Fifty six ago, on this day, January 21st 1968,
“ an aircraft accident, sometimes known as the Thule affair or Thule accident (/ˈtuːli/; Danish: Thuleulykken), involving a United States Air Force (USAF) B-52 bomber occurred near Thule Air Base in the Danish territory of Greenland. The aircraft was carrying four B28FI thermonuclear bombs on a Cold War “Chrome Dome” alert mission over Baffin Bay when a cabin fire forced the crew to abandon the aircraft before they could carry out an emergency landing at Thule Air Base. Six crew members ejected safely, but one who did not have an ejection seat was killed while trying to bail out. The bomber crashed onto sea ice in North Star Bay,[a] Greenland, causing the conventional explosives aboard to detonate and the nuclear payload to rupture and disperse, resulting in radioactive contamination of the area.“
(Lind et al., 2015)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323ppm. As of 2024 it is 422ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Americans were busy rattling their dicks and swinging their sabres and the world was consistently on a nuclear knife-edge, to use a cliche, and all across the world B52s with nukes were having near misses. And this was just another.
What we learn is that the waste remains, the waste spreads. We have poisoned this beautiful planet. “We” being sabre swingers and those who benefit from that sabre swinging and stay silent. And now everything has been ruined and you know the rest.
What happened next? We almost tried ourselves in 1983-4. Things got dialled back a bit. See also Barry Commoner on radiation building up in the system.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
References
Lind, O. C., Salbu, B., Janssens, K., Proost, K., & Dahlgaard, H. (2005). Characterization of uranium and plutonium containing particles originating from the nuclear weapons accident in Thule, Greenland, 1968. Journal of environmental radioactivity, 81(1), 21-32
see article here – “https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0265931X04003297
Also on this day:
January 21, 2010 – The flub that sank a thousand policies #auspol