Madam, - In his response (June 30th) to my review of Jean Malaurie's remarkable book on the people of the Polar North, Ultima Thule, the Danish ambassador implies that there were only two relevant parties involved in the location of the US nuclear air base at Thule in northwest Greenland in 1951: the Americans and the Danes.
This ignores the right of the Polar Inuit, the local inhabitants, to any say in the matter.
They lived on the very site chosen by the Americans and sanctioned by the Danes for a secret nuclear air base. Their ancestral burial grounds were also situated there and had to be abandoned when these indigenous people were summarily resettled further north. Malaurie calls it deportation, and claims that the burial grounds, within the precincts of the air base, remain inaccessible to these traditional people.
A geographer, ethnologist and linguist of international stature, Malaurie had been travelling with the Polar Inuit when these terrible events began. In the intervening half-century he has dedicated his life to scientific and educational projects across the Arctic North on their behalf. His book is a magnificent attempt to interpret the continual impact of the outside world on the Polar Inuit, from their own perspective.
This approach has not endeared him to the Danish authorities, as, among other things, he maintains on the evidence of his own experience that the construction of the nuclear air base at Thule was a technological and military invasion of Inuit territory. The events and their consequences were, he says, "the most destructive and difficult challenge of their history".
The Danish ambassador, in his letter, confirms that an American B-52 bomber, carrying four hydrogen bombs, crashed at Thule in 1968. This is referred to as an accident.
It actually belongs to a far more culpable class of occurrence, "an accident waiting to happen", which moves it dramatically up the scale towards inevitability. - Yours, etc.,
DERMOT SOMERS,
Drogheda,
Co Louth.