Date

Feb 19, 1968

Description

In his account of meetings held in Copenhagen, Bruner reported on the internal U.S. discussions held before the talks with Danish scientists. A key item was determining the extent of contamination of the scar area where the plane crashed. Wright Langham had studied the black crust of the scar area and had determined that it was a “combination of JP [jet propellant]-4 kerosene fuel, carbon, very fine debris, and organic matter in which is entrapped about 80% of the PU [plutonium] of the total sample.” During this discussion, Bruner reported that the Danes favored an “extensive biosurveillance program to assure that the Greenlander [Inuit] would not be contaminated by PU.” At the end of the meeting, the participants decided to “urge the Danes first to state what they thought should be done.”

During the talks with Danish officials, Langham suggested that “biological hazards would be minimal due to the dilution of the PU” and that there “should be no harm to anything if the PU were kept out of the systematic circulation of animals.” What concerned the Danes was that the JP-4 would form a slick, because an “oil slick will move at 5% of the wind velocity, the film would pile up on the shore of Saunders Island, where there are birds, walrus and seals in the summer.” The Danes saw that as a “major problem” because the movement of the slick was “unpredictable.” The implication was that there should be no fuel “to form a slick.” According to Bruner, that was “another way of saying: We want you to scrape up all the contaminated ice and do something with it.” According to Bruner’s 19 April report and the SAC “Crested Ice” history, the U.S. and the Danes then reached a “gentleman’s agreement” based on that point: the U.S. would remove the contaminated aircraft debris and snow and ice, an estimated 10,000 cubic meters, in the range of 90 to 95 percent of the total contamination, for storage in sealed containers for eventual removal.

Source

National Security Archive, DOE Releases on Thule Crash

Document published in following posting(s):

The United States and Greenland: Episodes in Nuclear History, 1957-1968
Part II: The B-52 Crash and Its Impact

Oct 15, 2025