A US nuclear bomb lost more than three decades ago probably lies on the seabed off Greenland's Thule airbase, which the United States is planning to use for its controversial anti-missile shield, a Danish newspaper reported yesterday.
Classified documents obtained by a group of former workers at Thule, an Arctic air and radar base built by the United States in 1951-52, suggest that one of four hydrogen bombs on a B-52 bomber that crashed there in 1968 was never found, the daily Jyllands-Posten said.
"Detective work by a group of former Thule workers indicates that an unexploded nuclear bomb probably still lies on the seabed off Thule," the mass-circulation daily said.
The crash, on January 21st, 1968, led to a crisis in relations between the United States and NATO ally Denmark, which is responsible for Greenland's foreign, security and defence policy and at the time prohibited nuclear weapons on its territory.
Denmark was never informed about the lost bomb, which has serial number 78252, the paper said. Footage filmed at the site by a US submarine searching for remains of the B-52 wreckage in April 1968 contained images of a bomb-like object, the Danish Ritzau news agency reported.
A US state department document dated August 31st, 1968 said all weapons on board the crashed aircraft had been accounted for but did not spell out whether they had been recovered, Ritzau said.
The United States assured the Danish government in spring 1968 that clean-up work after the B-52 crash had been completed and gave up searching for the lost bomb in August that year, Jyllands-Posten said.
"We are not able to comment at this stage," Mr Lawrence Butler, Deputy Chief of Mission at the US embassy in Copenhagen, said.
Mr Niels-Joergen Nehring, head of the state-sponsored Danish Institute of International Affairs (DUPI), which published a report called Greenland During the Cold War in 1997, including a chapter on the B-52 crash, said Jyllands-Posten's claim that a lost bomb remained off Thule was not surprising.
"It is not new information that there might be some stuff left there," Mr Nehring said, adding the crash had occurred "some kilometres off the coast" where the water depth beneath the ice was 250-300 metres. The US investigation of the crash site had ended once it had been confirmed that no radiation danger existed, he said.
Senior US State Department officials are scheduled to visit Greenland for three days on August 21st for talks with Danish and Greenland officials on Thule's role in the planned National Missile Defence (NMD) initiative.
Home to a ballistic missile early-warning radar station, Thule sits at the midpoint of a chain of similar sites between Alaska and Britain - a line along which the United States may build a shield against missiles from what it calls states of concern, such as North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Libya.
Leading politicians in Greenland do not want Thule to play any role in the NMD. Denmark has only said that the NMD should not go ahead if it breaches the strategic missile treaty between the United States and Russia.
President Vladimir Putin has warned Denmark and other US NATO allies their participation in the NMD could upset global strategic stability.