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