Greenland’s Decades-Long Importance to the US

The Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base) is pictured in northern Greenland, on Oct. 4, 2023. Thomas Traasdahl/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP/Getty Images

Commentary

During my lifetime, dating back to the middle of the 20th century, Greenland was off the radar screen of most Americans. If Americans knew anything at all about Greenland, it was that it was the answer to the trivia question, “What is the world’s largest island?”

In the last several decades, the climate-alarmist crowd repeatedly issued dire warnings that global sea levels would increase dangerously due to Greenland’s glaciers and vast ice cover melting. Alas for the alarmists, Greenland’s famous Petermann Glacier has been adding ice for the past dozen years, growing nearly 10 miles in length from 2012 to 2024. Indeed, for the past dozen years, ice loss in Greenland has shrunk overall by two-thirds, amounting to five-thousandths of 1 percent of the total ice cover—not nearly enough to alter the long-term trend of global sea levels rising at a rate of 1.2 inches per decade.

In 2025, however, Greenland is suddenly big news. President Donald Trump, citing Greenland’s strategic location as vital to U.S. and international security along with the island’s largely untapped mineral wealth, has talked openly about the United States annexing the island, even suggesting the possibility of using force.

While we may shudder at Trump’s indelicate suggestion of a forcible takeover of a self-governing Danish protectorate with a population of only 57,000 people, he is completely correct that Greenland is strategically important, and has been for a long time. I learned this back in the mid-1950s.

Here I need to veer into a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the Cold War. In the 1950s, with the development of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the United States sought to devise ways to defend against that Soviet threat. Defense tactics ranged from elementary schools conducting drills that had us kids fold ourselves into pathetic little balls of flesh hiding underneath our classroom desks to the construction of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line—a string of dozens of radar installations at the northern extreme of the North American continent and stretching eastward into Greenland.

While it might have been counterintuitive to those of us looking at flat maps of the world and thinking that the Soviets would fire their ICBMs at us across the Atlantic, the geographic reality of our globe is that the shortest distance from Russian nuclear launchpads to targets in the United States was and is over the polar region and the Arctic Ocean. The DEW Line radars were meant to give us sufficient time to launch a counter-attack and (hopefully) to intercept at least some of the incoming missiles.

I had an inside glimpse at the DEW Line. “Pop,” the uncle who provided a home for my widowed mother and me, had superb engineering and construction skills. He worked for Michigan Bell, which was part of the Bell System that was the major contractor working with the Department of Defense to build the DEW Line.

Long story short about Pop: Despite having served his country with three years of submarine duty in the U.S. Navy in the mid-1920s, staying in the reserves from then until World War II, and serving five years on active duty in that war (four of them on the aircraft carrier Essex in the Pacific) Pop, now in his 50s, was not done serving his country in extreme conditions. He volunteered (which really ticked off my aunt!) to serve in the Arctic, and was appointed assistant superintendent in charge of construction. His immediate superior took care of the book work back home, while Pop lived in the Arctic for two years (1955–1957) and personally oversaw the building of every one of those radar installations.

Working on the DEW Line wasn’t for the faint-hearted. Pop often worked two 10-hour shifts on the same calendar day. There were bucket baths in 30-degree below-zero temperatures. There were the long hours of darkness in the wintertime. On more than one occasion, crews shoveled snow for a week to prepare a makeshift runway for incoming aircraft bringing needed equipment and supplies, only to have a windstorm arise on the day of the expected delivery and undo the whole week of work, thereby aborting the hoped-for delivery. I still have a whole cannister of photographic slides showing over a dozen airplanes that were severely damaged while landing on the uneven ice, some of which Pop was a passenger in and others planes that he was waiting for. I recall hearing of one fatality—a man who fell into a crevasse. Building the DEW Line was anything but a cushy assignment, with the major benefit being that workers there could double their normal pay back in the States.

As mentioned above, Greenland, like Alaska and Canada, was a site of DEW Line installations. In fact, one of the gifts Pop brought back from the Arctic was a pennant for “Narsarsuak Air Base” in Greenland. I’m sure I was the only kid in my school who had ever even heard of Narsarsuak (spelled “Narsarsuaq” today). Trivia: The runway at Narsarsuaq slopes upward to the east, so that instead of aircraft taking off in the face of the incoming wind, they all take off going downhill toward the west.

The DEW Line closed in 1993. Satellites can detect missile launches much earlier than ground-based radars with sight lines limited by the Earth’s curvature. But Greenland remains strategically important. It presents a ripe field for Russian and Chinese mischief. And with the economic potential of Greenland’s mineral deposits, it is understandable that Trump wants to bring Greenland closer into the U.S. orbit. I just hope his forthright remarks don’t scuttle a good deal with the Greenlanders.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.