Denmark challenged over B52 crash

Denmark challenged over B52 crash

news.bbc.co.uk

"Let me take you back to an Arctic night in January 1968, still the era of the Cold War," a British MEP told the European Parliament this week, promising a tale comparable to an international thriller.

"An American B-52 bomber gets into trouble, the crew scramble to safety and the plane comes down in Greenland with an enormous amount of weapons-grade plutonium on board. Residents of Greenland working at the American base in Thule immediately set out across the ice with husky teams to get to the downed plane, the Americans desperate to get there before anyone else."

The Stratofortress disintegrated on impact with the sea ice a few miles from Thule, and parts of it began to melt through to the fjord below.

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When this happened it was only scarcely reported in Danish newsmedia -- but not before 3 days later -- though Thule is on Danish territory. The reason was an importent parlamentary election taking place on the 23. January 1968. By not reporting the accident before after, it was not only sure to not influence the election result, but also it would drown in the news from the election.

The incident in itself was very akward for Danish authorities, because the official policy of any Danish government has always been not to allow nuclear weapons on Danish soil.

The news as they were reported told that an emergency landing had been attempted, and I do think to remember that the initial reporting was it didn't have nuclear weapons onboard -- but I cannot find any confirmation on the net only references to books ...but jeez the net is not a library. Anyway it would had been very troublesome for the government to explain because of the declared foreign policy.

Despite a bomb -literelly ticking- was left on the sea floor and never recovered, the whole incident was soon forgotten and didn't get any attention again before 1995, when former Danish workers from the base demanded insight and compensation, because several were developing symptoms of various kind of cancer. That lead to an investigation unfortunate for authorities, because it revealed the non-nuclear policy to be one big lie.

Since 1957 a secret agreement had existed with the Americans to store nuclear weapons on the Thule base. The informations came from American archieves clasified, but opened after 30 years -- corresponding Danish' are classified 90 years.

As for the workers, health checks were done The first check didn't come up with any proof that definate could relate the symptons of the workers to the accident, so more checks were demanded, but all with the same result. No sure connection. The only result to come out was a small compensation about 10.000 dollars to be paid out to those who had taken part in the clean up, known as "shut up-money".

It went to the European Parliament because of a petition from former clean-up worker Jeffrey Carswell, appealing for pressure on Denmark to start monitoring the health of those exposed to contamination (the US workers involved have been regularly examined, but the Danes and Greenlanders have not).

It still remains to get the Danish government to acknowledge its responsibility for 40 years covert foreign policy... and lying to the Danish people.

The various links below tell the story about the accident.

www.bonde.com...
www.cphpost.dk...
www.fredsakademiet.dk...



news.bbc.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)