America’s Cold War Obsession with Greenland

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🗓️ 28 April 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

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Summary

April 27, 1951. The United States has been putting pressure on Denmark for a long time. Because the small European kingdom has something the Americans really, really want: Greenland. Today, they sign a treaty that will basically let the U.S. military build whatever it wants on this frozen island. They end up constructing an air base, but then turn to a much more ambitious project, underground. How does this hidden Arctic outpost connect to a massive nuclear secret? And why do the Americans abandon this city beneath the ice? Special thanks to Paul Bierman, professor at the University of Vermont’s School of the Environment and Natural Resources and author of When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth's Tumultuous History and Perilous Future; Kristian Nielsen, associate professor in science history at Aarhus University in Denmark and co-author of Camp Century: The Untold Story of America's Secret Arctic Military Base Under the Greenland Ice; and Robert Weiss, former US Army doctor and Donald Guthrie Professor of Urology at Yale University’s School of Medicine. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:00.0	The History Channel, original podcast.
0:03.2	Hey, everyone, Sally here.
0:04.9	The episode you're about to hear is a deep dive into a story about a covert government plan
0:10.2	that is also featured on Secrets Declassified, a new History Channel TV series hosted by David Decovney.
0:17.6	Secrets Declassified investigates explosive evidence from newly declassified files that shine
0:22.9	a light on what the government does in secret. Check out new episodes on the history channel every
0:27.7	Friday or stream the next day on history.com.
0:33.7	History This Week. April 27, 1951. I'm Sally Helm.
0:42.3	A negotiation has been going on for weeks. On one side, the United States. On the other,
0:50.6	a small European kingdom, Denmark. Its population is around 4.5 million, a little less than the size
0:58.4	of Massachusetts at the time. The two powers are far from evenly matched. But Denmark has something
1:05.6	that the U.S. really wants. They've tried to get it before. There wasn't an offer from the U.S. to buy Greenland from Denmark.
1:13.6	100 million U.S. dollars in gold.
1:17.6	Yes, the United States once tried to buy Greenland with gold.
1:23.6	That is Christian Nilsson, an associate professor of science history at Oros University in
1:29.3	Denmark. He said that bag of gold offer came soon after World War II. And here I quote the Danish
1:36.9	foreign minister at the time. We know we owe a lot to the Americans, but we don't owe the entire
1:42.1	island of Greenland.
1:51.2	To step back for a moment, in 1951, Greenland is a Danish colony.
1:55.4	But the U.S. has had a foothold there since 1941,
2:00.0	when they signed something called the Defense of Greenland Agreement.
2:07.3	Because Germany had just occupied Denmark, and the U.S. wanted to protect this giant,
	...

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