Climate Change and the Politics of - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Climate Change and the Politics of
Military Bases

(cid:129)
Jeff D. Colgan*

Abstract
How does climate change affect the politics of military bases? The United States alone has
hundreds of overseas bases that require continuous coordination with host governments.
I argue that climate change can create knock-on environmental problems associated with
a base’s infrastructure or waste. Those knock-on problems create a mix of subnational,
international, and transnational political contestation that raises the political costs of
overseas bases and could even rupture an international relationship. I probe the plausi-
bility of the theoretical framework using new evidence from Greenland. Between 1953
and 1967, the US Army maintained secret bases in Greenland as precursors for a nuclear
ballistic missile complex. The bases were eventually abandoned, leaving considerable
waste behind. Climate change is now poised to remobilize these pollutants into the sur-
face water, creating a risk for human settlements. The case could be the proverbial canary
in the coal mine for future politics surrounding overseas military bases.

Climate change affects international politics and institutions in multiple ways
(Newell 2008; Bäckstrand 2008; Andonova et al. 2009; Keohane and Victor
2011; Green 2013; Green and Colgan 2013; Jinnah 2014; Bulkeley et al. 2014;
Hadden 2015; Biermann and Boas 2010; Andonova and Mitchell 2010). Scholars
are particularly interested in the ways it might inﬂuence conﬂict and security affairs
(Busby 2008; Hendrix and Salehyan 2012; Reuveny 2002; Barnett and Adger 2007;
Homer-Dixon 1999). Policy makers, too, are concerned. The Department of
Defense is one of the few parts of the US government that prominently recognizes
the reality of climate change (US Department of Defense 2015; US Navy 2010,
2011). Yet, while policy makers are coming to grips with the physical effects
of climate change that are presently foreseen, there are likely unforeseen effects
yet to emerge. Moreover, the politics associated with even the anticipated envi-
ronmental impacts are far from clear, leaving an important question: how

* I thank William T. Colgan, Jessica F. Green, Jennifer Hadden, Robert O. Keohane, Johannes
Urpelainen, and Andrew Yeo for comments on early drafts of this article; Dawn A. Berry, Amanda
Lynch, and Curt Storlazzi for helpful discussions; and William T. Colgan, Michael MacFerrin,
Joseph A. MacGregor, Horst Machguth, and Dirk van As, geophysical research collaborators on
the broader project.

Global Environmental Politics 18:1, February 2018, doi:10.1162/GLEP_a_00443
© 2018 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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34 (cid:129) Climate Change and the Politics of Military Bases

does climate change affect the politics of military bases, especially those located
overseas?

The question has both scholarly and policy signiﬁcance. The United States
alone has hundreds of overseas bases that require continuous political coordi-
nation with host governments. Climate change is poised to interact with the
infrastructure and waste associated with many of those bases. The US military
bases in Diego Garcia and Guam, along with domestic bases like the one at
Norfolk, Virginia, are likely to be affected by climate change in the future. Bases
on low-lying islands like Diego Garcia and the Marshall Islands are especially
vulnerable.

This article develops a theoretical framework—albeit not yet sufﬁciently
advanced to be a proper theory—that can provide insight into the likely political
trajectory of military bases affected by climate change. Security scholars have
long argued that the politics of military bases are complex and have important
consequences for international relations (Lutz 2009; Cooley and Nexon 2013;
Yeo 2009, 2011; Holmes 2014; Kawato 2015). There is, in addition, an environ-
mental politics literature that examines wastes generally and of military bases
speciﬁcally ( Wegman and Bailey 1994; O’Neill 1998; Brunner et al. 2004).
But less attention has been paid to the relationship between climate change
and military bases. This theory-building article seeks to address that gap.

My central argument is that climate change can create knock-on environ-
mental problems associated with a military base’s infrastructure or waste that
disrupt the international politics that govern the base. Any cleanup costs or
compensation related to the knock-on environmental problems create an un-
funded liability for the host country, the country operating the base, or both.
This liability creates a mix of subnational, international, and transnational
political contestation that raises the political costs of overseas bases and, in
an extreme case, could rupture the international relationship that allows such
bases to operate. Indeed, the political contestation generated by knock-on envi-
ronmental problems appears to represent a new pathway leading from climate
change to disputes or contentious politics. Researchers have already identiﬁed
and debated several such pathways (Depledge 2007; Andonova et al. 2009;
Harrison and Sundstrom 2007; Levin et al. 2012; Raleigh et al. 2014; Hendrix
and Salehyan 2012; Barnett and Adger 2007; Borgerson 2008; Markowitz 2016)
but have paid relatively little attention to how climate change interacts with
preexisting local environmental hazards of a kind likely to be associated with
military bases.

I probe the plausibility of the framework using new evidence from
Greenland. Between 1953 and 1967, the US Army maintained various clandes-
tine bases in the Greenland ice sheet as precursors for a larger ballistic missile
complex (Petersen 2008; Weiss 2001; Christensen 2009). The largest of these
bases was Camp Century. Though its public face was a science station, its secret
task was to explore the feasibility of deploying up to 600 medium-range ballistic
missiles with nuclear warheads, constantly moving around a 4,000-km-long

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Jeff D. Colgan

(cid:129) 35

railway cut into the Greenland ice sheet. Project Iceworm, as it was known, was
never completed. The bases were eventually abandoned with minimal decom-
missioning, under the explicit assumption that perpetual snowfall would entomb
them in perpetuity, leaving large quantities of waste buried in the ice sheet (Clark
et al. 1962; Colgan et al. 2016). This waste includes tens of thousands of liters
of diesel fuel, a substantial but unknown quantity of polychlorinated biphenyls
(PCBs), and a reportedly small volume of low-level radioactive waste. Climate
change is now poised to ensure these pollutants are eventually remobilized into
the surface water, creating a future risk that they will spread and enter the food
chain in the nearest human settlements.

For the nexus of climate and security studies, this case is important for two
reasons. First, there is direct causality between climate change and military affairs.
Studies of other climate-related security issues, such as those linking climate
change to armed conﬂict via changing agricultural patterns, are forced to address
myriad intervening factors and causal identiﬁcation challenges (Raleigh et al.
2014; Meierding 2013). By contrast, the Iceworm locations are uninhabited, which
means that the causal effect of climate change can be isolated from other factors
and forecast with relatively high scientiﬁc certainty. Its ultimate effect on future
military cooperation is unknown, but political contestation is already occurring.
In 2017, Greenland’s prime minister ﬁred the foreign minister, Vittus Qujaukitsoq,
when they disagreed about the forceful approach Qujaukitsoq was taking with
Denmark and the US about their responsibility for the Iceworm waste (Breum
2017).

Second, the Iceworm case is important because of the lessons it provides
for other overseas military bases and sites and the potential precedent set as
the US responds (or not) to the environmental challenges (Lutz 2009; Cooley
and Nexon 2013; Yeo 2011; Holmes 2014). In this sense, the Iceworm case
could be the proverbial canary in the coal mine for future politics surrounding
military bases and sites. Military waste left at various Paciﬁc Islands is espe-
cially problematic. The US military left radioactive waste at Johnston Atoll, the
Marshall Islands (Runit Island), and elsewhere during the Cold War. Other
toxic materials are also present at these and other sites, such as Orote Point
(Guam), Ulithi Atoll (Micronesia), the Solomon Islands, and Midway Island.1
The rising sea levels associated with climate change elevate the risk that toxic
materials left on low-lying coral islands such as these will be remobilized into
the ocean. Other countries, especially those located in the Paciﬁc, could object
strongly to a US denial of responsibility. The US Geological Survey is currently
studying these potential climate change risks, but at present, their full extent is
unknown.2

1. There are people (and military bases, such as Bucholz Airﬁeld in the Marshall Islands) in relative

proximity to some of these sites.

2. Author communications with Dr. Jeff Burgett, June 16, 2017, and Dr. Curt Storlazzi, July 6

2017. See also Storlazzi et al. (2011).

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36 (cid:129) Climate Change and the Politics of Military Bases

Theoretical Framework

It is now widely recognized that climate change will have some foreseeable
effects on military bases (Floyd 2008; Busby 2008). The US Navy, for instance,
has identiﬁed effects, such as rising sea levels, that could negatively affect quays
and melting polar ice that could open new navigable sea-lanes (US Navy 2010).
Typically, these issues are seen mainly as challenges for the country that operates
the base. The US Department of Defense has published various planning docu-
ments that purport to identify how climate change will affect its military bases
and what actions ought to be taken in response (US Department of Defense
2015; US Navy 2010, 2011).

Less attention, however, has been paid to four issues: (1) the unanticipated
consequences of climate change for the international politics and law that govern
overseas military bases, (2) time-inconsistency problems associated with how
climate change affects a military base, (3) the knock-on environmental problems
that climate change could generate by interacting with local pollution and/or
infrastructure, and (4) the mix of subnational, international, and transnational
political contestation generated by the effects of climate change. For climate
change scholars, many of these issues will not be surprising, once articulated.
Yet among military planners and thinkers who are most likely to be responsible
for managing the climate change effects on military bases—these issues are
underappreciated (US Navy 2010, 3, 8, 16).

Three key assumptions assist in developing this theoretical framework.
First, climate change is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon, which includes
changes in temperature, sea levels, precipitation, and storm patterns. Second,
these changes will vary in magnitude and character across the globe, meaning
that the environmental impact of one military base will not necessarily be
repeated at others. Third, climate change interacts with the local environment
and infrastructure in unpredictable ways, owing to the complexity and path
dependency of those interactions.

I also note two characteristics of climate change problems: unanticipated
consequences and time inconsistency of preferences. Military bases located
where climate change is acute (e.g., polar regions, coastal areas) are likely to face
unanticipated local effects, such as the exposure of pollution previously thought
to be buried or sequestered, problems with sewage ﬂows, and the structural
weakening of buildings or infrastructure. It is common for overseas military
bases to be governed by a treaty or some other agreement between the host
country that owns the land or has nominal jurisdiction over it and the operator:
the country operating the military base (Yeo 2011; Holmes 2014). Unanticipated
effects could disrupt the international politics that govern the military base.
Second, time inconsistency of preferences is likely between current policy makers
and those who built or planned the base. Scientists’ understanding of climate
change has developed over time. It also takes time for scientiﬁc understanding
to be translated into policy preferences. These temporal processes mean that

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Jeff D. Colgan

(cid:129) 37

there is always a gap between the preferences of past and current policy makers
(Hovi et al. 2009; Urpelainen 2012). Yet the international agreements that gov-
ern overseas bases are written at a particular point in time and only infrequently
updated. From these assumptions and characteristics, two propositions can be
deduced about how climate change affects the politics of overseas military bases
(some of which will also apply to other military sites and domestic bases). These
propositions are hypotheses that are not yet fully testable, because climate
change is still unfolding, but ought to be testable at some point in the future.

The ﬁrst proposition is as follows:

P1. If climate change interacts strongly with a military base’s infrastructure or
wastes, it will create knock-on political problems that are distinct from
those associated with climate change per se.

Typically, analysts view climate change as affecting the global commons, gener-
ating a collective action or public goods problem (Keohane and Victor 2011).
Yet climate change can also generate local environmental problems. Speciﬁcally,
the direct environmental components of climate change (shifts in temperature,
sea levels, precipitation, and storms) interact with local conditions to generate
new environmental problems (e.g., toxic water). I hypothesize that these
knock-on environmental effects are, in the context of an overseas military base,
likely to generate knock-on political problems about whether and how to ad-
dress them. Two mechanisms can generate these political problems, either
individually or in combination. First, the identity of who is responsible for
(unanticipated) knock-on environmental effects is likely to be contested, espe-
cially when there is even a small amount of ambiguity in the base agreement.
Second, differences in perceptions about the scope of the knock-on environmen-
tal effects, the actions necessary to address them, and the costs of doing so are
likely to generate further political contestation.

Whereas climate change itself is typically viewed as a “global commons”
type of problem, any knock-on environmental effects are likely to have a differ-
ent problem structure. Scholars of international environmental politics, follow-
ing Oran Young, have frequently classiﬁed problems into one of four categories:
international commons, shared natural resources, transboundary externalities,
and linked issues ( Young 1994, 20–26). International commons are physical
or biological systems that lie wholly or largely outside the jurisdiction of any
one state but are valued by many, such as the ozone layer. Shared natural re-
sources extend into the jurisdiction of two or more states, such as ﬁshing stocks.
Transboundary externalities occur when activities in one state produce results
that affect those living in other states, such as loss of rainforests. Linked issues
stem from “efforts to devise social institutions to deal with environmental con-
cerns [that] have unintended consequences affecting other regimes and vice versa,”
such as when environmental treaties conﬂict with the World Trade Organization
(Young 1994, 24–25; on regime complexes, see Colgan et al. 2012). Scholars have
used these categories to study the effectiveness of regimes (Young and Zürn 2006).

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38 (cid:129) Climate Change and the Politics of Military Bases

Efforts to place knock-on environmental hazards into a single category are
likely to fail. Instead, policy responses will have to recognize the hybrid nature
of the problem. Increasingly, scholars argue that climate change should not be
seen as a single issue but rather as a metaenvironmental problem (Levin et al.
2012; Thompson 2010). The knock-on environmental hazards associated with
military bases could easily become a hybrid, multiheaded environmental prob-
lem that has components in each of Young’s categories. This metaenvironmen-
tal problem structure is not unique to military bases.3 It is worth noting,
however, that the hybrid structure makes it more likely to generate a range of
subnational, international, and transnational political effects, which leads to the
second proposition:

P2. If climate change creates knock-on environmental problems associated
with a military base’s infrastructure or wastes, they will create a mix of sub-
national, international, and transnational political contestation that raises
the political costs of the military base.

Climate-related environmental hazards could represent a new kind of tension
within international political alliances (Pressman 2008; Weitsman 2003). Such
tensions raise the political costs of overseas military bases (Lutz 2009; Cooley
and Nexon 2013; Kawato 2015; Holmes 2014). But intergovernmental relation-
ships are not the only realm of potential contestation. Contestation is especially
likely to occur between the operator’s national government and the local in-
habitants of the host country who are directly affected by base operations.
Knock-on environmental problems are also likely to generate political tensions
between groups in the same country (e.g., owing to differential levels of expo-
sure within states). Locally affected residents are likely to try to lobby the
municipal, subnational, or national governments to take action on their behalf,
domestically and internationally.

This mix of inter- and subnational politics is made more complicated by
the time inconsistency of preferences noted earlier. The host country’s govern-
ment is likely to use any ambiguity in the base agreement to its advantage, to
try to hold the base operator legally or political responsible for adverse con-
sequences that occur because of climate change (and, likewise, the operator
might seek to interpret the agreement to its advantage). Additionally, political
contestation is likely within the host country, as some subnational actors seek
to hold others politically or legally accountable for the decisions made in the
past, once the effects of climate change become clearer.

More broadly, the political contestation generated by knock-on environ-
mental problems could be considered a new pathway leading from climate
change to disputes or contentious politics. Researchers have already identiﬁed
and debated several pathways leading from climate change to disputes, including

3. For instance, climate change caused in 2016 a major bloom of naturally occurring anthrax in

western Siberia. See Revich and Podolnaya (2011).

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Jeff D. Colgan

(cid:129) 39

disputes over how to reduce emissions (Depledge 2007; Andonova et al. 2009;
Harrison and Sundstrom 2007; Levin et al. 2012), armed conﬂict owing to
changing agricultural patterns (Raleigh et al. 2014; Hendrix and Salehyan
2012), frictions over possible forced migration (Barnett and Adger 2007), and
tensions over newly available natural resources or shipping lanes in the Arctic
(Borgerson 2008; Markowitz 2016). If climate change interacts with a preexisting
latent environmental hazard associated with military sites, it creates an entirely
new pathway for climate-related disputes. Indeed, the fact that the latent envi-
ronmental hazard is located in a speciﬁc territory distinguishes it from pathways
that lead more directly from global climate change. The territoriality of the latent
hazard means that jurisdiction and political responsibility for the costs associ-
ated with the hazard can be contested more directly than the diffuse responsibil-
ity for global climate change itself.

It is worth acknowledging that military bases sometimes generate local
environmental hazards even without climate change. I highlight climate-related
hazards here because current thinking about how climate change will affect
military bases typically focuses on more direct effects of climate change (e.g.,
rising sea levels) and misses the knock-on environmental effects. Consequently,
military planners are less likely to have budgeted for, or even considered, cleanup
or compensation costs of knock-on effects of climate change (US Navy 2010,
2011).

Project Iceworm in Greenland

I probe the plausibility of the new theoretical framework using some recent sci-
entiﬁc projections of abandoned US military bases in Greenland under climate
change (Colgan et al. 2016). I selected this case not because it creates a partic-
ularly devastating environmental hazard but because it could prove to be an
indicator of things to come for some of the hundreds of other active or aban-
doned military sites. A nascent case like Project Iceworm is helpful because of its
location on the leading edge of climate change. The Iceworm case is also highly
relevant for the active military base in Greenland (at Thule) that is vital to US
strategic goals; Thule is the most expensive overseas base in the entire US net-
work and the keystone to the American strategy for the Arctic.

Project Iceworm was an ambitious plan by the US Army to build a ballistic
missile complex buried in the near-surface ice sheet of northwest Greenland
near Thule Air Base. Between 1953 and 1967, ﬁve precursor bases were built
and maintained at four sites under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), as part of a clandestine program to explore the feasibility
of deploying up to 600 ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads (Petersen
2008).4 These missiles were to be mounted on mobile rail cars, constantly

4. It was proposed that each NATO member have direct control of a portion of the Iceworm arsenal,

making it a multinational deterrent.

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40 (cid:129) Climate Change and the Politics of Military Bases

moving over railway track hidden in tunnels within the ice sheet. Constant
mobility would make the missiles difﬁcult or impossible for the Soviets to locate
and destroy, thereby ensuring that the United States would have second-strike
nuclear capability, a key element of nuclear deterrence theory. Project Iceworm
also ﬁgured in the intraservice rivalry within the US military, as the Army tried
to match the strategic nuclear mandates of the Air Force and Navy (Weiss 2001).
US military operations in Greenland were, and are, governed by the Defense
of Greenland Agreement of 1951. The treaty gives the US permission to build and
operate military bases on Greenland, in consultation with the Danish government.
In 1951, Greenland was a colony of Denmark. It was upgraded in 1953 to a
county-like status within the Kingdom of Denmark. Between 1979 and 2009,
however, Greenland transitioned to a self-governing overseas administrative
division of Denmark. As such, it is now a semisovereign territory, though Denmark
retains rights and responsibilities in the area of foreign policy.

Five bases at four sites were associated with Project Iceworm, all located in
northwest Greenland (Figure 1). The ﬁrst two bases were identical radar stations
called Site I and Site II. They were small, year-round surface bases, active between
1953 and 1957. The third was Tuto Tunnels, which variously operated seasonally
and year-round between 1958 and 1962. The fourth was Camp Fistclench, co-
located with Site II, which operated seasonally 1957–1958 and year-round
1959–1960. The ﬁfth base was Camp Century, which operated year-round
1959–1963 and then seasonally 1964–1967. Publicly, Camp Century was a joint
US–Danish science operation, though in practice, the Danish personnel respon-
sible for overseeing its activities were usually posted at Thule. A portable nuclear
generator powered Camp Century. Together, the four sites represent approxi-
mately 1,500 person-years of US Army occupancy.

Ultimately, Project Iceworm was abandoned. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff
gave up on it for one, or a combination, of three reasons: the development of

Figure 1
Locations of Project Iceworm Military Sites in Greenland (The online version of this article
contains this ﬁgure in color: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00443)

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Jeff D. Colgan

(cid:129) 41

longer-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), geotechnical challenges
associated with the ice tunnels, and anticipated Danish resistance to the plan.
ICBMs undermined the strategic logic of Project Iceworm by providing an alter-
native deterrent threat against the Soviets. US policy aimed for a “nuclear triad”
based on three delivery systems: submarines, bombers, and missiles. Initially,
the best missiles were only medium range and had to be located relatively close
to the Soviet Union (e.g., in Europe). That proximity made them vulnerable, but
by the early 1960s, longer-range ICBMs were operational. That development
weakened the strategic logic for Project Iceworm. At the same time, the technical
challenges associated with building and maintaining an under-ice railroad and
nuclear arsenal in Greenland began to mount (Petersen 2008). Those challenges
might have been surmountable, but the army did not have a chance to pursue
them. The third factor was the political and legal difﬁculties associated with the
Danish government, which had a nominally nuclear-free foreign policy.5 The
public only learned of Project Iceworm in 1997 via a US freedom of informa-
tion request by Danish academic researchers ( Weiss 2001, 31).

The bases were sequentially abandoned with minimal decommissioning
under the explicit assumption that the bases, and their pollutants, would be
“preserved for eternity” by perpetually accumulating snow (Clark et al. 1962).
That assumption now looks incorrect.

Climate Change and the Risk of Remobilized Pollution in Greenland

Climate change is dramatically affecting the weather patterns in Greenland,
more than most places on Earth. The Greenland ice sheet is currently shrink-
ing, as more ice melts each summer than accumulates each winter. The in-
creasingly negative surface balance, or net ice melt, of the ice sheet is likely
eventually to expose the Iceworm wastes buried, albeit on a different time-
scale for each site. Indeed, climate change is already exposing and remobiliz-
ing some toxic materials (associated with Tuto Tunnels). At the other sites, the
waste is currently buried, and surface exposure will take many years (perhaps
ﬁfty) to occur. Current scientiﬁc inquiries seek to determine exactly how much
waste is at each site and how much time will pass before exposure becomes
irreversible at each site (Figure 2) (Colgan et al. 2016). As the waste comes
closer to the surface, pollutants can remobilize by entering the water supply.
Three questions are highly important for understanding the nature of
the environmental risk. First, when will pollution remobilization occur? After
remobilization, it becomes difﬁcult or impossible to contain the pollutants
by environmental remediation efforts. To determine when remobilization will
occur, scientists need to know the precise location and depth of the waste. For

5. The United States had nuclear weapons in Greenland in the period 1958–1965, even though
Denmark had a nuclear-free policy for its home/metropolitan territory. See Fuhrmann and
Sechser (2014).

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42 (cid:129) Climate Change and the Politics of Military Bases

Figure 2
Conceptual Overview of Remobilization Timeline

The interaction between surface balance (transitioning from net snowfall to net melt), elevation, and abandoned
infrastructure depth determines irreversible exposure (when surface balance becomes negative), remobilization
(when percolation depth intercepts infrastructure depth), and exposure (when the ice sheet surface melts out
infrastructure).

instance, Camp Century was excavated to a depth of eight meters below the
surface when it was constructed in 1959, but that depth has now changed, as
snowfall has accumulated on the surface. Once surface balance of the ice sheet
switches from net snowfall to net melt at Camp Century, as is projected under
the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “business-as-usual” sce-
nario, surface exposure is inevitable.

Second, how much pollution will be exposed? Considerable uncertainty
exists about exactly what materials and how much were left at the four loca-
tions. A preliminary inventory of the type and volume of waste at the largest
site, Camp Century, estimates that the site hosts 9,200 metric tons of physical
waste associated with base infrastructure, 20,000 liters of chemical waste asso-
ciated with diesel fuel, and 24 million liters of biological waste associated with
untreated sewage (Colgan et al. 2016). Many metric tons of materials at these
sites are likely contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), though the
exact quantity is unknown. In addition, there are poorly deﬁned but nontrivial
quantities of low-level radioactive waste. The PCBs probably represent the larg-
est environmental risk to human and animal health, as they bioaccumulate
when ingested and can move up the food chain through local hunting (Poland
et al. 2001). The quantity of waste at the other three sites is unknown and awaits
future research.

The third question is where the pollution could go. Qaanaaq, a civilian
community 103 kilometers north of Thule Air Base, is the most geographically
susceptible Greenlandic population. Similarly, Grise Fiord, a civilian commu-
nity 362 kilometers west of Thule Air Base, is the most susceptible in Canada.

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Jeff D. Colgan

(cid:129) 43

The traditional hunting grounds of both these communities include southern
Nares Straight and northern Bafﬁn Bay. If remobilized, PCBs from the four sites
would likely bioaccumulate within the marine ecosystem in this region. The
pollution also represents some degree of bioaccumulation risk to American
personnel at Thule Air Base. This risk is probably small, however, because
Americans typically eat imported food rather than locally sourced “country
food.” However, the risk is not zero, because it is possible that the remobilized
pollutants could enter the water supplies for the base or that there are consid-
erably more pollutants than are documented.

Empirical Plausibility of the Theoretical Framework

The Iceworm case provides empirical information to assess the plausibility of
the theoretical framework developed earlier. Before doing so, some additional
legal and historical background is needed. The 1951 Defense of Greenland
Agreement provides a legal framework for US military activities, but it allows
for a certain amount of political and legal interpretation. For instance, Article XI
states that “all property provided by the Government of the United States of
America and located in Greenland shall remain the property of the Govern-
ment of the United States of America…. [This property] may be removed from
Greenland free of any restriction, or disposed of in Greenland by the Govern-
ment of the United States of America after consultation with the Danish authorities”
(emphasis added).

Denmark could argue that it was not fully consulted regarding the decom-
missioning of certain abandoned military sites, and thus any abandoned waste
there remains a US responsibility. Furthermore, the proposed deployment area
of Project Iceworm lay outside the US defense areas deﬁned in the 1951 treaty.
Consequently, the Iceworm system could not have been built legally without
the express authorization of the government (and parliament) of Denmark
(Petersen 1998). If asked, the answer almost certainly would have been no:
Denmark ofﬁcially had a nuclear-free policy. The nuclear status of Greenland
itself was legally unclear, but the Danish government, let alone its electorate,
was never ofﬁcially approached with a request or plan to deploy nuclear missiles
to Greenland (Petersen 2008, 77, 89; Nielsen and Nielsen 2016).

The difﬁculty with that argument, however, is that the Danish prime min-
ister, H. C. Hansen, appears to have indicated to the US in 1957 that he did not
want to be consulted on the issue. On November 13, 1957, US ambassador Val
Peterson secretly approached Hansen and asked him ofﬁcially whether the
Danish government wished to be informed in case the US chose to place nuclear
weapons in Greenland. The Danish prime minister responded ﬁve days later
by handing the ambassador a paper that he described as “informal, personal,
top secret and limited to one copy for each side” (Petersen 2008, 90). That
paper gave a very carefully crafted nonanswer to the ambassador’s question,
containing the line “I do not think that your remarks give rise to any comments

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44 (cid:129) Climate Change and the Politics of Military Bases

from my side” (quoted in Petersen 2008, 90). The note appears to give the
Americans tacit permission to proceed—and was interpreted as doing so by the
US military—while maintaining Hansen’s plausible deniability on the issue. A
Danish internal memo in 1959 stated, “The Government has not meant to explore
whether atomic munitions are stored from time to time—or constantly—in the
U.S.-operated defense areas in Greenland.”6 The Hansen paper did not become
public until 1995 (Petersen 2008, 91). The US might argue, therefore, that it
adequately consulted with the Danish.

Setting aside the virtues of those arguments, others might insist that the
US and/or Denmark was responsible for damages. Other than Greenland, Canada
is most likely to be negatively affected by remobilized pollution. This could re-
duce goodwill among the NATO parties, and it is unclear which state(s) would
be most eager to avoid an escalation of the dispute. If the US is interested in
maintaining or expanding its military presence in the Arctic, as its 2013 National
Strategy for the Arctic Region suggests, goodwill from Canada and Denmark might
be highly valued. This could be costly. For instance, in 1996, the US agreed to
contribute US$ 100 million to Canada’s decommissioning of the Distant Early
Warning (DEW) stations in its Arctic territory (Canadian Ministry of Aboriginal
Affairs and Northern Development 2014, 6). Similar payments, proportionately
scaled, might be used to prevent, mitigate, or compensate for environmental
damages associated with the legacy pollutants from Project Iceworm.

Even without any legal liability, the political consequences for the US
could be considerable. The legacy of abandoned US bases affects the reputation
of the US when it seeks to negotiate or renegotiate base agreements in Greenland
or Canada, and possibly other parts of the world. Cognizant of this risk, the US
undertook a United States–Denmark–Greenland Declaration in 2004 on military
cooperation that says, “The common goals are to protect the environment and to
prevent detrimental effects from any activities to the health and safety of residents
of Greenland.”7 Environmental hazards associated with abandoned US military
bases elsewhere in the world suggest that they can create considerable political
controversy and erode goodwill (Wegman and Bailey 1994).

Consider now the two propositions. The ﬁrst proposition (P1: if climate
change interacts strongly with a military base’s infrastructure or wastes, it will
create knock-on political problems that are distinct from those associated with
climate change per se) is supported. Table 1 provides evidence of knock-on polit-
ical problems. Unlike climate change, the pollution associated with Project Ice-
worm is not a problem of the international commons (the ﬁrst of Young’s four
categories), but it has aspects of each of the other three categories. Left unattended,
remobilized pollution will despoil a shared natural resource (second category),
namely, the water and traditional food sources used by people in Greenland
and Canada. Transboundary externalities (third category) stem from the spread

6. Foreign Ofﬁce paper, June 4, 1959, UM 105.F.2.B/1, quoted in Petersen (2008, 91).
7. http://denmark.usembassy.gov/gl/iaenvironment.html, last accessed June 10, 2016.

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(cid:129) 45

Table 1
Evidence of Political Contestation Over Project Iceworm Wastes

Dimension

Evidence to Date

Between the US, Denmark,
Others

Between Greenland and
Other Actors

Between Subnational Actors
Within Greenland

Between Transnational
Actors

1. Denmark commits 150 million kroner to study issue;
no promise (yet) on responsibility over cleanup
2. US Department of Defense statement neither conﬁrms
nor denies responsibility for cleanup

1. Greenland accuses Denmark of lying about pollution
2. Greenland brings complaint to the UN
3. Greenland links Iceworm cleanup to bargaining with
US over Thule Air Base
1. Iceworm pollution debated in Greenland’s parliament
2. Greenland’s prime minister ﬁres the foreign minister
over how to handle the issue

1. Online petitions requesting cleanup by US

of the pollution itself and from the political and ﬁnancial costs potentially
incurred by the US, Denmark, and others. Finally, the case links together envi-
ronmental concerns and international military cooperation via the 1951 US–
Denmark defense agreement (fourth category). These various aspects of the
problem make it difﬁcult to place neatly in any one category.

Instead, the case demonstrates a “cue ball effect” of climate change. In bil-
liards, the cue ball is in motion ﬁrst, but it soon hits other balls and puts them
into motion. Similarly, in this case, a changing climate (an international com-
mons) interacts with another environmental subsystem (ice-covered pollution)
and thereby creates further issues that fall into the other three categories. This
cue ball effect might actually characterize many potential problems associated
with climate change, and thus scholars should take note.

The preliminary evidence also appears to substantiate the second propo-
sition (P2: if climate change creates knock-on environmental problems associ-
ated with a military base’s infrastructure or wastes, they will create a mix of
subnational, international, and transnational political contestation that raises
the political costs of the military base), though the evidence is more complex.
The evidence from the Iceworm case alone is sufﬁcient to show that climate
change creates knock-on environmental problems and that these problems
generate multiple forms of political contestation. It is plausible but not yet fully
clear in the Iceworm case that this contestation will raise the political costs of
the military base. However, there is evidence from other cases (not related to
climate change) that environmental hazards do raise political opposition.

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The potential for remobilized pollutants in Greenland creates four dimen-
sions of political contestation: between the US, Denmark, and Canada; between
increasingly autonomous Greenland and other actors; between subnational actors
within Greenland, Denmark, or Canada; and between various transnational actors.
Table 1 summarizes the evidence of contestation, consistent with P1 and P2.

The ﬁrst dimension is international. As discussed earlier, the 1951 treaty
contains enough ambiguity for it to be used by both Denmark and the US to
argue that the other is legally or politically responsible for any Project Iceworm
pollution that gets remobilized. Denmark recently committed funds (150 million
kroner) to conducting environmental monitoring and studies of the pollution but
has not (yet) accepted responsibility for cleanup (Olsen 2016; Berlingske 2017).
Similarly, a 2016 US government press statement on Camp Century neither
conﬁrms nor denies responsibility for the pollution (quoted in Billing 2016).

The second dimension involves Greenland, where there is already direct
evidence of contestation. In 2016, Greenland’s foreign minister accused his
Danish counterpart of lying on the issue of Camp Century.8 Greenland also
ﬁled a complaint on the issue at the UN (Breum 2017). In addition, Greenland’s
government is linking the Iceworm pollution to the ever-evolving bargain with
the US over Thule Air Base. Much of Greenland’s population views the US mil-
itary negatively, especially those whose families were affected by the forced
migration of Qaanaaq away from the Thule site in 1953. So Greenland might,
for instance, insist on environmental remediation at Camp Century and the
other abandoned bases as part of the price for allowing the US to stay at Thule.
The foreign minister has already identiﬁed the Camp Century environmental
liability as a condition for Greenland’s permission for continued US operations
at Thule ( Vittus Qujaukitsoq, quoted in Berlingske 2016). Consistent with my
theoretical framework, both the identity of who is responsible for the knock-on
environmental effects of climate change and the scope of required action are being
contested by Greenland, Denmark, and the US, albeit still in early stages at the
time of writing.

The third dimension is the potential for political tensions within affected
countries, most likely Greenland and Canada. Actual food contamination—or
even the prospect of it—creates political tension among various stakeholders in
those countries. Greenland policy makers exhibited outrage in 2016 when the
news of the scientiﬁc ﬁndings about the Camp Century pollution was made
public, and the issue was discussed in parliament.9 And in 2017, the prime min-
ister ﬁred the foreign minister over how to handle the issue (Breum 2017).

The fourth dimension is transnational contestation (Zellen 2009; Berry
et al. 2016). There is limited evidence of such activity: there are online petitions
requesting the American government take responsibility for the pollution.10

8. Hannenstad, https://tinyurl.com/y7pa6qbz, last accessed December 5, 2017.
9. https://tinyurl.com/y93mds4o, last accessed June 2, 2017.
10. https://tinyurl.com/y7uwlzrw, last accessed June 25, 2017.

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(cid:129) 47

Overall, though, there is signiﬁcant evidence of various forms of political
contestation in the Iceworm case. The question is whether it can raise the polit-
ical costs of the military base. There are some early signs that it will, as indicated
earlier, but nothing conclusive. It is perhaps more instructive to examine the US
experience in the Philippines. Negative health effects associated with toxic
materials left at Clark Air Base generated political grievances and considerable
resentment toward the US military when at least seventy-six people died and
sixty-eight others were sickened.11 Then, in October 2012, American ships
dumped toxic waste into Subic Bay, spurring anti-Americanism in a traditionally
pro-American country and setting the stage for multiple public rallies.12 A major
protest in April 2014 saw Filipinos shouting anti-Obama slogans when President
Barack Obama toured the Philippines,13 and then in 2016, hundreds of protesters
burned US ﬂags and carried placards that read “US troops out now” while march-
ing to the presidential palace in Manila.14 That same year, President Rodrigo
Duterte declared his hostility toward the US and tried to realign the Philippines
toward a closer relationship with China. It would be a mistake, of course, to draw
a straight line between the American environmental waste and Duterte’s political
realignment away from the US. It is plausible, however, that the pollution con-
tributed to Filipino grievances and played a modest role in facilitating Duterte’s
move.

Environmental hazards are likely to raise the political costs of a base only
when no major security threat is immediately present that would outweigh
environmental concerns. For instance, environment-related frustrations with
the US military base in South Korea show no signs of ruining the political rela-
tionship, given the threat North Korea poses.15 When no immediate security
threat is present, however, it does seem that environmental politics can harm
the political relationship that allows overseas military bases to function.

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Conclusions

Climate change is on course to remobilize Arctic pollutants at abandoned US
military bases associated with Project Iceworm. The ultimate Iceworm legacy
for future military cooperation between the US, Denmark, Greenland, and even
Canada is unknown, but political contestation is already occurring. Climate
change could create a new class of liabilities and political challenges for overseas
military bases.

The issue of unfunded environmental liabilities associated with military
bases is signiﬁcant for both policy makers and scholars. For policy makers in

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11. https://tinyurl.com/3uj9cxm, last accessed June 1, 2016.
12. https://tinyurl.com/ayu6rv4, last accessed November 27, 2017.
13. https://tinyurl.com/yaeu7xhp, last accessed November 27, 2017.
14. https://tinyurl.com/zmfweh5, last accessed November 27, 2017.
15. https://tinyurl.com/y86nxfor, last accessed November 27, 2017.

48 (cid:129) Climate Change and the Politics of Military Bases

the US, the Iceworm case indicates that climate change could impose additional
costs on overseas military operations, beyond those already identiﬁed by the
Department of Defense (US Department of Defense 2015; US Navy 2010,
2011). Failure to address those costs—regardless of whether they are legal or
“merely” political—could compromise the government’s ability to operate
overseas military bases, such as the one at Thule, Greenland. For scholars, the
issue of unfunded environmental liabilities speaks to a debate about military
bases. Some scholars believe that a lighter military footprint can help reduce
friction between the US military and host nations (Kawato 2015). Others
argue that the critical issue is not the size or location of the US presence but
whether the local population believes in the legitimacy of its operations (Holmes
2014, 209). To the extent that climate change creates new knock-on environmen-
tal problems associated with military bases, the perceived legitimacy of overseas
military bases is likely to depend on how the US responds to those problems.
Climate change and various related knock-on environmental effects seem
likely to become even more salient for military sites over time. Climate change
reverberates into other environmental issues, potentially generating a combina-
tion of subnational, international, and transnational political contestation. This
article therefore contributes to conceptualizing climate change as a meta-
environmental problem rather than as a single issue. This way of viewing climate
change, as having multiple hydra-headed effects with different problem struc-
tures, is gaining currency among scholars of international environmental poli-
tics (Levin et al. 2012; Keohane and Victor 2011). The study of Project Iceworm
will give this scholarly community new empirical and conceptual material from
which to develop and reﬁne theories.

Jeff D. Colgan is the Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor of Political
Science and International Studies at Brown University. His research focuses
on the political economy of international security, especially as related to energy
and the environment. He is author of Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War
(2013). He has published articles in International Organization, Foreign Affairs,
World Politics, International Security, and elsewhere. He obtained his PhD from
Princeton University, taught at American University from 2010 to 2014, and
was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in
Washington, DC, in 2012–2013. He is @JeffDColgan on Twitter.

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