Thule Air Base - B-52 Nuclear Bomber Crash

B-52 Nuclear Bomber Crash

On January 21, 1968, a B-52G Stratofortress from the 380th Strategic Aerospace Wing, Plattsburgh Air Force Base, New York crashed and burned on the ice near Thule Air Base. The impact detonated the high explosives in the primary units of all four of the B28 nuclear bombs it carried, but nuclear and thermonuclear reactions did not take place due to the PAL and fail-safe mechanisms in the weapons. More than 700 Danish civilians and U.S. military personnel worked under hazardous conditions without protective gear to clean up the nuclear waste. In 1987, nearly 200 of the Danish workers unsuccessfully attempted to sue the United States. However, some information has been released by the U.S. authorities under the Freedom of Information Act. Kaare Ulbak, chief consultant to the Danish National Institute of Radiation Hygiene, said Denmark had carefully studied the health of the Thule workers and found no evidence of increased mortality or cancer.

The Pentagon maintained that all four weapons had been destroyed. In November 2008, an investigative reporter from BBC News made use of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act to gain access to the files and claimed that the aircraft had been carrying four nuclear bombs and that investigators piecing together the fragments realized that only three of the weapons could be accounted for. By August 1968, the Star III submarine was sent to the base to look for the lost bomb, serial number 78252, under the sea ice. In 2009, the assertions of the BBC were refuted in a Danish report, according to which Star III was searching for a small piece of uranium metal, the spark plug of a secondary.