U.S. Built Secret Nuclear Base Under Greenland

BY SUNE ENGEL RASMUSSEN AND MARINA VITAGLIONE

While flying above the Arctic Circle last spring, a team of NASA scientists testing a new radar system over northern Greenland detected something unusual.

Deep into the ice sheet, their instruments showed, sat a cluster of settlements connected by a network of tunnels, like a bygone civilization frozen in time.

“It’s like flying over another planet, and it’s hard to imagine anyone or anything ever being able to survive there,” said NASA scientist Chad Greene, who was on the plane.

What the scientists saw on their screens wasn’t a lost civilization but remnants of a U.S. military base built under the ice during the Cold War.

The base was part of an ambitious and clandestine Pentagon plan, known as Project Iceworm, to build a network of nuclear-missile launch sites beneath the Arctic ice. The underground site, which was designed to store 600 medium- range ballistic missiles, reveals the extent of U.S. involvement in Greenland going back more than half a century.

Camp Century, as the outpost was called, was partially built in 1959, and abandoned in 1967 after the ice sheet was deemed too unstable to support the proposed missile-launch network. Over the years, ice accumulated and the facility is now buried under at least 100 feet of ice.

The camp was known to some before the recent National Aeronautics and Space Administration overflight as an ostensible research facility, but its real military purpose was classified until 1996. Greene and his colleagues captured the first full picture of the camp in December.

More than just a relic of Cold War folly, Camp Century is a reminder of the U.S.’s longstanding presence on the Danish territory of Greenland, a position that at times has been controversial. Historically, to maintain sovereignty over Greenland, Denmark has had to relinquish part of the territory to the U.S.

President Trump has criticized Denmark for failing to adequately secure Greenland, and threatened to take the territory by force in the name of American national security.

The U.S. already has the right to establish bases in Greenland, according to a 1951 treaty with Denmark that enabled it to build Camp Century— something Danish politicians recently have reminded Washington of publicly.

Officials in Greenland and Denmark have tried to fend off Trump by demonstrating they are open to an enhanced American military presence while rejecting a full U.S. takeover of the territory.

During the Cold War, the U.S. maintained 17 bases in Greenland, and kept about 10,000 troops there. Today, the population has shrunk to fewer than 200 and the number of bases to one—Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base.

The presence of U.S. nuclear weapons historically has been a source of friction with the Danes. The U.S. military at the time didn’t disclose Camp Century’s nuclear-related pur-pose to Denmark, a self-de clared nuclear-free zone.

In 1968, a nuclear-armed B-52 bomber crashed near Thule Air Base, causing the payload to rupture and disperse, leading to radioactive contamination of the sea ice. The incident generated public controversy in Denmark, as did the revelation that the U.S. stored nuclear weapons at the air base without informing Copenhagen or Greenland.

Mineral-rich Greenland has been a part of U.S. Arctic security considerations since the beginning of World War II. When Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, Greenland was a Danish colony. The U.S. was concerned the Germans would occupy the island as a base for military operations closer to America.

In 1941, the Danish representative to Washington, contravening directives from Copenhagen, signed a deal that transferred responsibility for Greenland’s defense to the U.S. and gave Washington the right to establish bases on the island.

After the end of the war, the U.S. refused Denmark’s demand that it leave Greenland, and offered to buy it for $100 million. Denmark rejected the offer. In 1951, the Danish parliament ratified the 1941 treaty, allowing the U.S. to maintain troops on the island.

The Pentagon publicly hailed the construction of Camp Century as an achievement of engineering, but its real purpose remained classified, even to many of those who served there.

Comprising 21 interconnected tunnels—spanning nearly 2 miles—carved directly into the ice, the base was powered by a nuclear reactor that had been dragged more than 130 miles across the ice sheet. Sleeping quarters, a gym, latrines, labs and a mess hall supported about 200 military personnel.

When Greene flew over northern Greenland, his team was testing a radar instrument that can see through ice. They were hoping to map the bottom of the Greenland and Antarctic ice bed to forecast sealevel rise.

“You see how the buildings and tunnels were connected, how people had to move about in their day-to-day life, and think what a wild experience it must have been to be stationed there,” he said.