House of Imperialism

  

House of Imperialism

Peter Schultz

 

                  Katheryn Bigelow’s movie House of Dynamite created quite a stir, and rightfully so. And this led me to think about a similar, yet very different movie on the same theme but that might be called House of Imperialism. The following passages are from a book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr.

 

                  “The Japanese [after WW II] were right to be nervous. Despite all the duck and cover warnings about Soviet strikes on Cincinnati and Dubuque, the real lines of nuclear confrontation were the overseas bases and territories. Hundreds of nuclear weapons, we now know, were placed in South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Throughout most the sixties, there were more than a thousand on Okinawa. Johnston Island, one of the guano islands Ernest Gruening had recolonized, bristled with nuclear armed Thor missiles. An unknown number of nuclear weapons were stored in Hawai’I, Alaska (including on the Aleutian Islands), and Midway.

 

                  “Yet while the nukes on bases protected the mainland, they imperiled the territories and host nations. Flying nuclear weapons around the bases – something the military did routinely – risked catastrophic accident. Even when the weapons stayed put, their presence turned the bases into tempting targets, especially since overseas bases were easier to Moscow to hit than the mainland was. Arming the bases was essentially painting bright red bull’s-eye on them.

 

                  “A sense of the risk can be gained by considering the Arctic base at Thule in Greenland…. The virtue of Thule was that it was close enough to the Soviet Union that from there, the United States could lob missiles over the North Pole at Moscow. The drawback was that the Soviets could fire missiles back. The Soviet premier warned Denmark that to allow the United States to house its arsenal at Thule – or anywhere on Danish soil – would be ‘tantamount to suicide.’ Nervous Danish politicians incorporated a ‘no nuclear’ principle into the platform of their governing coalition: the United States could have its base, but no nukes.

 

                  “… Washington pressed the issue. When the Danish prime minister didn’t explicitly object, U.S. officials took his silence for winking consent and secretly moved nuclear weapons to Thule. Soon the air force began covertly flying nuclear armed B-52s over Greenland daily. This was part of airborne alert program to keep armed planes aloft and ready to strike the Soviet Union at all times – the subject of Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove….

 

                  “The general responsible for the program readily conceded how much danger this placed Greenland in. Thule, he told Congress, would be ‘one of the first ones to go’ if war came. Even without war, it faced peril. In 1967, three planes carrying hydrogen bombs made emergency landings in Greenland. The next year, a B-52 flying near Thule with four Mark 28 hydrogen bombs crashed, hard….

 

                  “The accident at Thule didn’t set off a nuclear explosion. It did, however, spew plutonium all over the crash site. The air force scrambled to clean up the mess before the ice thawed and carried radioactive debris into the ocean. The recovered waste filled seventy-five tankers. Had an accident of that scale happened over a city, it would have been mayhem.

 

                  “Could that have happened? Yes…. Two years before the Thule accident, a B-52 crashed over the Spanish village of Palomares while carrying four hydrogen bombs, each seventy-five times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Part of the plane landed 80 yards from an elementary school, another chunk hit the earth 150 yards from a chapel. The conventional explosives went off in two of the bombs, sowing plutonium dust into the tomato fields for miles.”

 

                  It isn’t inaccurate to say, as a character in Bigelow’s movie does say, that we’ve created a house of dynamite. But it should be noted that what makes that house of dynamite so bloody dangerous, even makes it a madhouse, is that the United States has created a house of imperialism, one that requires it to subject other nations to the possibility of nuclear catastrophes.