US cold-war waste irks Greenland

“That land is rightfully theirs,” says Aqqaluk Lynge of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and author of “The Right of Return,” a book about the relocation. “It should be returned in the same condition as when they hunted there.”

The US agreed to release the Dundas area – part of which had been a missile launch site – but not to clean it up first, a position that surprised Svend Auken, who was Denmark’s minister of environment during the negotiations. “There was strong pressure on the Americans that they should clean up after themselves, but they wouldn’t budge,” Mr. Auken says. “They said, ‘If you push us, we won’t give you an inch of it.’ ”

He adds: “They said if they were to clean up after themselves at Thule, then they would be met by similar demands in the Philippines, Japan, and elsewhere in the world. They didn’t want to set that precedent.”

Mikaela Engell, an official at the Danish Foreign Ministry, says the US position stands in stark contrast to that held when Sonderstrom and the DEW stations were returned. In 1991, the US agreed to remove the most serious environmental hazards, though barrels, rubbish, and other less dangerous materials were often left behind.

“There was a total reversion of the American position on the environment between 1991 and 2003,” Ms. Engell says. “There was a new administration and different political headwinds.” Danish officials say it is not yet known what a cleanup will cost.

Under the Bush administration, the US position has been to adhere to a 1951 agreement with Denmark, which does not require environmental remediation. In a written statement to the Monitor, Cheryl Irwin, a spokeswoman for the Secretary of Defense, said the US had acted in accordance with this treaty, which “reflected a shared burden with our host nation for our contribution for defense of the free world.”

And while the US was not required to return the Greenland sites to their original condition, the US had “given up any claims for residual value of improvements made while there,” the statement continued. Furthermore, any contamination on the sites was “the result of ‘normal’ practices in place at the time.”

Ms. Irwin also said that Congress had “forbidden us to remediate overseas sites returned to host nations when not required to by an international agreement.”

Two DEW line stations on the Greenland ice cap are slowly sinking into the ice. Ken Reimer, an expert on DEW line remediation at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, says such stations are often contaminated with PCBs, heavy metals, and fuel. “It’s not as if somebody who goes to the site will be exposed to something,” he says. “These chemicals aren’t an acute risk to environmental or human health, but they can cause chronic harm.”

But those extremely remote stations will probably be left as is, due to the high cost of removing contaminants. “You would have to take them down entirely,” says Engell of the Danish Foreign Ministry, “It might be better to leave them standing as long as you can and concentrate on more critical sites.”

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