← Empire: World History
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- [00:01]
Anita Anand
If you want access to bonus episodes. Reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:19]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium Wireless get 30, 30 better get 30, better get 20, 2020 better get 20, 20 better get 15, 15, 15, 15. Just 15 bucks a month.
- [00:38]
Anita Anand
Sold.
- [00:38]
Ryan Reynolds
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
- [00:42]
Daniel Immerwahr
Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only.
- [00:46]
Ryan Reynolds
Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks.
- [00:47]
Daniel Immerwahr
Busy taxes and fees extra.
- [00:48]
Ray Dalio
Cmintmobile.com this episode is brought to you by Avid Reader Press. Legendary investor Ray Dalio's new book How Countries Go the Big Cycle explains the mechanics behind big debt crises. Larry Summer says Dalio's brilliant I is an invaluable resource and Hank Paulson says it provides a solution to what is the biggest and most certain threat to our prosperity. Read it to understand the greatest economic issue of our time. Available now wherever books are sold.
- [01:20]
Home Depot Advertiser
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- [02:03]
Daniel Immerwahr
Hello and welcome to Empire with me.
- [02:05]
Anita Anand
Anita Anand and me, William Dalrymple.
- [02:08]
Daniel Immerwahr
You're echoey because you're not at home. Where are you?
- [02:11]
Anita Anand
I am in Scotland. I've just been to my nanny's 99th birthday party and she's now almost completely blind and as deaf as a post. It was an odd. It was an odd lunch.
- [02:22]
Daniel Immerwahr
An odd lunch. Lots of shouting and bonhomie.
- [02:25]
Anita Anand
Lots of shouting, bonhomie and fish and chips from Dino's and North Berwick by the beach.
- [02:30]
Daniel Immerwahr
Can I just say this, this little vignette into your life makes you sound like both very posh but very lovely. So both of those Food. Speaking of, very lovely, we're delighted to be joined again by Daniel Immewar, author of how to Hide an Empire. He has been on this podcast before. He's been an absolute superstar. And the reason that we've called you back, we've lured you back, is all thanks to your president, President Trump. So we've got him to thank for you coming back on.
- [02:58]
Anita Anand
You must be delighted with him. Daniels. Do you feel that he has spoilt your thesis that America had a hidden empire, or has he made your entire career and brought you on every chat show in the land?
- [03:09]
Daniel Immerwahr
It's not that hidden at the moment. His imperial desires are not hidden at all.
- [03:13]
Ryan Reynolds
No. And it's even worse than that because, I mean, for me, for my thesis, because I had said that there was a trend away from seizing large land masses toward a more insidious strategy of lots of little bases. I called it the Pointillist empire.
- [03:28]
Daniel Immerwahr
Yes.
- [03:29]
Ryan Reynolds
And now we're back.
- [03:30]
Daniel Immerwahr
You're back. I mean, we're still going to look back because I think it's really useful because he's drawing so much on figures that he appreciates and approves of from America's history. And so that's why we're going to take you all the way back to 1823, because I think it's really important to talk about the Monroe Doctrine, which was the first time that America started thinking, you know, what spheres of influence, not pointillism, but big great plodges on a map is what we need. So to remind people, what is the Monroe Doctrine? Who was President James Monroe and what does President Trump draw from him?
- [04:07]
Ryan Reynolds
I unfortunately am going to offer a revisionist take on the Monroe Doctrine. So historians sometimes get a little snippy about how this gets used. The sort of one line Wikipedia thing is the Monroe Doctrine was the moment when the United States declared its domain over the entire Western Hemisphere. In fact, it was not any kind of announcement to world leaders. It was a message in front of Congress. And it was not known as a doctrine at the time. It was non binding, it was non committal. And it was just part of a sort of evolving conversation where after a lot of Latin American countries had received their independence. So actually a lot of American countries had received their independence, including the United States. This was one of those American countries saying, you know, it looks pretty much now like the countries on this side of the world are independent of Europe. That's not totally true.
- [04:57]
Anita Anand
There's still some European colonies and this is 1823. So only about 20 years earlier less than 20 years earlier, the British had burned down the White House.
- [05:04]
Ryan Reynolds
It was just a moment of kind of naming these United American nations, which included Latin American ones, wouldn't welcome further European colonization. There were still European colonies in the Western Hemisphere, but that was kind of a. Just sort of here's where we are at the moment.
- [05:19]
Daniel Immerwahr
You're talking about rebranding it as the Monroe musings. Not a doctrine, just like a science.
- [05:23]
Ryan Reynolds
That's right.
- [05:24]
Daniel Immerwahr
Well, it wasn't.
- [05:24]
Ryan Reynolds
No, that's right. No one called it a doctrine. No one recognized it as a doctrine at the time. It was not a huge deal. It became important around the time that the United States started snatching up other colonies, because then it got sort of re read. Not as we would not welcome for the European colonization in the Western Hemisphere, but in fact, this is the US Domain, that the US Is in charge of this entire hemisphere, which is not really part of what Monroe was saying.
- [05:51]
Daniel Immerwahr
Oh, interesting. Okay. We love having you on because you turn everything upside down and inside out, which is what Donald Trump's done to your Internet. I mean, it's just fair. I suppose. This is all very balanced.
- [06:01]
Anita Anand
Are you planning another volume, the Unhidden Empire or the Empire Revealed, or is there a companion volume in the press?
- [06:07]
Ryan Reynolds
I sincerely hope not. I mean, you know, please God, we have no idea what it's going to look like in the next, you know, a couple years. It could be nothing or it could be everything.
- [06:17]
Daniel Immerwahr
It could be everything.
- [06:18]
Anita Anand
It could be the Gaza Riviera, mass ethnic cleansing.
- [06:22]
Ryan Reynolds
I mean, the thing is that Trump is known for saying a lot of things that don't happen. That's something we got used to in the first presidency. And then in the second term, we're getting used to him saying things that do happen, and it's unclear what bucket this one falls into.
- [06:36]
Anita Anand
And then things that happen that he then changes his mind about a week later, too.
- [06:39]
Ryan Reynolds
Exactly.
- [06:40]
Daniel Immerwahr
Let's. Let's take him at his word, just for now, that he is going to take Greenland and it is going to be his. And whether the Danes like it or not or the people of Greenland like it or not, it is going to be his. Now, this is not the first time that America has toyed with ownership as if it were a secondhand car of another country called Greenland. Can you, can you take us back to the first time? And this is 1867 and you've had the US on a. On a buying spree anyway, because they've already purchased Alaska. That's in their basket. They've beeped that through and. And they've now got their eyes on Greenland. Why back in 1867, was Greenland important to them?
- [07:18]
Ryan Reynolds
I mean, it's not just Alaska. It's. The United States had expanded extraordinarily by taking formerly Mexican lands. So there's a guy, William Henry Seward, who has a vision that there's no reason that this needs to be restricted to contiguous space or even to the North American continent. But it's the same idea. The United States is expanding. It's distributing homesteads to settlers. And he has a kind of rosy view of the temperature in both Alaska and Greenland. And so these are all potential ways for the United States to expand. And he's also interested in islands.
- [07:55]
Daniel Immerwahr
So there's a list. Can you remind us how much did the United States purchase Alaska for? Because they bought it from the Russian Empire. I mean, it was nothing. It was peanuts, wasn't it?
- [08:04]
Anita Anand
And a year later, they found oil there, and it became incredibly valuable asset.
- [08:08]
Ryan Reynolds
I think all of this is a reminder that these claims, both Russian and US claims, are fairly notional, right? It's not like either of them has or is about to have a large settler presence. These are still native lands. And a lot of American space in the Western Hemisphere is held by and controlled by indigenous peoples through the 19th century. So there is this kind of game that European powers play. Is this mine? Is this yours? And they get to color on the map, but that doesn't mean that they're there on the ground.
- [08:36]
Daniel Immerwahr
But Seward has a ballpark figure, certainly for Greenland from Denmark. So he says, I shall give you five and a half million dollars in gold. What do you think? What do you think? Denmark?
- [08:49]
Ryan Reynolds
There are questions about what counts as currency in the 19th century. And gold is a good one, so that's part of it. But doesn't it just sound like such a good supervillain plan?
- [08:55]
Daniel Immerwahr
It's definitely. I mean, honestly, if this was in vision, I'm doing my sort of, you know, Dr. Evil little finger in mouth. $5.5 million in gold. What does Den say to this incredibly generous offer? I mean, does it rhyme with mugger off? I mean, is that a little bit like that? I think it sounds like. Does that mean. Then, okay, Seward says, I will buy this. And they say, we're not selling it. Nice of you. Thanks for coming, but no. Is that the end of the story? Or do they still. And why Greenland? It's not in the thoroughfare of the world at this point, is it?
- [09:32]
Ryan Reynolds
It's not in the thoroughfare in the world at this point. But it is if you're dividing the world up conceptually between the Eastern and the Western hemispheres, Greenland is kind of in the middle, and there's not a lot of places there in the middle. So it could seem like the outermost frontier of the Western hemisphere. If you're trying to control hemisphere, it could seem in some ways like a bridge to Europe. If your intellectual world is an Atlantic one. It's a big enormous space in the middle of the Atlantic.
- [10:00]
Daniel Immerwahr
But no mineral deposits at this point are a driving force. There's no suspicion that this could be some kind of treasure trove for things that the United States would find useful.
- [10:11]
Ryan Reynolds
Okay, so just think about this. The United States negotiated a peace after it won a war with Mexico, and within days after annexing Mexican land, including California, it discovered gold there.
- [10:26]
Anita Anand
The same happened to Alaska. I think within literally two years after Alaska, they found a major oil deposit.
- [10:31]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. And I think that's all another way of saying is that Europeans and settlers don't really know what's going on in these spaces. So it's not to say that they have a clear sense of, you know, we're going to unearth this there. But all these spaces are kind of pure potential for them.
- [10:47]
Daniel Immerwahr
Right. So we could explore it, and who knows what will turn up. So Denmark says Mugaboff about Greenland. But there is another deal to be made in 1916, and this is a treaty. The United States strikes out a rather more attractive option.
- [11:03]
Anita Anand
The Virgin Islands get offered.
- [11:05]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. Which are also Danish and Seward had also been interested in.
- [11:08]
Anita Anand
And this time the Danes bite.
- [11:10]
Ryan Reynolds
This time the Danes bite. And one of the things that makes this more attractive from the Danish perspective is that in these days of technically we own it, but who knows what's going on there? The United States had advanced some a little more than notional claims to the northern part of Greenland on the grounds that they had sent explorers there. And so it wasn't clear what that meant. Was the United States going to back these claims? No one was up there from either the United States or my understanding is from Denmark. But the United States agreed to back off Greenland. That was part of the deal. In exchange for we'll take the Danish West Indies, which become the US Virgin Islands.
- [11:46]
Daniel Immerwahr
I mean, they offered a little more than 5.5. Skating the face now the Dr. Evil. A little more than the 5.5 million in gold this time for the Virgin Islands, it's 25 million. So I mean, they do sort of. They Buck up the offer substantially by 1916.
- [12:02]
Anita Anand
This is another 40 years later. So prices have risen.
- [12:06]
Ryan Reynolds
And it's also a World War I thing. Greenland is useful because it connects America to Europe. Weirdly, the Danish West Indies are useful because they're in the Caribbean and they're an approach route to the Panama Canal, which connects the Pacific to the Atlantic.
- [12:21]
Anita Anand
Another thing on the shopping list.
- [12:23]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, it's another thing the United States controls. But Woodrow Wilson, who's president at the time, is nervous that the Germans might be able to, to get a foothold in the Caribbean and thus take the canal in the context of World War I. So this is a way of sort of buffering up US control of that region.
- [12:37]
Daniel Immerwahr
But what they do say, I mean, as you said just a second ago, they promise Greenland, if you give us the Virgin Islands, we promise not to bother you. Take your Greenland, go happy, we're not going to bother you anymore.
- [12:48]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, it's not. We promise never to ask for it again, but we promise that whatever notional sovereignty claims we've made, we're not going to be enforcing those.
- [12:56]
Daniel Immerwahr
But. But the Danes don't formally declare sovereignty over Greenland until 1921. So you've got a Greenland finally in 1921, saying, this is all ours. Look, this is absolutely. And we, we're drawing a ring around it. And you promised, you promised United States, you're going to butt out. And this is all ours now. But America still in the 20s and 30s, they're starting to classify bits of the map of the world and Greenland is categorized as Rainbow4. So Rainbow4 is that if the US was attacked on multiple fronts, it would invade Greenland immediately. Rainbow Four, that's what it sounds so jolly and lovely, but they would go straight into Greenland in order to protect North America. So there would be no ifs, buts or even chatting to the Danish. They would just take it. And that was because there was an existential threat they were feeling at that time.
- [13:44]
Ryan Reynolds
So this is a moment when, if you're playing that map game, and increasingly in the early 20th century, you know, in the interwar period, you are, you start to think about which flank is undefended. And Greenland does look like an important place.
- [13:58]
Anita Anand
It's a big space on the map.
- [14:00]
Ryan Reynolds
It's a big space on the map and not necessarily for the seward reason that you're going to send a lot of settlers there because you have a misunderstanding of how warm it is. But yeah, it's useful in the great game of risk.
- [14:09]
Anita Anand
The next development is 1940, when Nazi Germany rolls into Denmark and so potentially the Nazis are now in Greenland.
- [14:21]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, this is the fear. And the United States responds exactly as you would expect, or exactly as planned. It brokers a deal with the Danish minister.
- [14:29]
Anita Anand
The Danish minister in exile.
- [14:31]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, that's right, that's right. And it's not going to annex Greenland. It will just take it for the.
- [14:37]
Anita Anand
War, to use Trump's nice phrase, acquire.
- [14:40]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. But part of that deal really is a kind of lot of hand waving about sovereignty. They're like, we're not taking it for ourselves forever. It's just.
- [14:50]
Daniel Immerwahr
We're just looking after it for you.
- [14:52]
Ryan Reynolds
No, that's right, we're looking after it. You seem to be occupied by the Nazis, right?
- [14:57]
Daniel Immerwahr
Yeah, yeah. So we'll just keep it warm just while you're busy. That's exactly with the Nazis. While they're keeping it warm and cradling it as a good neighbour would, they do discover that Greenland is replete with something called cryolite. Before, they may not have known what ever the hell was on this great expanse called Greenland. But cryolite is an important mineral that the United States thinks is going to be very useful for the manufacture of aircraft and weapons because it's used to produce aluminium or aluminum, as you would say.
- [15:26]
Ryan Reynolds
Please.
- [15:26]
Daniel Immerwahr
In a way that we mock you relentlessly for. But, you know, so in the manufacture of aluminum, cryolite is. Thank you. Is. Is very, very useful. So now suddenly, this is not just something on a. On a game of risk. This is something that can be exploited and useful at a time of war. So it turns looking after your rabbit while you go on holiday too. We actually, we could eat this rabbit.
- [15:50]
Ryan Reynolds
We could do something here.
- [15:51]
Daniel Immerwahr
We could do something with this rabbit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So does that explain why looking after the rabbit turns into a wholesale occupation which really does start in 1940? Is it, is it done by stealth or is it done with great fanfare that we're occupying, we, the Americans, are occupying Greenland for your own good?
- [16:08]
Ryan Reynolds
Now, I think that part is real. Like, they are just looking at who controls what territory and how can we defend against Nazi invasion. On the other hand, they are also not just looking at the map, but looking at the map anew. Because as territories shift colors in the game of risk, you then have to think, oh, where do we get rubber? Suddenly, Japan just took over Southeast Asia. And so there's this weird calculation that both involves technology and territory where a, they're developing new technologies and they're like, okay, suddenly cryolate. We can do something Y. We can use that now.
- [16:43]
Anita Anand
A similar thing took place in the First World War with Soviet Union occupying Central Asia in order to get enough cotton to clothe the soldiers.
- [16:52]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, yeah. And what's interesting about the Second World War is that like, midway through the war, they're learning new uses for resources. So not only is the map shifting, but their sense of, like, what's valuable is shifting as they figure out how to use various resources in different technologies.
- [17:07]
Anita Anand
Then we have the post war period, and there's a formal offer in 1946 from President Truman. FDR's just died, Truman is in charge, and he makes a formal offer to Denmark of 100 million.
- [17:22]
Daniel Immerwahr
No, you say it properly. $100 million.
- [17:27]
Ryan Reynolds
In gold if necessary.
- [17:29]
Daniel Immerwahr
If you want gold, we'll do it in gold. But 100 million, we're not sad doing.
- [17:35]
Anita Anand
Video if you can't see the little finger.
- [17:38]
Daniel Immerwahr
Little finger going up to the corner of my mouth. The thing about Truman, which was interesting, we've just done a fair few episodes on the YATA conference and basically how Roosevelt kept all foreign policy a complete secret from Truman, didn't tell him anything.
- [17:52]
Ryan Reynolds
He didn't know about the bomb. Day one, he confesses to the Postmaster General, which, by the way, you're like, why is he even talking to the Postmaster General? Because these are the people that Truman talks to. And he confesses. He's like, I know nothing of foreign affairs. You're gonna have to figure it out real quick, man.
- [18:10]
Anita Anand
1946, an important year.
- [18:12]
Daniel Immerwahr
So who's in his ear? Because if Truman is not a foreign affairs man, who is buzzing in his ear saying, you know what? We know you probably can't find this on a map. President Truman. But, but, but, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [18:24]
Ryan Reynolds
Day one, the White House has a map room. And it's like, you know, blacked out, curtains, huge map, all that kind of stuff. And Truman has never been there. And Truman has this like, little, like World War I map from his, like, Senate office. And he's like trying to follow the war. And so Truman just starts going to the map room. And this guy, Admiral Leahy is sort of like showing him everything. And they keep like giving him all these reports. And I mean, he's a serious student. He reports like reading so much every day that he's like worried about doing permanent damage to his vision. But what he's trying to figure out is, is the risk game he's trying to figure out. He's like, oh, I guess we have bases everywhere. I guess we have troops everywhere. And very quickly he's just trying to sort of cram to the point where he can, you know, take over as president.
- [19:08]
Daniel Immerwahr
Yeah. Because he's not been briefed at all by the people who should have prepped him. So the war is still raging. FDR has died just after Yalta, and Truman has taken over with pretty much no preparation at all. What is interesting, though, is he makes this deal for $100 million for Greenland again at this time, almost his first sort of foreign affairs big deal that he wants to make. But nobody gets to know about this. Daniel, it is entirely secret. It is a secret deal that we only get to know about in 1991 because, I mean, Time magazine catches wafts of this at the time, saying, is there some sort of strange shopping expedition the President's on? Is he offering great sums of money for great swathes of land? And it sort of gets pushed away, but in 1991, we get to find out. Yeah, no, it was true.
- [19:58]
Ryan Reynolds
So first of all, the deal is go through. Right. He doesn't get it. But the thing that he's thinking about is one of the new technologies that has really changed people's understanding of how maps work is aviation. Suddenly, Greenland is no longer large. It starts to feel really central. And you start to see people in the United States say, actually there's this whole movement, a very bizarre cartographic movement against the Mercator map projection. They're like, this is. This has screwed us up. This map is totally wrong. It puts Japan on one side and it puts the United States on another. And in fact, Japan attacked us over the edge of the map. And, like, we were wrong about that. But they also say something which is, I think, really true. They're like, the Mercator map was really useful for the Age of Sail. And it's actually quite hard to show the, like, quickest routes for planes on a Mercator map. But if you have a globe or you have a map that allows this, and you start looking at, like, how would a plane get from, I don't know, North America to, I don't know, various capitals in Europe? It all goes over southern Greenland. So suddenly they're like, oh, this place is really important. Not just as a kind of buffer in the moat against the naval attack, but actually, like, everything is going to have to go through Greenland.
- [21:12]
Daniel Immerwahr
You've said the word Mercator a few times. And just in case people don't know what this is, sometimes we just sort of assume everyone knows all the chuntering that we do on this program, but the Mercator map projection is kind of a cylindrical projection of the world map on flat. It was invented by a man called Gerardus Mercator in 1569. And as you say, it was a navigational map. It was for people who wanted sea routes. And so things are distorted and things are not where you would actually bump into them if you're flying around a round globe or sailing around Earth.
- [21:44]
Ryan Reynolds
So the Mercator map is close to the kinds of classroom maps that people know. And one of the things that, you know just comes up in sort of fifth grade is you're like, gosh, Greenland looks enormous. And then the teacher's like, okay, no, no, no. That's like a distortion of the map projection. It's not that it's big, but it's not that big. So in some ways, the Mercator map overstates the size of Greenland, but it also puts it on the periphery, just.
- [22:07]
Anita Anand
As it understates the size of things like India and Africa.
- [22:11]
Ryan Reynolds
That's exactly right.
- [22:12]
Daniel Immerwahr
Brilliant episode of the West Wing. Have you ever seen it?
- [22:14]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [22:16]
Daniel Immerwahr
So a huge fan of the West Wing, but there is this wonderful thing.
- [22:19]
Ryan Reynolds
Where they come up with a Peter's.
- [22:20]
Daniel Immerwahr
Map, and he's talking to C.J. and saying, this is what actually countries look like in relationship to the. To one another. And her brain is utterly blown by it.
- [22:32]
Ryan Reynolds
So Greenland size is overstated, but it's. Its centrality is understated by that map. And so that's what the new kind of air consciousness is. You're supposed to be able to see. You're like, oh, Greenland is actually really strategically important to the United States in an age of aviation.
- [22:45]
Daniel Immerwahr
So, I mean, the war runs its course, and when it is over and they have to give the rabbit back to Copenhagen, but they do it sort of in a really. I won't say grudging, but they won't. They won't let go of a foot. They kind of hang onto the rabbit's foot because they say, you can have it back. But I think a lot of us just like it and going to stay. And so you've got American personnel, military.
- [23:10]
Anita Anand
Personnel, and they refuse to leave.
- [23:12]
Daniel Immerwahr
Yeah, they won't go. They're just saying, well. And Denmark says very politely, no, thank you for looking after the rabbit. Could you go now? And they say, well, no, that's fine. We were really happy to do it. No, we're not going. What weirdness is that, Daniel?
- [23:24]
Ryan Reynolds
I mean, this is the weirdness of 1946. It's happening all over the planet. There's this great moment where Truman says, you know, the United States won the war. It is central to the peace. It is going to be the hedge of demonic power. And a lucky thing is that we, unlike other, you know, great powers that you might be able to think of, do not believe in empire. And we did not fight World War II for territory, and we covet no territory. And in fact, we're going to set our largest colony, the Philippines, free. We're not that kind of country.
- [23:52]
Daniel Immerwahr
We're the good guys.
- [23:53]
Ryan Reynolds
We're the good guys. And then there's this, like, freak out in the military where they're like, did Truman just say, we're not going to claim any territory? What about all the military bases? Like, oh, did he just give up all the military bases that, you know, thousands of little, you know, airstrips that we've claimed during the war? And then Truman has to go back and say, okay, you know, we're not. Yes, we're not like colonizing, you know, India. But, yeah, we're going to keep all the bases.
- [24:16]
Daniel Immerwahr
We're keeping the bits that we, we like very much, and we're already there. And it is very, very funny. We're going to take a break fairly shortly. But suffice to say, Denmark does ask numerous times politely for the Americans to please leave. Please go. Please, please go. You've said you'd go. Why aren't you going? Please, when are you leaving? The fridge is empty. We've got things. We've got places to be. Some of us have to work and go, but they won't go. And it is hilarious because by spring 1948, Denmark gives up asking them to go. He just says, oh, man, they're not leaving. Let's, I mean, just, you know, this is. We might as well just put barbed wire around that bin. Let them stay and just carry on.
- [25:03]
Ryan Reynolds
And look, here's an important thing to know. On the one hand, you look at the map and you're like, okay, they're still there, but they're just like on some bases. In terms of acreage, the United States is not taking a lot. But in terms of population, the US Is putting so many people there that its personnel at this point represent a very large fraction of the population, like more than 10% of the entire population.
- [25:29]
Daniel Immerwahr
Well, it's like Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands. I mean, sort of similar kind of thing. You know, we'll pump personnel and military hardware in here. Anyway, look, let's take a break because something a little Bit tricky is going to happen very shortly and I mean, we just want to work out how exactly these two parties navigate because, well, here's a clue. There is a thing called NATO which America has approved to the world as a very, very good idea. And Denmark wants to join. What happens next? Join us after the break.
- [26:00]
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- [26:10]
Ryan Reynolds
I want to build something iconic.
- [26:12]
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- [26:35]
Daniel Immerwahr
Welcome back. So, in 1949, Denmark officially applies to join NATO and is accepted and is one of the founding members along with the United States, the uk, France, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal. I think, I think that's all of them. But I mean, the key thing there is you attack one of us, you attack all of us. Right? Article five, we all know about article five. We talk about article five a lot. And these are brothers together. They're not meant to be nipping at each other's territories. I mean, that's the whole point of NATO. So what are the kind of conversations convoys going on at that time considering Denmark's just basically got bored and tired of asking them to leave and they won't.
- [27:17]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. So the U.S. view is, oh, you would like military protection that's going to come from our military, not yours. Let's be honest. Like we are not very protected by the Danish military, but Denmark is protected from the US military and it would be a lot easier if you gave us a base or two. So there's this kind of basis for Battleship style deal where if Denmark is willing to give the United States use of territory, then that military protection becomes a lot easier for the United States to offer.
- [27:48]
Anita Anand
And the Danes? There's a trade minister called Jens Otto Krag who is sort of realistic about this. He says the USA de facto partial occupation of Greenland. Interesting. He calls it an occupation which we do not possess the power to prevent, would cause the Soviet Union to see his country as an American ally and that Denmark should benefit from this relationship. If you've got a squat in my country, I may as well get something in return.
- [28:13]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, but let's say the other Part of that because this is something that occurs to the Danes a lot in the post war period by you stationing your troops and we'll presumably get to this, your nuclear arsenal on our territory you are just painting targets because if there's a first strike it's going to be on Greenland.
- [28:31]
Daniel Immerwahr
Oh, it's tricky isn't it being a member of a club. It's really hard. It's really tricky.
- [28:36]
Anita Anand
Which brings us to the establishment of the two day air base in 1951. Tell us about that.
- [28:42]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, so okay, the Soviet Union had just tested a nuclear device in 1949. So suddenly there's more than one nuclear power. And again the map readers say, oh, if the Soviet Union were to try to fire, you know, a missile or fly a plane toward the United States, that route would go over Greenland, but it would go over northern Greenland. So suddenly northern Greenland is the pivot of the world and this base at two way which is in northern Greenland is an attempt for the United States to be able to monitor, to defend, to extend its defensive perimeter far beyond the borders of the United States right up against the Soviet Union.
- [29:21]
Daniel Immerwahr
So I mean it puts it clearly in the sights of the Soviets because NATO and then the creation of the Warsaw Pact is just showing, you know, the whole world is about to freeze over in the Cold War. It is going to be a dangerous place. So in May 1955, USSR sets up the Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact has eight founder members just to, I mean, you know all this. But I'll just remind you in case you haven't heard our previous episodes, they've got the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania. They also have a pact saying you attack one of us, you attack all of us and things start reaching a boiling point. And as the temperature gets higher, defence spending starts rocketing too. I can give you some numbers because they are, I mean, eye watering. By 1953 the USA was spending 50 billion on the arms race, the USSR was spending 25 billion and the USA this means had doubled its spending every single year between 1949 and 1953. Now I mean I'm guessing this makes the Danes a little bit nervous and they want to have some degree of separation from, you know, Greenland nominally is ours, but let's not talk about it anymore because really, you know, it's the Americans and they've got all your nuclear capability on there but please don't bomb us because they make a public show of banning nuclear weapons in 1957 and this is sneaky you know, in the relationship between the United States and Denmark. You know where I'm going with this? Tell us about the big sneak here. Because publicly they say, look, look, look, nothing to say. Please don't bomb us. I know things are getting really, really bad. Greenland Smeal. It never was ours. We never owned that rabbit. That's their rabbit. Please don't bomb us.
- [31:08]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, I mean, suddenly Greenland is right in the middle. Each side is armed to the teeth. And you know, the Danish are like, oh, great. So there's a guy who's elected HC Hanson, who's elected government head on a plank that includes opposition to nuclear weapons in Greenland. Because if you put nuclear weapons in Greenland, two things could happen. One is that they could go off accidentally. That's a real risk. Two is that the fact that they're stationed there could mean that there would be Soviet attacks, nuclear attacks on Greenland. Like, you don't want to be in the middle of that battlefield. And the Danes fully understand that. So they declare their opposition and that they will forbid nuclear weapons. And then the United States is like, okay, we're just going to assume that that was like, for the voters. We're going to assume that what you're asking is just plausible deniability here because it's a political issue. So what if, and in fact, I'm just saying this out loud to myself because we're not even talking to you about it. What if we just do this and don't tell you about it? Like that seems like that would solve your problem with the voters and that would solve our problems. And now Greenland is a nuclear space and everyone's happy. Yeah, yeah, everyone is happy.
- [32:15]
Daniel Immerwahr
But again, that Thule Air Base is a place then that becomes replete with nuclear weapons. Even though Denmark's saying, we don't have them, do not bomb us. We don't have them. They have them. They know they have them, but they're just pretending that they don't know that they have them.
- [32:31]
Anita Anand
There's a whole city now which gets built 1959, Camp Century gets built under the ice.
- [32:36]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. They're doing three separate things. On the one hand, they're just stationing them. On the base. On the other hand, they are flying them over Greenland. The idea is that if you keep enough hydrogen bombs aloft that the Soviets won't be able to strike where they're stored because they're in space. So just at any time, there should just be planes flying over Greenland with nuclear. This is what Dr. Strangelove is about.
- [32:58]
Daniel Immerwahr
Like, I mean, Can I just say that doesn't sound very safe.
- [33:01]
Ryan Reynolds
Well, from an aviation perspective, it raises questions. Yeah. And then they also have this idea that, like, they're like, okay, well, the planes is one thing, but what if we also build these, like, ice tunnels and then we just have the, like, bombs just shuttling through the ice tunnels at all times, so no one knows what they are, and maybe we can launch them straight from underground. All of this is happening and it's.
- [33:19]
Anita Anand
Literally, it's not just a tunnel of sort of half a mile. This is thousands of kilometers of underground tunnels with weapons moving around.
- [33:28]
Ryan Reynolds
They never get to the point where they're actually moving all the weapons through them. But, yeah, they've built this little, like, underground Disney World with all the monorails.
- [33:34]
Daniel Immerwahr
Going with the best codename. Sorry, I love a code name. As you know, Project Ice Worm, ladies and gentlemen, Project Ice Worm, where you're having weapons, nuclear weapons, hurtling under the ice so that if somebody is to drop something and try and blow up the nuclear arsenal, they might just miss it. So, I mean, all of this just sounds completely bonkers. But then there is a nuclear reactor and you can't really. I don't know how much how you can hide this, but a nuclear reactor is brought to Thule Air Base and that happens in 1960. And actually there are problems from this. This is no joke, because Radiation. Yeah, exactly. So the reactor becomes operational on 2 October 1960, and soldiers who are living near it start having radiation sickness. The levels that they're exposed to are deemed unacceptably high. They start installing lead and shielding and trying to move people away. But even after that, and we'll talk about this very, very briefly, if they invite Boy Scouts, Daniel Omavar to come and come and spend some time in this fantastic Disney.
- [34:36]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, so this is the. At the, like the underground place, they have a nuclear power and they have like warm showers because of it. And they're like, this is actually quite, quite nice here, here under the ice. So they have these Eagle Scouts who are like walking around who have nothing to do because what do you do? So the thing that they put them doing is they're like, okay, so we have all these tunnels. The problem is the tunnels are made of ice and it's very cold. So that like, actually every day the tunnels get a little smaller because the ice just builds. So. So could you, like, just measure how much of a slow motion cave in we're dealing with? And so, like, these Eagle Scouts are just like watching you Know, like, helping to like, shave the ice back off and just like watching the tunnel slowly contract.
- [35:17]
Daniel Immerwahr
The worst camp trip in the history of camp trips.
- [35:20]
Ryan Reynolds
It's wild.
- [35:20]
Daniel Immerwahr
Yeah, it is awful. But it's also exposing them to radiation. I mean, this is after all the radiation leakage.
- [35:26]
Anita Anand
So, I mean, it's just poor irritated Boy Scouts.
- [35:28]
Daniel Immerwahr
It's so mad in the 1960s though, the camp century tunnels with these poor Eagle Scouts with their whittling knives trying to keep back the ice and stop being irradiated to death. I mean, they do close the tunnels and that's not because they suddenly think we might have done some real damage to some Eagle Scouts and also to our own personnel. But it's because there's a new breed of weaponry that doesn't need that this kind of birth anymore. Longer range missiles.
- [35:55]
Ryan Reynolds
I mean, there's two plans. There's one is you keep the missiles up in the air and you kind of hurl them through the air. And the other is this complex ice tunnel plan. So the plane strategy is the one that's actually the dominant one.
- [36:07]
Anita Anand
And as we said, it's a dangerous idea. And indeed, in 1961, it badly goes wrong.
- [36:14]
Ryan Reynolds
What happens, do you think, if you are carrying around like these, you know, these like B52s have like four hydrogen bombs on them. What do you think is going to happen if you just like every day are just putting these planes aloft? So first of all, they start doing emergency landings. So that's like pretty dicey, you know.
- [36:33]
Anita Anand
And then nuclear bombs abroad.
- [36:35]
Ryan Reynolds
In 1968, one of them crashes and it crashes into the ice at like more than 500 miles an hour, hard.
- [36:43]
Anita Anand
And the story apparently was that there was a heater. They were, they were obviously very cold up in the B52 above Iceland, and they had a heater on and the heater lit up a rubber cushion and the rubber cushion caught fire. Then the entire cabin caught fire and they bailed with four nuclear weapons on board.
- [37:01]
Daniel Immerwahr
Hang on, they bailed and they left the plane with the nukes on?
- [37:04]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. I mean, what are you gonna do?
- [37:05]
Daniel Immerwahr
Its own devices.
- [37:06]
Ryan Reynolds
You're in a plane going down.
- [37:07]
Anita Anand
You don't wanna be on the plane at that point.
- [37:09]
Ryan Reynolds
You do not. We need to now distinguish two things that can happen to an armed nuclear device. One is that it can detonate, and that's the kind of nightmare scenario, you know. The other is different, is that it can explode. So the explosives go off, but they don't go off in the timed way. That's going to compress the core and trigger nuclear fission. Because the bomb contains not only plutonium, but it contains all these explosives that are supposed to. Yeah. So all of the bombs explode, none of them detonate. But we are talking about so much plutonium just all over that it takes 75 tankers to recover the waste hastily before the ice thaws. And surely they did not get all of it right.
- [37:50]
Daniel Immerwahr
So, I mean, are you saying there are bits of Greenland that glow in the dark? Unintentionally, because this stuff is still scattered all over.
- [37:56]
Anita Anand
Well, it's that nice porridge you used to have ready. Bread would make you light up.
- [38:02]
Daniel Immerwahr
I mean, dangerous levels, Daniel. I mean, I guess they're a bit secretive with how much nuclear material has been sprinkled liberally over Greenland. But I mean, how much are we thinking?
- [38:11]
Ryan Reynolds
I mean, we know how much it gets lost, which is four Mark 22 hydrogen bombs worth, which is really dangerous.
- [38:19]
Anita Anand
Just not the sort of thing you want to mislead.
- [38:21]
Ryan Reynolds
No, it's not. So they, like, try to try to, like, scrape up all the debris and put it. But. But then at a certain point, the top level of ice is going to melt, which then just takes all of that, whatever's left, and just sort of, you know, it starts flowing into the ecosystem. And we don't know how much of that happens.
- [38:38]
Anita Anand
And they. They find three. They locate three of the bombs, but one is missing.
- [38:43]
Ryan Reynolds
Willie. No, no, Willie. Willie. It's even worse. You're talking about a different crash. Another same thing. Four bombs over Spain crash. Two of them explode and one goes missing for three months.
- [38:58]
Daniel Immerwahr
Oh, God. Okay, So, I mean, and also just a little aside to this, the people that they hire to clean up the nuclear material that has exploded all over Greenland are local Inuits and Danes. And many of them get very, very sick. And it still isn't really transparent about how much irradiation took place.
- [39:17]
Anita Anand
There's a hell of lawsuits. A lot of the people then. Then sue the government.
- [39:20]
Daniel Immerwahr
Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, we're sort of running out of time, so I would like very much to know from you because right now Denmark is taking quite a stronger line than they ever have with. Could you please leave? We'd really like you to leave. Are you not leaving? Okay. There's milk in the fridge if you need it. They are taking a now. So in January this year, Anders Vistason, a Danish member of the European Parliament, responded to President Trump saying, we're going to buy Greenland, so it's going to be ours with this. Dear President Trump, listen Very carefully. Greenland has been part of the Danish kingdom for 800 years. It's an integrated part of our country. It's not for sale. Let me put it in words you might understand, Mr. Trump f off, except he used the whole word. So now, in this day and age, why does he want it? Is it a legacy ownership that he's thinking of or is there actually a strategic need or is it mineral deposits? What is the allure for him right now?
- [40:14]
Ryan Reynolds
There's two thoughts. I mean, strategically, it doesn't actually make a lot of sense. And the reason it doesn't make a lot of sense is that the United States still has a base there. Like the United States can do what it wants militarily because it still has a presence which is now a space force base. And then the last time Trump tried to buy Greenland, Denmark said, look, it's true, we have a lot of rare earth minerals and that are increasingly coming along online because of climate change and they're just easier to get at. But we've always been willing to sell them to you. Like you want to buy them? Fine, we'll sell them. You don't need to colonize this entire semi continent in order to do what you would do anyway, which is buy them. But Trump seems to have a kind of 19th century or real estate developer mentality where he's not content with long term deals, with allies. He's like, no, we're going to take the whole thing.
- [41:01]
Daniel Immerwahr
And what are the good people of Greenland who, you know, don't live in Denmark and don't live in the United States, what do they want? All these colonial enterprises operate and work because they imagine this is empty land with no people in it that they can fight over and take. There were people on it, There are people on it. What do the people of Greenland want?
- [41:19]
Ryan Reynolds
Not to be colonized by the United States is my understanding.
- [41:22]
Anita Anand
Yeah, as we saw when J.D. vance turns up and the bass knocks on every door in Nook saying, would you like to be visited by JD Vance? And everyone, I mean everyone says, nope, nope, nope, nope, not today, thank you. I won't be there.
- [41:38]
Ryan Reynolds
Sorry.
- [41:38]
Daniel Immerwahr
I mean, I do think, as much as you don't want to, I do think you're going to have to write something else. I think it's just, I think.
- [41:46]
Ryan Reynolds
History, first tragedy, then farce.
- [41:48]
Daniel Immerwahr
Yeah, well, poor Daniel now has his head in his hands. But we're still very, very happy you came to chat to us about it because it's absolutely fascinating.
- [41:54]
Anita Anand
It's a good, I mean, it is all that. So it's Captain Incredible Story.
- [41:58]
Daniel Immerwahr
Absolutely nuts. Daniel Imavar, thank you so much. It's brilliant having you on a program with this because it just makes it all so accessible. In the next episode of this here podcast, we are going to be discussing Canada, another place that's told Donald Trump to f off. We're working down the shopping list, another place that Donald Trump would like to imbibe as the 51st state of the United States. So we're going to be talking about the imperial history of Canada. Until the next time we meet, though, it is goodbye from me, Anita Anand.
- [42:28]
Anita Anand
And goodbye from me, William Durham.
- [42:38]
Daniel Immerwahr
Before you go, can we tell you about something really exciting?
- [42:41]
Anita Anand
Have you ever heard an ad on this podcast and thought, hang on, my brand would be way better here than whatever they are nattling on about?
- [42:49]
Daniel Immerwahr
I mean, it's bold of you, but you might be right. And here's the thing, you can actually make that happen. Make the dream real. Imagine your brand front and center on Empire and other shows across the Goal Hanger network.
- [43:01]
Anita Anand
If you don't know who Goal Hanger is, they are the producers of this show. And if you're looking to get the brand right into the center of everybody's routines, they are the people you want to talk to.
- [43:11]
Daniel Immerwahr
If you're curious, just head over to goalhanger.com that's goalhanger H-A-N-G-E-R.com.