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