On This Day in History: January 21

A nuclear weapon goes missing at Thule

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You know those cargo carriers you see on top of cars that people put skis and shit in? The ones with “Thule” printed on them? Thule is ancient Greek, basically meaning way the fuck north. Thule Air Base is way the fuck north on Greenland, and in 1968 a B-52 carrying four nuclear bombs crashed on the sea ice eight miles west of Thule. One of the bombs was never found.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: January 21, 1968--

Fucking Space Force. Fucking Star Trek logo-stealing dumbfuck Trump idea. Thule Air Base is now part of the stupid United States Fucking Space Force as its northernmost base. Previously, it was a US Air Force base. Anyway, Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Danish Realm, but like with many other places on Earth, that didn’t stop the U.S from saying we’re gonna set up a military installation here.

Being so far north, a thousand miles from the North Pole, it’s a short flight from Thule to nuke the fuck out of Russia should someone decide that’s a good idea. Between 1960 and 1968 the USAF had Operation Chrome Dome, which had a dozen B-52s each carrying four thermonuclear day ruiners in constant airborne patrol skirting the Soviet border. In 1966, the operation was cut from 12 to four bombers being aloft at all times because of the American investment in missile silos. On January 21, 1968, one of those B-52s caught fire. Continues below …

I hate flying because I’m worried the plane is going to catch fire and then we have two minutes of screaming and hurtling to our doom while trying to scribble goodbye messages to our loved ones on highly flammable cocktail napkins. But I also love flying because Canada is cold as fuck and Mexico is nice but flying costs money please become a paying subscriber today.

It was human error. Some dipshit placed cloth-covered seat cushions overtop one of the aircraft’s heating vents, and they ignited. Fire extinguishers couldn’t put it out. They were 90 miles from Thule and attempted to make an emergency landing, but smoke filled the cockpit, so the captain said everyone get the fuck out. Six had ejection seats and they survived. One didn’t and tried to bail via a hatch but bonked his brain doing so and died.

Each bomb was 1.1 megatons, roughly 100 Hiroshimas per. The bombs also contained conventional explosives, and those went kerblooie in the crash, blowing radioactive material all over the place, like an oopsie dirty bomb. To add insult to nuclear injury, burning jet fuel melted the sea ice, and shit sank to the bottom of the fjord.

A massive cleanup was undertaken, but the secondary stage—the fusion boom part—of one of the nukes couldn’t be found. Accidents with nuclear weapons are called a “Broken Arrow,” because it’s a common enough thing that someone came up with a name for it. The Danes were fucking pissed because they had a nuclear-free zone policy. In 1995 there was a scandal in Denmark because it was revealed that the Danish government gave secret permission to allow American nukes in Greenland. Of the 1,500 Danish workers involved in the cleanup, 410 died of cancer in the next three decades. The U.S. never conducted a “died from cancer” study on the American workers involved in the cleanup. Thule is one of six missing American nukes. Russia has lost way more.

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