The US Army’s Secret Plan for an ICBM Base in Greenland

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The City Under the Ice

In the late 1950s, the world lived under the shadow of the bomb. The United States and the Soviet Union, two superpowers locked in the ideological struggle of the Cold War, were engaged in a relentless and terrifying arms race. Each side possessed nuclear weapons of unimaginable power, capable of annihilating the other in a matter of hours. This precarious balance of terror was dominated by a single, overriding fear: the “first strike.” A surprise nuclear attack, swift and overwhelming, could potentially cripple a nation’s ability to retaliate, leaving it defenseless and defeated. This existential dread permeated global politics and drove military planners to the farthest reaches of strategy and geography in search of a solution that could guarantee their nation’s survival.

Out of this climate of fear and high-stakes strategic calculation, the United States Army conceived one of the most audacious, secretive, and ultimately ill-fated engineering projects of the 20th century. The plan was codenamed Project Iceworm. Its objective was to build a sprawling network of tunnels and launch sites for hundreds of nuclear missiles deep within the Greenland ice sheet. This frozen fortress, hidden from Soviet reconnaissance and constantly shifting its assets along a subterranean railway, would be a truly survivable second-strike force, an untouchable nuclear dagger held at the Soviet Union’s doorstep. It was a monumental gamble, a plan that pushed the boundaries of technology and human endurance, representing a collision of geopolitical ambition, extreme engineering, and the unforgiving, dynamic power of the natural world.

To bring this secret vision to life, the Army first needed to prove that it could build and sustain a community under the ice. This preliminary step was given a public face, a cover story of peaceful scientific endeavor known as Camp Century. Presented to the world and to the allied government of Denmark as a pioneering Arctic research station, Camp Century was a masterpiece of Cold War propaganda. It was a “city under the ice,” powered by a revolutionary portable nuclear reactor, where scientists would study the mysteries of the polar cap. The reality was that this scientific outpost was a laboratory for a far grander and more dangerous purpose, a pilot program for a vast nuclear arsenal.

The story of Project Iceworm is more than a chronicle of a failed military endeavor. It is a multifaceted saga with a significant and deeply conflicted legacy. It is a tale of incredible ingenuity undone by a fundamental misunderstanding of the very environment it sought to conquer. In its spectacular failure, the project inadvertently bequeathed to humanity a priceless scientific gift: the first deep ice core, a frozen archive of Earth’s climate history that became a cornerstone of modern climate science. Yet, it also left behind a toxic inheritance. The city, abandoned and crushed by the ice, is now a subterranean landfill of hazardous waste. As the planet warms and the Greenland ice sheet begins to melt, this Cold War relic is threatening to re-emerge, posing a new kind of environmental threat and raising complex political questions about responsibility that linger to this day. This is the story of the city under the ice, a project born of the fear of nuclear annihilation that now serves as a stark warning about the long-term consequences of our actions in a changing world.

The Doctrine of Survival: A Second-Strike World

The strategic landscape of the 1950s was defined by a terrifying new logic. The atomic age, which began with the United States holding a monopoly on nuclear weapons, had given way to a bipolar reality. In August 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its own atomic bomb, shattering American nuclear superiority and ushering in an era of mutual vulnerability. The development of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb by both sides in the early 1950s raised the stakes to an apocalyptic level. The world was no longer contemplating a war that could be won or lost in a conventional sense; it was facing the possibility of total annihilation.

This new reality forced a radical re-evaluation of military doctrine. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration adopted a policy of “massive retaliation,” which held that any significant Soviet aggression would be met with a devastating nuclear response. This policy was not merely a threat; it was a calculated strategy based on the concept that the prospect of “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD, would deter either side from initiating a conflict. The entire edifice of this deterrence rested on a single, indispensable capability: the ability to absorb a surprise attack and still launch a cataclysmic counterattack. This was the doctrine of the “secure second strike.”

The imperative of a secure second-strike capability became the central obsession of Cold War military planners. A nation’s nuclear arsenal was useless as a deterrent if it could be destroyed on the ground before it was ever launched. Fixed, known targets – such as bomber airfields and the first generation of stationary, silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) – were becoming increasingly vulnerable as missile accuracy improved. The fear of a “bomber gap” or a “missile gap,” whether real or perceived, fueled a frantic search for more survivable ways to base these weapons. The U.S. Navy was developing the Polaris submarine, which could hide in the depths of the ocean. The Air Force was experimenting with keeping nuclear-armed bombers in the air at all times. It was in this context that the U.S. Army saw a unique opportunity, looking to a landscape that was as vast and opaque as the ocean: the Greenland ice sheet.

Greenland’s geographical position made it one of the most strategic pieces of real estate on the planet during the Cold War. It lay directly on the shortest flight path – the great circle route – between the Soviet Union and the United States. This made it an ideal location for the vast network of radar stations that formed North America’s early warning systems, such as the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line and the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS). U.S. air bases, like the one at Thule, were critical as refueling points for long-range strategic bombers. But the Army saw something more. They looked at the ice cap itself – an immense, remote, and seemingly inert slab of frozen water thousands of feet thick – and envisioned it as the ultimate natural concealment. It was a place to hide an entire missile force, rendering it invisible to Soviet surveillance and theoretically invulnerable to a first strike.

This strategic impulse was compounded by a powerful institutional motivation. In the new era of nuclear deterrence, the U.S. Army found itself in an existential crisis. The post-World War II reorganization of the American military had allocated the lion’s share of the defense budget and the prestige of the primary nuclear mission to the Air Force, with its fleet of strategic bombers and its developing ICBMs, and to the Navy, with its aircraft carriers and emerging ballistic missile submarines. The Army, with its focus on ground combat, struggled to maintain its relevance and its share of funding in an age where the decisive conflict might be over in a matter of hours, fought with weapons launched from thousands of miles away.

To secure its status alongside the other branches of the armed forces, the Army needed to carve out a central role for itself in the nation’s strategic nuclear deterrent. Project Iceworm was the answer. It was more than just a clever solution to the second-strike problem; it was an institutional imperative. The plan for a mobile force of ground-deployed, medium-range ballistic missiles, operated by soldiers living and working under the ice, was a bold attempt to prove that the Army had a vital part to play in the nuclear age. The success of Project Iceworm would have cemented the Army’s position at the heart of American defense strategy. Its failure would not only be a technical and engineering setback but also a significant blow to the Army’s strategic ambitions, a stark demonstration of the limits of its role in a world defined by the bomb.

A Tale of Two Projects: Iceworm and Century

At its core, the American endeavor in the Greenland ice was a story of significant deception, a tale of two vastly different projects, one secret and one public, intertwined in a complex dance of military ambition and political necessity. The true mission was a plan of staggering scale and consequence, while its cover was a carefully crafted fiction of peaceful scientific exploration.

The secret was Project Iceworm. Outlined in a top-secret 1960 U.S. Army report titled “Strategic Value of the Greenland Icecap,” the plan was breathtaking in its scope. It called for the excavation of approximately 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) of tunnels beneath the ice sheet, a subterranean network that would span an area of 52,000 square miles – an area three times the size of Denmark itself. This underground labyrinth was not for habitation or research; it was designed to be a massive, mobile missile base. The plan was to deploy up to 600 nuclear missiles, a specially modified, two-stage version of the Air Force’s Minuteman ICBM that the Army proposed to call the “Iceman.” These missiles would be mounted on rail cars and constantly shuttled between thousands of different vertical launch shafts dug into the ice. This constant movement, a potentially lethal game of atomic “whack-a-mole,” would make it impossible for the Soviet Union to know the exact location of the missiles at any given time. This elusiveness was the key to the entire concept. An enemy cannot destroy what it cannot target. The Iceworm force would be the ultimate guarantor of a second strike. To operate this vast complex, the Army envisioned a permanent garrison of up to 11,000 soldiers living and working full-time in the frozen depths of Greenland.

Such a monumental undertaking could not be launched without a preliminary phase to test the very concept of building and living under the ice. This pilot project needed a plausible cover story, and that cover was Camp Century. Publicly, the U.S. Army and the Department of Defense presented Camp Century as a benign, even inspiring, scientific outpost. It was billed as a “nuclear-powered Arctic research center,” a demonstration of affordable and innovative techniques for establishing outposts on the polar ice caps. The official purpose, as explained to Danish officials in 1960, was threefold: to test construction methods in extreme Arctic conditions, to explore the practical challenges of operating a semi-mobile nuclear reactor, and to support a wide range of scientific experiments on the ice sheet. This narrative was remarkably successful. The “city under the ice” captured the public imagination and was portrayed as a symbol of American ingenuity and peaceful exploration in the final frontier. It attracted widespread media attention, with journalists from National Geographic, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New York Times visiting the site. Famed television newsman Walter Cronkite even filed a report from within its icy tunnels. Camp Century became a potent tool of Cold War propaganda, showcasing American technological prowess to the world, all while hiding its true military purpose.

The entire operation, both the secret and the cover, depended on the acquiescence of Denmark. Since the 1814 Treaty of Kiel, Greenland had been under Danish control, and while the island gained more autonomy over time, its defense and foreign policy were still directed from Copenhagen. The geopolitical realities of the Cold War had already drawn the United States to Greenland. A 1951 “Defense of Greenland” agreement, signed by the U.S. and Denmark as NATO allies, permitted the United States to build and operate military facilities on the island for the collective defense of the North Atlantic region. This agreement was the legal basis for installations like Thule Air Base. However, the treaty made no mention of deploying nuclear weapons. Complicating matters further, Denmark had adopted an official public policy of being a nuclear-free zone in 1957, forbidding the stationing of nuclear weapons on its territory in peacetime.

A direct American request to place 600 nuclear missiles under the ice would have faced almost certain rejection, as it would have forced the Danish government to either abandon its popular anti-nuclear stance or risk a major diplomatic rift with its most powerful ally. The U.S. Army and the State Department chose a path of strategic ambiguity. U.S. Ambassador Val Petersen approached Danish Prime Minister H. C. Hansen to discuss the possibility of storing components related to nuclear weapons in Greenland. Hansen’s response was a masterpiece of diplomatic evasion. He reportedly stated, “I do not think that your remarks give rise to any comments from my side.” He neither approved nor denied the request.

This was not a simple misunderstanding. It was a sophisticated, unspoken negotiation in which both sides used ambiguity to achieve their goals. The Danish government, heavily reliant on the U.S. and NATO for its security against the Soviet threat, was in an untenable position. A public “yes” to nuclear weapons would have been political suicide at home; an outright “no” could have damaged the important defense relationship with Washington. Hansen’s deliberate non-answer allowed him to sidestep this dilemma. It placed the onus entirely on the United States and allowed the Danish government to maintain that it had never formally consented to the placement of nuclear weapons on its soil. For the U.S. Army, this was all it needed. It interpreted the Prime Minister’s non-committal response as a tacit “green light,” a form of plausible deniability that allowed them to proceed with their plans. They moved forward with the construction of Camp Century, keeping their Danish allies in the dark about the full and true scope of Project Iceworm. It was a calculated risk, leveraging a diplomatic gray area to begin one of the Cold War’s most secret projects.

Engineering an Impossible City

The construction of Camp Century, which began in June 1959, was an undertaking of immense difficulty, a logistical and engineering feat executed in one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth. The chosen site was a desolate, featureless plateau on the ice sheet, 150 miles inland from Thule Air Base, at an elevation of 6,600 feet. Here, the forces of nature were absolute. Temperatures regularly plunged to -70°F, and relentless katabatic winds could howl at speeds exceeding 125 miles per hour. The annual snowfall was more than four feet, a constant effort to bury anything built on the surface.

Every single piece of equipment, every prefabricated building panel, every ration of food, and every drop of fuel had to be transported across this treacherous landscape. The logistical chain was a Herculean task. The Army first had to build a road through the ice. Then, a fleet of tractors hauled the project’s 6,000 tons of supplies and materials from Thule. Most of the heavy equipment was loaded onto enormous bobsleds known as “heavy swings.” These convoys, pulled by powerful D8 and D9 tractors, crawled across the ice at a maximum speed of just two miles per hour. The 150-mile journey from the air base to the construction site was an arduous 70-hour trek, a slow and steady procession against the vast, white wilderness.

The primary construction method employed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was an innovative technique known as “cut-and-cover.” Instead of building on the surface where structures would be battered by wind and buried by snow, the engineers would build within the ice sheet itself. The process began with massive, specialized rotary snow-milling machines. These Swiss-made “Peter Plows” were the workhorses of the project, their powerful rotating blades capable of carving enormous trenches into the hard-packed snow and ice at a rate of up to 1,200 cubic yards per hour. They cut a series of deep, parallel trenches that would form the streets and corridors of the subterranean city.

Once a trench was excavated to the desired depth and width, it was covered with a roof of arched, corrugated steel panels. These arches were assembled on the surface and then lowered into place, creating a strong, semi-circular ceiling. Snow, the very material that had just been removed, was then pushed back over the steel arches, burying the new tunnel and providing insulation and camouflage. The result was a network of protected, subsurface corridors, shielded from the brutal conditions on the surface.

Inside these newly formed ice tunnels, the city began to take shape. Engineers erected prefabricated wooden buildings, which arrived in sections and were assembled on site. These structures would house everything from living quarters to laboratories. A critical design consideration was the heat generated by the heated buildings. To prevent this warmth from melting the surrounding ice walls and compromising the structural integrity of the tunnels, a significant air space of several feet was maintained around every building. This gap allowed cold air to circulate, insulating the ice from the heated interiors. To further aid this process, a ventilation system was installed, and 14-inch diameter “air wells” were drilled 40 feet down into the tunnel floors to draw up cooler air from deeper within the ice sheet.

When completed in October 1960, Camp Century was a marvel of Arctic engineering. The final layout consisted of 21 main tunnels with a total length of nearly two miles. The largest of these, the central artery of the camp, was nicknamed “Main Street.” It stretched for more than 1,000 feet and was 26 feet wide and 28 feet high. The entire city was wired for electricity and featured a system of insulated, heated pipes for its water supply. This water was sourced from a remarkable innovation known as a “Rodriguez Well.” Engineers used steam to melt a deep shaft in the ice, creating a large, subsurface cavern that filled with meltwater. This reservoir, replenished by the steam, provided the camp with a reliable source of up to 10,000 gallons of fresh water each day. For safety, a series of escape hatches were built, providing emergency exits from the underground complex to the surface.

Yet, for all its ingenuity, the engineering of Camp Century was built upon a catastrophic scientific miscalculation. The entire design was predicated on the assumption that the Greenland ice sheet was a largely static, stable, and permanent medium, something akin to soft rock that could be excavated and would then hold its shape. The engineers were treating a living glacier like a fixed geological feature. They were aware, to a degree, that snow and ice were not inert; they knew that snow compacts under its own weight and that some deformation would occur. The design had a projected lifespan of ten years, with the understanding that ongoing maintenance, or “snow trimming,” would be required to shave away ice that slowly encroached on the tunnels.

What they fundamentally underestimated was the sheer power and relentless nature of glacial dynamics. Snow is a visco-elastic material; under the immense pressure of its own accumulated weight, it compresses, deforms, and flows. The ice sheet is not a stationary platform; it is a river of ice, moving slowly but inexorably toward the sea. The engineers of Camp Century had built their city inside an active, moving force of nature. The very material they used for protection and concealment was, from the moment of construction, working to crush their creation. The battle was not against the cold and wind on the surface, but against the immense, silent pressure of geology and physics from all sides. It was a battle they were destined to lose.

Life Beneath the Ice

For the small, isolated population of soldiers, engineers, and scientists who called Camp Century home, life was a surreal existence, conducted entirely within a labyrinth of ice and steel, hundreds of miles from the nearest town and a world away from familiar civilization. The camp’s population fluctuated, with a core year-round staff of around 85 personnel, swelling to nearly 200 during the summer months when construction and scientific activities were at their peak. Their world was one of artificial light, the constant hum of machinery, and the ever-present, bone-deep cold of the surrounding ice sheet, which maintained a steady temperature of around -10°F.

The U.S. Army understood that maintaining morale and operational effectiveness in such an extreme and confined environment was a paramount challenge. To combat the psychological pressures of isolation and monotony, they went to extraordinary lengths to recreate the amenities of a small American town within the tunnels. The living quarters consisted of electrically heated, prefabricated barracks. Each barrack contained a common area and five small, 156-square-foot rooms, providing a measure of privacy for the inhabitants. Beyond the basic necessities of shelter and food, the camp was remarkably well-equipped.

The social heart of the base was a recreation hall and a movie theater, providing a important outlet for entertainment. A library and hobby shops offered opportunities for quieter pursuits. The camp had its own post exchange, a small shop where personnel could buy personal items. A chapel provided a space for religious services. To maintain health and hygiene, there were modern latrines, hot showers, and a laundry facility. The medical facilities were comprehensive for such a remote location, including a dispensary, a ten-bed infirmary, and a fully equipped operating room. There was even a barbershop to provide a sense of routine and normalcy. A central kitchen and mess hall served meals around the clock, fueling the men who worked in shifts to keep the city running. This subterranean society was a completely self-contained world, a bubble of civilization buried deep within the polar ice. For a touch of companionship in the stark environment, the base even had an official mascot, a hardy Siberian Husky named “Mukluk.”

Despite these modern conveniences, life at Camp Century was fraught with unique challenges. The most relentless of these was the constant battle against the ice itself. The glacial deformation that engineers had underestimated proved to be a constant, labor-intensive problem. The walls and ceilings of the tunnels were in a perpetual state of slow-motion collapse, squeezing inward under the immense pressure of the overlying snow and ice. To keep the tunnels from being crushed, maintenance crews had to engage in the continuous task of “snow trimming.” This involved painstakingly shaving and cutting away the encroaching ice to maintain the original dimensions of the tunnels. It was a time-consuming and physically demanding job, requiring the removal of more than 120 tons of snow and ice every single month.

Other problems were more mundane, yet equally persistent. Waste disposal was a significant issue. The camp’s sewage was directed to an unlined sump dug into the ice. This pit was initially not vented, and the liquid waste began to permeate the surrounding snowpack. This not only accelerated the deformation of the ice in that section of the camp but also, after the first year of operation, created an unbearable odor that wafted into the nearby sleeping quarters. It was a stark reminder that even in this futuristic city of ice, the most basic problems of sanitation could not be ignored. The men of Camp Century were pioneers, living and working on the frontier of both technology and the natural world, their daily lives a constant negotiation between the comforts of their engineered environment and the powerful, unyielding forces that surrounded them.

The Atomic Heart: The PM-2A Reactor

The technological centerpiece of Camp Century, the very heart that pumped life-giving heat and power into the frozen city, was the PM-2A nuclear reactor. It was a groundbreaking piece of technology, the world’s first portable, or semi-mobile, nuclear power plant, and a key component of the U.S. Army’s broader effort to develop compact reactors for use at remote military installations. The designation PM-2A stood for Portable, Medium Power, 2nd Generation, Model A. Designed and built by the American Locomotive Company (Alco Products), it was intended to demonstrate that a nuclear reactor could be delivered in pieces, assembled, operated, and eventually removed from one of the most inaccessible locations on Earth.

The PM-2A was a pressurized water reactor, a design that would become standard for most commercial nuclear power plants. It used highly enriched uranium-235 as its fuel, with an enrichment level of 93 percent, far higher than that used in civilian reactors. The Army boasted that the reactor’s core, containing just 44 pounds of uranium, could produce the same amount of energy as over a million gallons of diesel fuel. This was the key strategic advantage of nuclear power in the Arctic: it dramatically reduced the enormous and vulnerable logistical chain required to transport fossil fuels to remote bases. The reactor was designed to produce a net output of 1,560 kilowatts of electricity, as well as generating up to 1,000,000 BTUs per hour of steam for heating the camp’s buildings and for melting ice in the Rodriguez Well to create the fresh water supply.

The term “portable” was relative. The entire reactor system weighed between 330 and 400 tons. Its portability stemmed from its modular design. The entire plant was broken down into 27 main packages or components, each engineered to meet the size and weight restrictions for transport aboard a C-130 Hercules cargo plane. These components were shipped to Greenland and then painstakingly hauled across the ice to Camp Century. The assembly process, which took place inside a specially excavated trench, was a delicate and high-stakes operation. The extreme cold made metal brittle and susceptible to cracking, so every piece of equipment had to be handled with extraordinary care.

The reactor achieved its first criticality – a sustained nuclear chain reaction – in October 1960. It was a resounding success, proving the feasibility of the Army’s portable reactor concept. For more than three years, the PM-2A reliably powered the city under the ice. However, the reactor’s design contained an unforeseen and ultimately fatal flaw, not in its nuclear physics, but in its interaction with the unique environment. The operation of the reactor generated a significant amount of residual heat, particularly in the area around the reactor vessel and the feed water pools that were essential to its cooling cycle. This waste heat, while minor compared to the reactor’s power output, was enough to warm the surrounding ice and snow in its dedicated trench.

This localized warming had a dramatic effect. It significantly accelerated the natural process of glacial deformation. The ice in the reactor trench began to compress and flow much more rapidly than in other parts of the camp. By mid-1962, the effects were becoming alarming. The ceiling of the reactor room had visibly sagged and dropped, forcing engineers to undertake the difficult task of lifting it by five feet. The very machine that was the source of Camp Century’s life and warmth was also actively hastening the destruction of its own shelter. The atomic heart was melting its own icy ribcage. This inescapable paradox was a clear sign that the long-term viability of the entire project was in serious jeopardy.

An Unforgiving Environment: The Project’s Demise

The end of Project Iceworm came not from a Kremlin decree, a shift in Washington’s political winds, or a breach of its secrecy. It came from within, delivered by the very scientists who were part of its cover story. The project was ultimately defeated by a fundamental truth of the natural world, a truth that its ambitious engineers and strategic planners had failed to fully comprehend. The Greenland ice sheet was not the stable, static platform they had envisioned; it was a dynamic and unforgiving environment, wholly unsuitable for the mission it was meant to conceal.

As part of the official scientific mandate of Camp Century, geologists and glaciologists on site were conducting research on the properties of the ice sheet. One of their primary activities was the drilling and analysis of ice cores. These cylindrical samples of ice, extracted from deep within the glacier, contained a wealth of information about past climate conditions. They also provided a direct measurement of the physical properties of the ice itself. Within three years of the camp’s excavation, the data from these ice cores revealed a fatal flaw in the project’s core assumption. The analysis demonstrated conclusively that the glacier was moving and deforming at a rate far greater than anyone in the U.S. Army had anticipated.

This constant, powerful movement of the ice exerted immense and relentless pressure on the tunnels of Camp Century. The effects were not theoretical; they were visible and alarming. By 1962, just a few years after construction, the tunnels were noticeably warping. They were compressing both vertically, as the weight of the overlying snow bore down, and horizontally, as the ice sheet flowed. The steel arches that formed the ceilings began to buckle. Supporting timbers snapped under the strain, and massive steel beams were observed to be twisted and torn. The prefabricated buildings housed within the tunnels were being slowly crushed. The Army’s own assessments concluded that the tunnels, and by extension any sensitive missile deployment system housed within them, would be rendered structurally unsound and destroyed in as little as two years.

For Project Iceworm, this discovery was a death blow. The concept of a mobile missile system depended on a network of precisely aligned railway tracks and vertical launch tubes. Maintaining such a system in an environment that was constantly shifting, warping, and collapsing was a physical impossibility. The ice sheet was not a passive hiding place; it was an active and destructive force. Faced with this insurmountable engineering and geological reality, the U.S. Army had no choice but to abandon its grand plan.

Project Iceworm was officially canceled in 1963. The PM-2A reactor, which was already causing accelerated deformation in its own trench, was shut down for planned maintenance in July 1963 and was never reactivated. The Army made the decision to operate Camp Century as a summer-only camp from that point forward, powered by its backup diesel generators. The portable reactor was dismantled and removed from Greenland the following summer. The camp limped on for a few more years, but its primary purpose was gone. In 1966, Camp Century was formally abandoned. The Army personnel packed up and left, leaving the city under the ice to its fate. They walked away from the tunnels, the buildings, and the accumulated waste, confident that the perpetual snowfall would soon bury their creation, leaving it to be slowly and silently crushed and consumed by the immense glacier it was carved from.

There is a supreme and telling irony in the project’s demise. The elaborate deception of Camp Century, the public-facing scientific mission designed to provide cover for the top-secret military objective, was the direct cause of its undoing. The Army needed a believable reason to be digging massive trenches in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet, and Arctic research provided the perfect fiction. To make this cover story convincing they had to allow and support legitimate scientific work. This legitimate science – the dispassionate, methodical work of glaciologists studying ice cores – produced the very data that proved the fundamental premise of Project Iceworm was fatally flawed. The project was not exposed by Soviet spies or satellite reconnaissance. It was killed by inconvenient facts, uncovered by the very scientists it was using as a disguise. The pursuit of knowledge, intended as a mask, revealed a truth that the project’s military ambition could not overcome.

An Accidental Legacy: Science from the Ice

While Project Iceworm was a spectacular military and engineering failure, the scientific program at its cover facility, Camp Century, produced an accidental and enduring triumph. The very research that doomed the secret missile plan also opened a new window into our planet’s past, leaving a legacy that has proven far more valuable and lasting than any hidden nuclear arsenal. The project’s greatest contribution to history was not strategic, but scientific.

In the mid-1960s, as the military project was winding down, a team of scientists at the camp achieved a historic milestone. Using a combination of thermal and electromechanical drills, they succeeded in drilling the first-ever ice core to penetrate the full thickness of an ice sheet. They drilled down through nearly a mile of ice – 4,560 feet to be exact – and reached the bedrock beneath the Greenland ice sheet. At the very bottom, after pulling up the last section of clear glacial ice, they extracted something unprecedented: approximately 12 feet of frozen soil and rock fragments from the base of the glacier.

This ice core was a treasure trove of information. For the nascent field of paleoclimatology, it was the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone. Glaciers are formed by the annual accumulation of snowfall, which over millennia compresses into ice. Each layer of ice traps bubbles of the ancient atmosphere, dust, volcanic ash, and chemical isotopes that correspond to the environmental conditions of that year. By analyzing this mile-long column of ice, scientists could, for the first time, reconstruct a detailed, continuous record of Earth’s climate history stretching back over 100,000 years. The Camp Century core provided the first high-resolution look at the dramatic climate shifts between the last ice age and our current warm interglacial period. It became a foundational dataset, a benchmark against which subsequent ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica would be compared.

The story of the core’s most startling discovery took another half-century to unfold. The precious sample of frozen soil from the bottom of the borehole was examined, cataloged, and then, in the shuffle of closing the camp and the passage of time, it was largely forgotten. The samples were eventually shipped to an ice core repository in Copenhagen, Denmark, where they sat in a freezer, untouched and unexamined, for decades. In 2017, the long-lost soil samples were rediscovered by researchers preparing to move the university’s ice core collection.

Applying modern analytical techniques unimaginable in the 1960s, an international team of scientists began to study this forgotten earth. What they found was stunning. Under the microscope, the frozen sediment contained the perfectly preserved remnants of an ancient tundra ecosystem. They identified fossilized twigs, leaves, and the delicate structures of mosses and other vegetation. This was not just sterile rock flour ground up by a glacier; it was the remains of a living landscape. The inescapable conclusion was that the site of Camp Century, now buried under nearly a mile of ice, had once been ice-free.

Further analysis using luminescence and isotope dating revealed that this ice-free period occurred within the last million years, and perhaps as recently as 400,000 years ago. This discovery fundamentally altered the scientific understanding of the Greenland ice sheet’s stability. It proved that during past natural warm periods, known as interglacials, large portions of the ice sheet had melted away entirely, allowing sunlight to reach the ground and a tundra ecosystem to flourish. The most objectiveing aspect of this finding was that these past warming events occurred when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were far lower than they are today. This suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is much more sensitive and vulnerable to warming than many previous climate models had assumed. The accidental scientific legacy of a failed Cold War military base had delivered a critical and urgent warning about the future of our planet in an era of human-caused climate change.

A Toxic Inheritance: The Thawing of a Cold War Secret

When the U.S. Army walked away from Camp Century in 1967, they left behind more than just empty tunnels and scientific data. They abandoned an entire city, assuming it would be harmlessly entombed within the ice sheet for eternity. The decommissioning process was minimal. The nuclear reaction chamber of the PM-2A was removed and shipped back to the United States, a important step to prevent a major radiological hazard. But virtually everything else – the camp’s physical infrastructure, prefabricated buildings, railway tracks, vehicles, and all the accumulated waste from nearly a decade of occupation – was left in place. The prevailing assumption of the era was that the perpetual snowfall of the high-latitude ice sheet would continue to bury the site deeper and deeper, preserving it forever in a frozen, inert state.

This assumption of eternity has been shattered by the realities of 21st-century climate change. The Arctic is warming at a rate faster than any other region on Earth, and the vast Greenland ice sheet is responding. In 2016, a team of scientists published a study that, for the first time, compiled a detailed inventory of the hazardous waste left behind at Camp Century and modeled its future under a warming climate. The findings were alarming. The abandoned site, which covers an area of 136 acres (roughly the size of 100 football fields), is a significant subterranean landfill.

The inventory of hazards is substantial. Researchers estimate that the site contains approximately 53,000 gallons (200,000 liters) of diesel fuel, which was used to power vehicles and backup generators. It holds an enormous volume of human waste, estimated at 6.3 million gallons (24 million liters) of wastewater, including sewage, which was deposited in unlined sumps dug into the ice. The site also contains a nontrivial, though unquantified, amount of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), highly toxic and carcinogenic industrial chemicals that were commonly used in building materials, paints, and electrical equipment during that period. Finally, there is an unknown volume of low-level radioactive waste, primarily in the form of coolant water from the PM-2A reactor. While the reactor core was removed, the coolant that circulated through it would have become irradiated during its operation.

The 2016 study used standard climate models to project the future of the ice sheet covering the camp. Their conclusion was stark: the Cold War assumption of permanence was dangerously wrong. The models predicted that, if current warming trends continue, the region around Camp Century could transition from a zone of net snow accumulation to one of net melt as early as the year 2090. Once this tipping point is reached, the process becomes irreversible. Instead of being buried deeper, the overlying ice will begin to thin and melt away. It is only a matter of time before the buried infrastructure and the hazardous waste it contains are exposed at the surface. When this happens, the melting ice will remobilize the pollutants. The diesel fuel, PCBs, sewage, and radioactive coolant could be carried by meltwater streams across the ice sheet and eventually into the marine environment, where they could disrupt fragile Arctic ecosystems.

This looming environmental threat has created a complex and unresolved political dispute, a new kind of cold war over a relic of the old one. The central question is one of responsibility: who is liable for the cleanup? The legal and diplomatic landscape is murky. The base was built and operated by the United States. It sits on the territory of Greenland, which is now a self-governing constituent country. However, at the time of the base’s construction and abandonment, Greenland’s defense and foreign affairs were the responsibility of Denmark. This has led to a three-way political standoff.

Greenland’s government has forcefully argued that Denmark, as the sovereign power at the time, is ultimately responsible. They have accused the Danish government of neglecting its duties to protect the environment and the rights of Greenland’s indigenous population. They have demanded that Copenhagen either fund the cleanup itself or compel Washington to do so. Denmark, in turn, has acknowledged the seriousness of the issue but has moved slowly, citing the need for further study. The United States has acknowledged the reality of climate change and the risk it poses at the site and has stated it will work with the Danish and Greenlandic governments to address security matters. The situation highlights a novel and growing challenge in international law: how to assign liability for historical military waste that was abandoned under one set of environmental assumptions and is now being unearthed by the new reality of a warming planet. The toxic legacy of Camp Century is a potent symbol of how the unresolved problems of the past can re-emerge to haunt the future.

Summary

The story of Project Iceworm and its public face, Camp Century, is a remarkable chapter of the Cold War, a saga of immense ambition, technological audacity, and ultimately, humbling failure. Born from the pervasive fear of a nuclear first strike, the project was a bold and imaginative solution to the strategic imperative of a secure second-strike capability. The U.S. Army’s plan to hide a vast arsenal of mobile nuclear missiles beneath the Greenland ice sheet represented the apex of Cold War thinking, an attempt to use one of Earth’s most extreme environments as the ultimate military fortress. The construction of Camp Century, the city under the ice, was an engineering marvel, a testament to human ingenuity and endurance in the face of unimaginable hardship.

Yet, for all its grand vision, the project was doomed from the start by a significant misunderstanding of the very nature it sought to command. The relentless, dynamic power of the Greenland ice sheet, a force of geology that its planners had fatally underestimated, crushed the tunnels and rendered the entire concept of a stable, subterranean missile base impossible. In a moment of supreme irony, the project’s fate was sealed by the legitimate scientific research it used as a cover story, with its own glaciologists providing the data that proved the mission’s futility.

The legacy of Project Iceworm is a study in contradiction. It is remembered, on one hand, as a secret military plan to wage nuclear war from a frozen, underground redoubt. On the other hand, its failure gave rise to an accidental scientific triumph. The ice core drilled at Camp Century was a gift to humanity, providing an unprecedented record of Earth’s climate history. Decades later, forgotten soil from that same core revealed the Greenland ice sheet’s surprising vulnerability, offering a critical warning about our planet’s future in a warming climate.

Today, the story has come full circle. The city under the ice, abandoned and left for dead, is stirring. As the climate changes, the ice that was once its tomb is now threatening to release its toxic contents. The buried waste of Camp Century – a cocktail of fuel, chemicals, and radioactive coolant – is a physical remnant of the Cold War being brought back to the surface by a 21st-century crisis. This has ignited a complex political dispute over cleanup and responsibility, forcing a new generation to confront the unresolved environmental and diplomatic problems of the past. The city under the ice, once a closely guarded secret, is now a public and potent warning, a symbol of how the ambitions of one era can become the burdens of another.

Last update on 2025-12-20 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API