How America and Denmark covered up a nuclear disaster in Greenland

Since Donald Trump was elected in November 2024, a historic diplomatic crisis has opened up between the United States and Denmark over the question of who controls Greenland. Trump, on the one hand, views Greenland and the Arctic in general as a key strategic area for US interests. The Danish ruling class, meanwhile, sees their Greenlandic colony as their ‘golden ticket’ to the White House, without which their position on the international stage would be diminished to the level of complete insignificance.

[Originally published in Danish at marxist.dk]

The Danish ruling class have, on the one hand, come out against Trump infringing on their colonial domination. At the same time, they are trying to appease the new master in the White House by immediately increasing spending on Arctic defence. 

Now, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has raised the possibility of stationing nuclear weapons on Danish territory – a statement that can only be interpreted as a subservient plea to Trump. The Danish state is clearly willing to do whatever America asks of them – including the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in their Greenlandic colony – as long as it doesn’t involve the breakaway of Greenland itself.

In Danish media, Frederiksen’s announcement has been described as a break with a principle of Danish defence policy since 1957, which states that Denmark should not station or store nuclear weapons.

However, both the media and Frederiksen herself conveniently forget to mention that the US actually had nuclear weapons in Greenland during the Cold War. In 1957, behind the back of the population, H.C. Hansen, the Social Democratic Prime Minister at the time, accepted the American imperialists’ wish to deploy nuclear weapons in Greenland – a policy that ended in disaster and a historic cover-up.

H.C. Hansen had hypocritically campaigned on not allowing nuclear weapons in Denmark, emphasising that it would make them a target in a possible war between the US and the Soviet Union, which would be tantamount to suicide for a small country like Denmark. But H.C. Hansen clearly had no problem with making Greenland a target – although it was legally as much a part of Denmark as any other. Thereby, the Greenlandic people were exposed to all the dangers that came with the placement of nukes in their country.

In 1968, the collusion between the Danish Government and the US was exposed when an American B-52 bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed, causing a serious nuclear accident which still has fatal human consequences to this day. To understand the full consequences of the accident – and the complicity of the Danish colonial rulers of Greenland – we must start by looking at the events leading up to the crash itself.

Forced displacement and hunger

After the end of World War II, the Danish bourgeoisie entered into a close alliance with the United States, the world’s main imperialist power. As part of the alliance – which can best be described as the relationship between a master and his servant – Denmark and the US signed a treaty in 1951 that gave the US free rein to build and expand military facilities in Greenland. To the delight of the Americans, this gave the US a forward outpost against the Soviet Union 3,000 kilometres from America’s own borders.

Shortly after the signing of the secret treaty between Denmark and the US, the American military began expanding Thule Air Base (renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2023) in northwest Greenland. This had fatal consequences for the local Greenlandic population in the area, also known as the Thule people.

In 1953, to make way for the expansion of the US military base, the Danish colonial power gave the entire local population, consisting of around 30 Inuit families, three days to pack as many of their belongings as they could and move 150 kilometres north. Where they were sent became what is today the town of Qaanaaq. But at the time, it was a wasteland. If the Thule people didn’t comply, the Danish authorities threatened to raze their houses to the ground.

At the new settlement, the Danish authorities had neither built new houses nor provided any supplies. Hunting opportunities at the new settlement were far worse, and so hunger quickly began to spread among the displaced Thule people. When they desperately tried to return to their old settlement, the Danish authorities responded by burning down their former homes.

On 21 January 1968, an American B-52 bomber crashed near Thule Air Base / Image: public domain

However, the suffering that Danish and American imperialism had inflicted on the Thule people was only just beginning.

Lies and manipulation

On 21 January 1968, an American B-52 bomber crashed near Thule Air Base. It was carrying four hydrogen bombs, each 100 times more powerful than the bombs the Americans had dropped on Hiroshima 23 years earlier, which had killed 140,000 innocent civilians.

When the bomber crashed on a frozen fjord, the conventional explosives in the bombs detonated without triggering a nuclear explosion. However, the conventional explosion spread the radioactive material in the bombs, such as plutonium, over 7.7 square kilometres, which threatened to poison the ocean.

As it was the official Danish policy not to allow nuclear weapons on Danish soil, the government reacted to the accident by denying knowledge of any nuclear weapons in Greenland. At the same time, the US tried to downplay the scale of the disaster. Nevertheless, a joint and hasty effort was initiated to avoid a major environmental disaster. American, Danish and Greenlandic workers were mobilised to participate in the clean-up effort. They later became known as the Thule workers.

The nuclear accident created a serious political crisis in Denmark. It revealed to the public that the Danish nuclear policy was being ignored behind closed doors and triggered anti-American demonstrations. To save himself and his government, the then Social Democrat Prime Minister, Jens Otto Krag, pretended to be outraged that the Americans had not respected Danish nuclear policy. But his reaction was nothing more than cynical posturing.

Like several other top politicians, Jens Otto Krag had long known that the Americans were storing nuclear weapons in Greenland – he had even written about it in his diary. Even after the nuclear accident, Danish politicians continued to deny knowledge of American nuclear weapons in Greenland for decades. However, their lies were finally exposed in 1995, when the publication of a secret document revealed that successive governments had lied to both the Danish and Greenlandic populations for 38 years.

Radiation death

As usual, it was not the capitalists or their political representatives in parliament who felt the consequences of their lies and reactionary policies. Instead, it was the Greenlandic people and the Thule workers who paid the price for Denmark’s hidden nuclear collaboration with the Americans.

For many Thule workers, the clean-up work after the nuclear accident was a death sentence. The workers were exposed to high levels of radiation. A study from 2005 showed that as many as 410 out of 1500 Danish Thule workers died of cancer, with a cancer mortality rate twice that of the general population.

Incredibly, while the American Thule workers were given protective suits during the clean-up, the Danish authorities did not provide Danish or Greenlandic workers with any protection, as the government would not even admit that there had been a nuclear accident!

For many Thule workers, the clean-up work after the nuclear accident was a death sentence / Image: public domain

After the nuclear accident, the Greenlandic inhabitants, who had already been forcibly relocated from the area around the Thule Air Base, lost their already meagre livelihoods. Hunting and fishing were temporarily banned across a large area due to the danger of radioactive material in fish and game. The accident had huge social consequences for the residents of northwest Greenland, who today are among the poorest in the country.

Today, the people of Thule still want to return to their original settlement. For decades, they have waged a legal battle against the Danish state for financial compensation for the forced relocation and the right to return. In 2003, however, their case was rejected by the Supreme Court. The decision exposes the class nature of the judiciary; a cornerstone of the capitalist state that cares not about whether justice is served, but primarily about defending the Danish bourgeoisie, their imperialist policies and their crimes.

No trust in the politicians

Now Mette Frederiksen has reopened the debate on whether nuclear weapons should be deployed on Danish soil. However, as history shows, when the media claims that Denmark has not previously stockpiled nuclear weapons, they are lying.

While posing as the ‘humane’ imperialists against the threats of Donald Trump, whipping up a chauvinistic narrative of Denmark’s ‘duty to protect’ Greenland, the Danish bourgeoisie have always acted as loyal lapdogs of American imperialism.

To further the interests of both the Danish capitalists and the American imperialists, for over 300 years, the Danish state has shown complete disregard for the consequences of their colonisation on ordinary Greenlandic people.

Workers and the oppressed can have no trust in politicians – American and Danish alike – who plunder and exploit to protect their own capitalist interests, and use them as pawns in imperialist power struggles.