms and weather systems move through this region? How quickly did sea ice form in winter, and thin in the summer? How would geomagnetic fluctuations and the aurora affect radio communications and navigational equipment? How would ocean currents influence ship movements and submarine operations? Was there evidence that the northern climate was indeed warming, requiring revised war plans? Did the ice cap mask seismic signals from Soviet nuclear tests? These were crucial issues for Cold War strategists. Understanding the physical environment of Greenland and the larger Arctic was essential to successfully employ the new weapons systems of the early Cold War, including long-range bombers, guided missiles, and (by the late 1950s) nuclear-powered submarines and defense warning radars. At Thule, and at other US installations throughout Greenland and the Arctic, researchers had sought answers to remedy these deficiencies. ⁹

At half past four local time that evening in Greenland, as the B-52 continued its emergency descent, the plane’s electrical power system failed.

* * *The massive island toward which the wounded bomber was rapidly dropping had just over 40,000 inhabitants in 1968—less than the population of Copenhagen back in 1700—scattered across an area 50 times the size of Denmark, or roughly 1.5 times the land area of Alaska. The island’s first inhabitants, including the Inuit Thule, were descendants of rugged individuals who already had begun venturing along the rim of the North American Arctic Ocean by 1000 BC, their migration rivaling that of Polynesian voyagers. ¹⁰ European settlers, while more recent arrivals, were no less legendary. Erik Thorvaldsson (Eric the Red), banished from Iceland in 982, had led hundreds of fellow disaffected Vikings to southern Greenland. The two settlements established by his followers, at their height, had supported nearly 6000 people and 300 farms, with sheep, goats, and miniature cattle; they also built more than a dozen churches. ¹¹ Eric’s group had limited interactions with the indigenous Inuit (whom they called “skraelings”) living further north. ¹² When the local climate had turned frigid in the mid-fourteenth century—making southern Greenland far less green, with increased sea ice hindering their trade with Denmark—settlers began abandoning these encampments, decamping for good by 1450. ¹³ The island of Greenland nevertheless formally remained a colony of greater Denmark from the eighteenth century forward. ¹⁴ After splitting from Denmark following the Napoleonic wars in 1814, the new nation of Norway laid claim to Eastern Greenland in a period of increasing nationalist sentiment in the early twentieth century. Norway lost its claim in The Hague in 1933, and Greenland came solely under Danish rule. But Danish efforts to maintain sovereignty claims, like elsewhere in the colonial north by the early twentieth century, had shifted from economics (trade) to science (detailed strategic knowledge about landscapes and natural resources). ¹⁵ It was this issue that fueled an increasingly bitter dispute in the 1930s between the Danish explorer Lauge Koch—internationally known for his explorations of Greenland—and other prominent Danish geologists after Koch claimed superior knowledge of Greenland through aerial mapping (using photographs from airplanes) rather than ground-truthing by dog-team-pulled sledges. Knowledge equaled sovereignty: so vital were these issues for Danish nationhood and self-identity that the Koch controversy commanded front-page attention in leading Danish newspapers for nearly a decade. ¹⁶

By the 1930s, natural scientists were increasingly drawn to Greenland’s immense ice cap—second only to Antarctica as a relic of Earth’s last ice age. The enormous ice dome filling Greenland’s vast interior had fascinated researchers since the nineteenth century, and the famed Norwegian polar explorer Fridjof Nansen had first traversed its southern part in 1888. Interest rose further in the twentieth century after the German glaciologists Albrecht Penck and Eduard Brückner, drawing on their fieldwork in the eastern Alps and a half-century of prior investigations, published evidence that four ice ages had occurred, interspersed by warmer interglacial periods. ¹⁷ The first research station on the ice cap, named Eismitte (Ice-center), was established in 1930 by German geophysicist Alfred Wegener, who sought both meteorological data (appreciating its importance for understanding European weather) and evidence for his theory of continental drift. That November, trekking back to the coast from Eismitte, Wegener died on the ice cap just 118 miles from his destination. ¹⁸ After 1945, in addition to US researchers, Danish authorities permitted a small number of other Western European nations to send expeditions to Greenland’s center, includ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Exploring Greenland’s Secrets: Science, Technology, Diplomacy, and Cold War Planning in Global Contexts
• 1. Arctic Challenges in the Cold War
• 2. Controlling Hostile Environments: Geophysical Research in Greenland
• 3. Entanglement and Transformation: Diplomacy and Politics of Science in Greenland
• Backmatter