If the US wants to write a check, let it do so: it would be the first step to pay their environmental debt to the Greenlanders, to Denmark, to the European Union and to the common good," said Jean Malaurie, ethnologist, geographer and living in the Arctic. He died on the 22nd of 2022 at the age of 101, but here we find the book Les Derniers rois de Thulé (The Last Kings of Thule), published in 1955, classified among the classics of ethnography, which is not only a tale of the life of the Inuit, but also a critique of imperialism and colonialism. He was commenting on Donald Trump’s intention to buy Greenland when he made that mistake. Because Trump already had this in mind in 2019, and he seems to have on his list of things to do during his second term of office the appropriation of Greenland.

I would like to buy the Greenlandic 'yes' through Sosa, with US$ 10,000 distributed to each of them each year - as such, to compensate for the US$ 600 million grant that Denmark distributes to Greenland each year. They are launching a communication campaign on the ground, putting at the forefront their proximity to the Alaskan Inuits who depend on the United States, as well as praising the economic advantages that would come from becoming an American – “we will make you rich,” Trump has just told them. Not the first time, though. The Americans have long been trying to take possession of this northern island, which sees the world as a game of monopoly and has 81% of its land covered with ice. Greenland and Iceland were acquired by American President Andrew Johnson in 1867, but the Kingdom of Denmark refused to do so. In 1946, Harry S. President Truman extended his offer in exchange for $100 million. But not again.

High, at least militarily, the Americans are well located in Greenland. In 1943, an army base called Thulé was built on the northwest coast, which was renamed Pituffik in 2023. In 1941, with Denmark occupied by the German army, the Danish ambassador to Washington authorized the United States to establish bases in Greenland. Built in 1943 and a few years later, the base would be expanded in 1951 with the support of NATO.

Greenland was considered and settled as a mere frozen territory, leaving the Inuit far from the talks between the Americans and the Danes. They made it as if they didn’t exist, settled there and took out the 187 citizens of the place without giving them a hint of opportunity and a way out – in the end, with the force of asking, they would get the compensation in 1999.

The Inuit is a rich people whose way of life has developed to advance in extreme conditions, descendants of the Jin and those who remained there in the 13th century from Asia. Today it is a community of about 55,000 people, dependent on Denmark, structured as autonomy and which also has the question of acquiring independence at its door.

In a 1993 interview, Jean Malaurie said: "The operation [of Thulé] has been a symbol of Western colonialism in a Shakespeare way: without any warning, we have settled in the center of the people who demanded nothing. What did the Thule Eskimos have to do with the problems between Soviet and Western communism? Nothing at all." After a year of expedition with his Inuit friends on the island of Ellesmere, he returned to Thule and saw the following from the tip of a glacier: "Between the smoke and the ashes appeared a city of hangars and shelters made of iron and aluminum, which dazzled us with the rays of the sun. Until then it was empty on a plain. The Martians were from the US Air Force. Five thousand men had just come to the area that I knew very well."

5,000 armed men, as well as the descendants of the newly burned Fat Man and Little Boy weapons, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nuclear weapon under the glacier

Although this is not told to us, because the Inuit people are marked by uranium, and this is what Malauri remembered when referring to the "environmental debt". On the one hand, we have the nuclear project of the Camp Century military base, which has been kept secret for a long time, even concealed from the Danish Government. 200 kilometers from Thulé, this base was erected in 1959, which should have been more for scientific research than military. Officially, his specialty was being under the ice. There was, yes, spectacular, because they built the infrastructure to channel the day of 200 soldiers under the glacier: rooms, laboratories, a hospital, a chapel, a cinema room... and all powered by a portable nuclear reactor PM-2A.

When we were in the heart of the Cold War, the American objectives were to show the world their cutting-edge engineering. They had mounted a base of 55 hectares, connecting the different spaces thanks to a tunnel of three kilometers under the glacier. That's where 200 people carried their diary, day and night in the heart of the ice. But the real function was covered by this immense infrastructure: the Americans formed a hidden space for the union of 600 ballistic missiles, from which the Soviet Union was accessible. The project was called Iceworm.

Due to the movement of the ice, the tunnel was in danger of sinking, which is why the project was abandoned in 1964. In 1967, the base was officially hetero and the Iceworn horror could not be brought to mind. Without maintenance, all the tunnels soon collapsed – each month they had to move and/or remove more than 120 tons of snow and ice to keep the base usable. And it stopped in the past, under the ice... Until April 2024, the radar of a scientific flight by the United States Space Agency (NASA) detected, by chance, the village about 30 meters from the glacier.

All the waste – rubbish, dirty water, industrial chemicals, radioactive water used to cool the reactor... – was dumped into the glacier, thinking that the ice would “disappear” forever. A study published in 2016 in the journal Geophysical Research Letter brought to light the fact that they contained 200,000 litres of fuel oil in the cisterns, which are likely to be destroyed by rust and ice movements. The chemicals known as polychlorinated biphenyls are the most widespread and problematic in the local iceberg, as well as 240,000 litres of radioactive water.

What they didn’t know was that decades later, climate change would cause the melting of glaciers. According to the 2016 study, Camp Century can be fully outdoors by 2090. Who will take care of the cleaning before? Denmark didn't know anything about that? The United States? The same Trump? The NATO? They don't have the subject in their priorities. It is likely that, once again, the Inuit who have not asked anything will be the first to be affected.

Scandal to the light in 1997

In 1997, the secret of the nuclear weapons accumulated on this base came to light. Obviously, it caused a scandal. It was also reported that the Danish Government had quietly authorized the Americans to transport nuclear weapons to Greenland. The official statement of Prime Minister Hans Christian Hansen of 1957 was then officially violated because Greenland was classified as a nuclear-weapon-free zone.

Maleruski, it's not the only radioactive trace left by the American: On January 21, 1968, the plane carrying four thermonuclear bombs near Thulé collapsed. Officially, the Danish and U.S. governments immediately launched a work to limit pollution, which they said did not pose a risk to the environment or the health of the population. The fact is that one in four bombs has never been detected, that cancer cases have rapidly spread among workers and residents of Thulé in the years to come, and that the Danish Government has never allowed witnesses to undergo medical follow-up.

In 1951, Shaman Uutaaq assigned the ethnologist Malaurie to direct the following message to the US Air Force: "Go home, my general. Thule is a land of Inuit, a land of peace. You are not welcome.” It would also be valid for today, both for the army and for the mining companies that dream of frozen uranium for nuclear production.