“Unraveling the Mysteries: How Fire, Ice, and Plutonium Could Redefine Our Understanding of the Universe”
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.
