Memo to J R Totter, Subject: Trip to Thule Greenland January 23 to February 3, 1968 in Connection with B-52 Crash January 20, 1968

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THRU: John R. Totter, Director, TRIP TO THULE, GREENLAND, JANUARY 23 T^l FEBRUARY 3, 1968, IN CONNECTION WITH B-52 CRASH, JANUARY 20, 1968 The request came Tuesday, January 23, at 10 a.m., from Mr. Winter, Deputy Director, Division of Military Application. He had spoken to Mr. Hollingsworth who, while agreeing that Wright Langham was the expert in Pu contamination problems wanted a man from his staff, preferably an M.D., to be at the site. A Danish scientific team proceeding at the same time from Copenhagen to Thule was thought to be medically oriented, but this turned out to be incorrect. Since Dr. Storer was already slated for Japan, I cancelled appointments, got my passport, some money and clothes, and reported to the Pentagon by 2 p.m. In Dr. Walske’s office, Dr. Langham, who had come in from Oak Ridge, and I were briefed on the situation, as it was then known, and on the members of the Danish team. After a short visit with General Scott who pointed out how very important it was for the crash to be taken care of properly, promptly and thoroughly, Colonel Moore and Colonel Shwiller furnished us with orders, took us to Andrews Air Force Base, got our cold weather equip ment, and put us on an executive plane to McGuire Air Force Base. We were to have taken off next morning at 6 p.m. for Thule, but bad weather there caused the flight to be cancelled. A Colonel C. S. Dresser, was also waiting for this flight, and when we learned that he was the Commanding Officer of Thule Air Force Base returning from leave, we took advantage of the 24 hour delay to learn as much as possible about Thule. Thus, we were instructed about "Phases" the local name for wind storms off the ice cap. The characteristic of a Phase is that fine ice crystals are blown horizontally so as to fill the air and create the "white out" in which one promptly gets lost and freezes to death. Also, the velocity of the wind rapidly increases the "Chill has the cooling effect of something like -75° F or so. A man's bare hand will freeze solid under such circumstances within a minute. Annex I gives the safety procedures which are obeyed to the letter when the base intercoms and radio give warnings of Phases. A Phase can develop within fifteen minutes, but usually they are forecast about six hours in advance. Note is made of Phases because they condition all activities on the base. Throughout, the first consideration was US DOE ARCHIVES CONFIRMED TO BE UNCLASSIFIED

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that the base personnel not be put at risk. It is because of these sudden-death storms that the native Greenlanders (eskimos) build a small igloo whenever they make a rest stop; apparently they can read the weather signs as accurately as the meteorologists. Thule is 76° 30' North and 68° 30' West, about 800 miles South of the North Pole, so that during January there is little or no light except for a light tinge of pink on the southern horizon that slowly fades into the sharp blackness of the nearly starless polar sky. As shown on the daylight-darkness chart (Figure I), the shift from total darkness to total daylight occurs rapidly. The early stages of the investigation and clean-up had to be made in near total darkness. The fully-fueled B-52 was about 90 miles South of Thule at 28,000 feet when an electrical fire was discovered in the main compartment and its pilot radioed a "May Day." Within a few minutes, they were approaching the base at 9000 feet, and the men bailed out when over the Thule beacon. The rescue operation is described graphically in the "Thule Times" of January 26 (Annex II). Six of the seven made it despite parachuting from that height, clothed only in their regular lightweight flight gear; ground temperature at the time was -32° F. For unknown reasons, the abandoned plane made a U-turn, losing 9000 feet altitude in roughly 18-20 miles and crashed onto the ice at North Star Bay about 7.5 miles slightly South of West of the base at about 5:30 p.m., January 21. A very sharp explosion accompanied the crash. This was followed by a large "column" of fire--actually a strip of fire but this could not be determined when viewed from the base. The plane had been under continuous radar surveillance and hence it was recorded that a fire "column" about 800 meters across shot up to about 800 meters. Figure II, a tracing from a geologic map, shows the general topology of the area and the location of the crash with respect to the base and depth of the bay. This part of the bay is the lower end of Wolstenholme fjord; the bottom has a long boat-shaped depression blocked by a sill between Cape Athol on the mainland and Wolstenholme Island. Thus, if anything went through the ice, which averaged 30 inches thick at the time, it should drop into the deepest part of the bay and stay in the hold of the "boat." The crash occurred about 45 minutes after a high tide at the neap phase DOE ARCHIVES (Figure III); the tides give rise to "leads" in the ice and to piled-up blocks and "slip-joints" at the shore line. (This figure not available at this time.)

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Subsequently, it was inferred that the plane must have reached near supersonic speeds, because pieces of its skin with sheared-off rivets and a bomb-bay door were found North of the crash point. The plane probably came in at about 15° to the surface with the left wing 60° low and impacted at greater than 500 knots per hour. The nose crashed back against the wing, loosed the four weapons and they exploded. The JP-4 fuel and heavy parts of the plane continued forward; one engine rotor was found 6 km down the ice. The Pu of the weapons was oxidized and aerosolized by the explosion; some impacted on interior surfaces of the plane as it blew apart; some was taken up in the fire column (v.i.); and some was spread forward on the ice along with the JP-4 and the residua of the plane. The spread of fuel down the ice by momentum and its ignition created the "fire colume" (v.s.) which burned fiercely for 20 to 30 minutes with whitish flares suggesting the combusion of magnesium. The fire died out after about an hour and the residual fuel, carbon, bits and pieces of metal, and Pu02-contaminated residua were refrozen into the surface ice which had melted during the fire. This was the composition of the "black streak" shown on the composite photo made from 3000 feet using chute flares on Thursday, January 25 (Figure IV). The streak subsequently was found to be about 2200 feet long and 350 to 400 feet No fission products were found on the ice or plane wreckage and hence the detonations were all "one-point." To return to the time of the crash: The local rescue teams promptly went into operation with the help of the Greenlanders and their dog sleds. A Mr. Jens Ziglersen, the local factor for the Danish Trading Corporation, proved to be the key person in this and subsequent work on the ice as he alone spoke the Greenlander language. He mobilized the Greenlanders and their dog sleds and after rescuing the fliers they were the first to inspect the crash site. They saw no life and nothing of any meaning to them so they returned to base without trampi around. Major General Richard Hunziker, Chief of the SAC "Broken Arrow" Response Group, arrived Monday, January 22, and got operations started but the Phase which prevented our taking off from McGuire on January 24 also stopped al1 operations on the ice. However, by the time we arrived Thursday, the dog teams had carried enough 4x8 sheets of plywood out to the streak area to construct a safe landing pad for the helicopters and to build an emergency shelter against sudden Phases.

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The first problem encountered by the "Broken Arrow" cadre was that their standard PAC-1S alpha-meters simply did not work at these temperatures. They supposedly met cold temperature specifications of -20° F, but at -40° F they failed on at least three counts. Hences the contamination levels at the crash site and the streak were sub stantially unknown until Messrs. Tenney and Benedict of LRL: Livermore, arrived on Friday, January 26, ostensibly to test the field performance of the Fidler meters. Essentially, the Fidler was a lightly shielded Nal crystal with battery-powered electronics responding to the 17 kv the batteries under their parkas, repairing some contacts and gradually cold-adapting the instruments, they calibrated them against known sources covered by average thicknesses of snow. The darkness and cold made civil engineering virtually impossible (Polaris is directly overhead), so the first isodose plot of the contaminated area was obtained by selecting an arbitrary starting point and then walking radially, recording the number of paces until the meter reading changed a given number of units. This resulted in the "semi-quantitative" chart shown in Figure V. This fully confirmed the decisions taken by General Hunziker on the basis of a very few PAC-1S readings, to red-flag the streak and a zone around it. As it happened, the phase winds of January 24 spread the contamination transversely and each succeeding phase enlarged the contaminated area. As shown on Figure VI, however, a later reliable quantitative isodose plot, most of the activity was related to the streak. A special team of weapons experts had priority in combing the area for pieces of weapons, using the dog sleds and helicopters. The problems of existing, working, moving, and using instruments in the dark and cold during these first two weeks can hardly be overstated. It is to the credit of General Hunziker and Colonel Dresser that no one man was killed or lost, then or later. Dr. Langham and I arrived shortly before the Danish team and were the first ranking Americans to talk with them. In fact, we received them and introduced them a bit later to General Hunziker. They were Professor Jurgen Koch, Consultant to Danish National Health Service, and Professor of Physics, Orsted Institute, University of Copenhagen, Professor Otto Mogens Kofoed-Hansen, Head, Physics Department, Danish Atomic Energy Commission. Ris$S; Mr. Per Grande, Head, Radiation

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Laboratory, National Health Service of Denmark; Dr. Henri L. Gj^rup, Head, Health Physics Department, Ris«J; and Mr. H. Lassen, Head of Division, Ministry for Greenland. Professor Kofoed-Hansen immediately began giving us a hard time about a Greenland hunter reputed to have approached the crash from the Narssarsuk area and finding nothing had gone back to his hunting. Why hadn't he been found? Weren't we going to decontaminate him? The others looked somewhat ill at ease, but nodded agreement. Just as we were about to see about arranging a search, General Hunziker walked in, welcomed them, told them that anything they wanted would be done, etc. This set very well and the mood changed. Shortly thereafter, we went to the briefing room for the first session with the newspaper men from both Europe and America. The European journalists had arrived on the same SAS plane with the four Danes. On the assumption that it was better for the AEG not to seem to be masterminding or to be responsible in this situation, I stayed out of the spotlight. I found Mr. Frank Tucker of the Danish Desk of our State Department and a Brigadier General in nondescript winter gear doing the same thing. As it worked out, General Hunziker's frank situation report and Dr. Langham's description of the biohazards of Pu were quite sufficient. Only Professor Koch spoke for the Danes. He merely outlined their interest in determining the extent of the Pu contamination and of being assured that it would be safely taken care of, so that no harm could come to the Greenlanders. There were one or two sharp questions of a political nature, fielded neatly by Professor Koch and General Hunziker. The New York Times reporter, a rather impertinent, "mod" type of young man, insisted on calling the smoke column a mushroom. Professor Koch pointed out the difference and when the reporter said he preferred "mushroom cloud", Koch told him that it was reporters like him who didn't deserve to be called journalists, etc. The Times man merely smiled as though he had scored. The weather turned bad Saturday, and soon the newsmen realized that they were accomplishing little by staying on in this uncomfortable climate. They had to remain because the Phase reached stage II and closed down everything for almost two days. They were happy to leave on the first outbound plane. On the whole they reported the situation fairly, but a few tried to make political hay out of it. Curiously, the Danish paper that had stirred up the most political furor over the accident editoralized next week on how many Soviet warships sailed through the Kattegat with nuclear weapons aboard and what would happen if one of them ran aground in the tricky waters of this narrow sea lane—or collided with another ship!

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That evening, Thursday, Dr. Langham and I were fully briefed on the situation as it was then understood, but the information was scanty and imprecise. In fact, the crash area was able to correlate the aerial photographs taken by magnesium photoflashes with the "dark streak" and the distribution of the debris. None of us, including the Danes, recognized that a hole had been blown in the ice at the north end of the streak although the question had been raised when parts of a weapon chute were found frozen into the ice of this area. I tramped back and forth over this area and saw only a jumble of ice blocks and pieces of metal, whereas Dr. Borge Fristrup, the Danish glaciologist, who arrived on February 1, immediately recognized that the ice at the north end of the streak was newly-frozen and that the blocks of ice had been upended and refrozen in abnormal positions. This was the clue that led to the suspicion that the concussion from the four weapons had blown a hole in the ice and thereupon close study of Figure IV and an aerial infrared photo of the crash spot revealed a circular pattern of fracture lines about 600 feet in diameter and a smaller circular area of ice that had been more It was obvious to all who examined the streak that this was the bits and pieces of residue of the plane, and the JP-4 fuel with carbon particles and Pu02 refrozen into a "cruddy" kind of ice; the point of impact was marked by the "cracked ice." This black streak had been the base or surface for the "column of fire." A few heavy pieces of the plane, engine rotors, one landing gear, and wheels were found up …