Americans really are assholes. We have 100% earned our reputation around the rest of the world as assholes. And rest assured, it's not because they're jealous of the shoddy and twisted republic that we have. The worst punishment I can imagine for the rest of the world would be to make them Americans and expose them to American institutions. They would revolt a lot faster than we, the rebellious-at-heart Americans, ever would. In case you haven't noticed, we're such assholes that we used the atomic bomb TWICE. And when another country is having an election, we always back the dictator instead of the people's choice. Then, of course, the genocide and slavery not just in our history but in our building blocks. There's a lot to hate.
But we're also lying to everyone all the time, even nations we have treaties with like, say, Denmark, the owners of Greenland. Back in 1959 we talked them into letting us build a nuclear reactor on their land. For science, of course. We also built a miniature village so people working there (about 200 of them) had a place to live. We called it Camp Century. But what we really did was, we tried to see if we could build a nuclear missile base there. Why Greenland? And why does Trump want Greenland so badly now? Well, about that:
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| From National Geographic |
Pretty useful during a Cold War that could turn hot at any moment. And before you judge us too harshly, please remember that not very long after we convinced the Dutch to let us do this, the Soviets snuck a bunch of nuclear missiles into Cuba, hence the Cuban Missile Crisis. Having Greenland is also pretty useful if you intend to fuck over Putin at some point. Even Trump must know that the two of them can't coexist. I suspect that if he has his way and bends America to his will, Putin will be the next order of business. A little unexpected from him, considering his love of the Russian dictator, but a solid political move.
So what happened to Camp Century? We, uh, well . . . we kinda forgot about it. In 1965 we abandoned it. We told the Dutch that it was a more or less successful experiment, and we did learn a lot about building nuclear reactors in such climates as the Arctic. We even accidentally learned something interesting about Greenland while we were at Camp Century. We drilled all the way through the ice sheet covering Greenland. That ice has long been thought to be 2M years old, but we examined the ground and evidence we found and came to the conclusion that it was a mere 400K years since Greenland was uncovered by ice.
OK, maybe that wasn't all that exciting for you to learn, but big picture, it's pretty important to our understanding of the world. Which is besides the point, so let's get back to it.
What we really learned was that it was impossible to build a missile base there. The conditions were too unstable, so we packed up our shit and left under the assumption that whatever we left behind would be sealed away in ice forever. It sounds kind of stupid to us now to do that, but back then they didn't know about one little tiny thing that is a very large fucking thing now.
That thing they didn't know about? Climate change. Now the ice is melting, and we have rediscovered Camp Century. There's just one problem. We left behind a lot of stuff, including nuclear waste and PCBs, the dreaded forever chemicals. To say nothing of the 24M liters of untreated sewage.
So now Camp Century is a ticking time bomb. Don't worry, you probably won't be alive when it goes off, which is scheduled for 2135 or 2179, depending on which model of climate change you follow. Your grandkids might be alive for it, though. Imagine the sheer joy they'll experience when that waste is exposed to the air and shoved right into the Polar Jet Stream. How much damage could that shit do once dispersed in such a fashion? I imagine there won't be a lot of places in the northern hemisphere you could avoid it.
Yeah, I don't think Trump wants Greenland so he can clean up the US's previous mess, either. All the same, if he somehow figures out how to make a missile base work there, I wonder what Putin might try to sneak into Cuba? Hell, maybe Mexico is tired of the tariffs. Why not put a real threat at the border?
Fun in the end times . . .
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