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“Neither Confirm Nor Deny” Doctrine in Danish-American Relations, 1957–1968

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“Neither Confirm Nor Deny” Doctrine in Danish-American Relations, 1957–1968 ODillesenemmas and Limits of the “Neither Confirm nor Deny” Doctrine Tango for Thule The Dilemmas and Limits of the “Neither Confirm nor Deny” Doctrine in Danish-American Relations, 1957–1968 ✣ Thorsten Borring Olesen Introduction On Sunday 21 January 1968 a U.S. B-52G Stratofortress bomber armed with four 1.1-megaton thermonuclear bombs crashed into the ice in Wolsten- holme Fjord, some ten kilometers southwest of the Thule Airbase in north- west Greenland. A ªre in the aircraft’s heating system caused the accident. When the seven members of the crew realized that the ªre could not be con- trolled, they ejected from the aircraft. Six were recovered safely, but the sev- enth, the co-pilot, who lacked an ejection seat, incurred fatal wounds during ejection.1 The B-52 minus its crew passed straight over the Thule Airbase and made a 180-degree turn before crashing against the frozen surface of Wolsten- holme Fjord. The conventional high explosives in the bombs went off on im- pact, but thanks to the inbuilt safety system no nuclear detonation occurred. However, radioactive contamination from the plutonium in the four wrecked bombs was spread on the ice at the area of impact.2 1. U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) History and Research Division, Project Crested Ice: The Thule Nuclear Accident, Vol. 1, 23 April 1969, in National Security Archive, Washington DC (NSArchive). 2. Ibid.; and Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 156, 180. To reduce damage from the crash, a cleanup operation, Project Crested Ice, was carried out. Along with bomb and aircraft debris, contam- inated ice crust and snow were removed and shipped to the United States for disposal. Whether all four wrecked bombs were in fact retrieved has been a subject of debate, most recently in November 2008 when the British Broadcasting Corporation disclosed documents from U.S. archives supposedly indicating that one of the bombs might still be buried in the waters below the ice. After the BBC dis- closure the Danish government asked the U.S. government to share the documents examined by the BBC. After receiving the 348 documents, which were largely identical to a cache of 317 documents re- Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring 2011, pp. 116–147 © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 116 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00108 by guest on 02 October 2021 Dilemmas and Limits of the “Neither Confirm nor Deny” Doctrine A crash involving a nuclear-armed aircraft is an awkward event. The downing of “HOBO 28,” the call sign of the B-52 that crashed at Thule, was no exception. This accident was especially awkward because it took place in a foreign country. Even though Denmark was a close U.S. ally, ofªcial policy banned nuclear weapons from Danish territory. Moreover, the accident oc- curred less than 48 hours before parliamentary elections were scheduled to be held in Denmark. The Problem This article discusses how the Thule crisis was handled by Denmark and the United States. The Danish government seized on the B-52 accident as an oc- casion to renegotiate the 1951 agreement concerning the defense of Green- land, a document that for the past seventeen years had regulated U.S. military activities on the island. By late May 1968 the two governments had agreed to sign a supplement to the original pact. Negotiations had been intense, and the U.S. administration clearly felt that the Danish government was exploiting the situation. This article analyzes the Danish government’s motivations in pressing for a sharp change in the way the nuclear issue was handled in rela- tion to Greenland. The article also explains why the U.S. government ulti- mately agreed to a supplementary document banning the peacetime introduc- tion of nuclear weapons on Greenland territory, including overºights. The Thule accident was a crisis involving two North Atlantic Treaty Or- ganization (NATO) allies, and the way it was resolved is a reºection of the close allied relationship. The accident was also a crisis between a small state and a superpower and thus demonstrated that under certain circumstances a small power can have leverage when confronting a larger power. Last but not least, the Thule episode represented a clash between two different security policy perceptions: one local, the other global. Taken together, these themes highlight fundamental tenets of Pax Americana during the Cold War. The article is to a large degree based on the detailed analysis presented in a government-mandated report, Greenland during the Cold War: Danish and American Security Policy 1945–1968, which the Danish Institute of Interna- tional Affairs (DUPI) prepared for the Danish government in 1997.3 The re- leased by the U.S. Department of Energy in 1994, the Danish government asked the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) to scrutinize the documents to see whether they contained any new evidence. The DIIS analysis published in 2009 concluded that the large body of declassiªed sources showed that no bomb was left behind at Thule. See Svend Aage Christensen, The Marshal’s Baton: There Is No Bomb, There Was No Bomb, They Were Not Looking for a Bomb (Copenhagen: DIIS, 2009). 3. Grønland under den kolde krig: Dansk og amerikansk sikkerhedspolitik 1945–1968, 2 vols. (Copenha- gen: Danish Institute of International Affairs, 1997) (hereinafter referred to as Thule Report, with ap- 117 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00108 by guest on 02 October 2021 Olesen port was based on a large body of Danish and U.S. primary sources, many of them newly declassiªed and never used in research before. Following the com- pletion of the report, other U.S. documents covering the Danish-American negotiations on a supplement to the 1951 Greenland agreement were declas- siªed, and many were published in the appropriate volume of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) document series.4 My analysis here is based on all of these primary sources as well as on the many new research publications on Denmark and the Cold War that have ap- peared in recent years.5 U.S. Strategic Interests in Greenland Even in the nineteenth century, U.S. ofªcials viewed Denmark as a country of strategic value. Secretary of State William Seward, who was a driving force be- hind the purchase of Alaska in 1867, also actively promoted the idea of buy- ing Greenland. This idea never came to fruition, but because Danish sover- eignty over all of Greenland was not universally recognized, the Danish government made the sale of the Virgin Islands (then known as the Danish West Indies) to the United States in 1917 conditional on U.S. recognition of Danish sovereignty over the whole of Greenland. The U.S. government agreed but noted that its recognition of Danish sovereignty did not pertain to the right of selling the island to a third party. In a court case provoked by Nor- way, the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague in 1933 ªnally accorded Denmark full sovereign powers over Greenland.6 During World War II Greenland became crucial for U.S. security in two ways. Before December 1941, the U.S. government wanted to keep propriate volume and page numbers). The concluding chapter 18 of the report was translated into English and published separately under the title Greenland during the Cold War: Danish and American Security Policy 1945–1968 (Summary), and published separately. The report was produced by a small group of researchers, including me, and was approved by the DUPI Board before being submitted to the Danish government. 4. The editorial note published as Doc. 1 in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Vol. XII, Western Europe (hereinafter referred to as FRUS, with appropriate year and volume numbers), indicates that the publication of these 24 documents was in part a response to the publication of the Danish Thule Report. This FRUS volume is available online at http:// www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/xii/2199.htm. 5. Presentations of recent Danish and Nordic Cold War research may be found in Thorsten B. Olesen, ed., The Cold War and the Nordic Countries: Historiography at a Crossroads (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004); and Thorsten B. Olesen: “Under the National Paradigm: Cold War Studies and Cold War Politics in Post–Cold War Norden,” Cold War History, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May 2008), pp. 189–212. 6. Thule Report, Vol. I, p. 50; and Nancy Fogelson, “Greenland: Strategic Base on a Northern Defense Line,” Journal of Military History, Vol. 53, No. 1 (1989), pp. 51–63. 118 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00108 by guest on 02 October 2021 Dilemmas and Limits of the “Neither Confirm nor Deny” Doctrine other countries from gaining military positions on Greenland, close to the Canadian and U.S. borders. Later on, after the United States joined the war, Greenland became a stepping-stone for U.S. offensive activities in the Euro- pean theater. U.S. forces built numerous military bases and meteorological stations in Greenland as authorized by the U.S.-Danish Defense Agreement of 1941. The agreement was legally unconventional, having been signed by Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and the Danish ambassador to the United States, Henrik Kauffmann. Kauffmann signed contrary to orders from Co- penhagen, where the government clung to a ªctitious neutrality despite the German occupation.
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