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John HatchardDecember 25, 2024 at 8:20 PM EST

#ProjectIceworm #Greenland #Arctic #SovietUnion #USA #Eisenhower #ColdWar #Moscow #Nuclear #ICBM Project Iceworm was a top-secret 1958 $2.7 billion U.S. plan to convert part of Greenland into a launchpad for nuclear missiles, including a nuclear reactor. Abridged (shortened) article thread ⬇️ 5 min

As Soviet ICBM tests and the launch of Sputnik in the 1950s added intensity to the Cold War, the U.S. turned attention to the Greenland ice sheets for an edge. Meant to be a “city under the ice,” Camp Century was designed to be a series of “twenty-one horizontal tunnels spidering through the snow". Designers boasted it would be 3x the size of Denmark — replete with a movie theater, hot showers, a chapel, a library, chemistry labs, and most importantly, a portable nuclear reactor. Destined to house 200 residents, it was publicly touted as a “remote research community” under auspice of research. archive.is In reality, it was “a top-secret plan to convert part of the Arctic into a launchpad for nuclear missiles.” Dubbed “Project Iceworm,” the city nestled under layer after layer of ice was to be positioned ~3,000 miles from Moscow.

During the Cold War, the location offered a more covert & convenient cover for medium-range ballistic missiles, or MRBMs, taking advantage of a strategic location midway between the two superpowers, to avoid using long-range Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, located stateside.

In 1958, the U.S. received tacit approval from Denmark — which has maintained control of the world’s largest island since the 1814 Treaty of Kiel — after being approached with the plans for Iceworm by U.S. ambassador Val Petersen. According to Petersen’s account, Danish Prime Minister H. C. Hansen replied, “You did not submit any concrete plan as to such possible storing, nor did you ask questions as to the attitude of the Danish Government to this item. I do not think that your remarks give rise to any comments from my side”

The U.S. deemed this a green light, with construction slated to begin in June 1959. Despite temperatures as low as -70°F, winds as high as 125 miles per hour and an annual snowfall of 4+ feet, the audacious project was completed the following October, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation. “The missile force is hidden and elusive. It is deployed into an extensive cut‐and‐cover tunnel network in which men and missiles are protected from weather and, to a degree, from enemy attack. The deployment is invulnerable to all but massive attacks & even then most of the force can be launched." Concealment and variability of the deployment pattern are exploited to prevent the enemy from targeting the critical elements of the force.” The audacious $2.71 billion plan didn’t account for one thing, however: Mother Nature. It became increasingly clear, in short order, that building an atomic city under shifting ice sheets was tenuous at best. The project was scrapped entirely by 1967, and the massive underground structure collapsed shortly after.

Despite this rather large military gaffe, the project wasn’t entirely a waste. During the building of Camp Century, U.S. glacier scientist Chester Langway drilled “a 4,560-foot-deep vertical core down through the ice,” according to an account in the University of Vermont Today. “Each section of ice that came up was packaged and stored, frozen. When the drill finally hit dirt, the scientists worked it down for twelve more feet through mud and rock. Then they stopped.” For decades, this layer of ice and rock from Greenland’s core remained untouched, stored in cookie jars at the bottom of a freezer in Denmark. Then in 2017, it was rediscovered by a professor and a glaciologist who were going through the university’s extensive collections of ice repository cores. “Some were oddly labeled ‘Camp Century sub-ice. But once we got it out, we picked it up to see these dirty lumps, and I said: what is this now? And all of a sudden it dawned on us: Oh s–t, this is the sediment underneath it. The ‘sub-ice’ is because it’s below the ice. Whoa.”

While the U.S. didn’t get to act out its Bond villain lair fantasies, it did, at the very least, further scientific understandings of the world around us — and below us.