Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

But why would they need that much power to run a dinky Arctic science facility?

A couple of reasons. First, something needs to keep the movies playing, the hospital X-raying, and the workshops workshopping. But besides that, Camp Century, though primarily a cover for a more secret project, actually hosted some seriously cool science. Most of this involved deep ice core drilling. In 1961, physicists drilled more than forty-five hundred feet into the ice to reach the bottom of the Greenland Ice Sheet for the first time. This gave the scientific community an ice core representing more than a hundred thousand years of climate history, and so for the first time, ice core samples could be used to study the Earth’s climate. Camp Century biologists were also able to observe microscopic organisms and germs that had been frozen for centuries in glaciers and then during the warmer summer months melted off into streams of water to be collected by enterprising science teams.

But of course, the real reason for Camp Century—and all its power—was to serve as a test bed for what came next: Project Iceworm. The nuclear reactor, resupply procedures (through the Swings), and the broader study of the feasibility of the ice as a platform for major military operations, were all designed to see if the deployment of American nuclear weapons to the Greenland Ice Shelf was a possibility.

Iceworm called for the placement of up to six hundred nuclear-armed medium-range ballistic missiles in a series of underground tunnels. Ultimately the tunnel system would span almost twenty-five hundred miles of the subsurface, and railroad tracks would connect thousands of individual firing positions. Although you’d only have hundreds of missiles, you could keep the Soviets guessing by having multiple places from which we could launch each missile. The missile itself was a modified version of the U.S. Air Force’s primary ICBM, the Minuteman. But this one would be shorter, designed for medium ranges, and renamed the “Iceman.”

Of course it was.

On its face, it was a great plan. The missiles could hide out under the massive ice sheet, impervious to Soviet strikes, and then pop out when it was time to launch. They would take the most direct path to the Soviet Union—over the Arctic—and end the war before it began.

Iceworm would be a huge undertaking, and it’s not altogether clear how anyone expected it to remain a secret. When fully manned (and we are still probably talking about just men), the project called for eleven thousand personnel working in an area of more than fifty-three thousand square miles, this is about the size of New York— State . Or about three times the size of Denmark.

Speaking of Denmark, the bigwigs in the Kennedy administration loved this idea. It provided them with the flexibility in nuclear weapons development that they preferred. JFK’s administration wanted to have options—not like the Eisenhower administration, which was committed to the idea of Massive Retaliation (in essence, when war began we would launch everything we’ve got). But one major potential roadblock to the plan was the government of Denmark, the country that administered Greenland. In the 1950s, when the United States was working with its European partners on overseas nuclear weapons deployment, Denmark refused to allow American weapons to be placed on Danish soil (as part of a U.S.-Danish defense agreement in 1951). It wasn’t that they didn’t want to work closely with the United States and NATO. Nor was it because they were less worried about the expansionist threat of the Soviet Union than were the United States or NATO. In fact, it was because they were more afraid of the Soviets. Denmark is a small country, with significant strategic importance due to its location at the entrance to the Baltic Sea. And it’s quite close to the border of what was once the Soviet Union. Even though it was a stalwart American ally and a member of NATO, Denmark was smart enough to avoid purposely poking the Soviet bear.

So it’s altogether possible that Denmark would have blocked the use of Greenland for the deployment of hundreds of American nuclear missiles.

That is, if they knew about it.

The most interesting part of the U.S.-Danish alliance was the intentional lack of information transfer that occurred between these two NATO allies. It all started with the Thule air base. The United States requested use of Thule as part of the 1951 joint agreement. It was clear from the get go that the U.S. Air Force wanted to use Thule as a launching and staging point for its long-range strategic bombers. But of course, this would violate the provision in the treaty to keep American nuclear weapons off Danish territory.

The solution to the problem was a display of diplomatic contortionism for the ages. When the United States brought up the topic of what “might” be based at Thule, the Danish responded with, “The Danish government does not want to be asked that kind of a question.”

Lalalalalala. I’m not listening. We never had this conversation. I don’t speak English. Or Danish. Or anything else. If you don’t ask me, then I don’t need to say no. Now please go away and let’s pretend this never happened.

With this diplomatic philosophy in play, it’s certainly possible that the Kennedy administration planned to just continue the political charade of nuclear Don’t Ask Don’t Tell as it applied to Project Iceworm. It posed tantamount benefits to both sides: The Danish government saves face with the Soviets and strengthens NATO, all while providing the United States with a valuable centerpiece for JFK’s nuclear strategy.

But we will never know, because Iceworm never made it to the operational stage. We would just be speculating about the reaction of the Danish government to American missiles deployed in Greenland—and we hate to speculate.

In fact, neither Cold War geopolitics nor Danish domestic policy prevented Project Iceworm from becoming a reality. Instead, it was nature.

You might assume an ice sheet more than twice the size of Texas to be stationary. You’d be wrong. The Greenland Ice Sheet, like all ice masses on the Earth, is in constant (albeit really, really slow) movement. The ice sheet is spreading outward from the center, and from higher elevations to lower ones. If the naturally flowing ice from the ice sheet reaches the sea, it chunks off into ice blocks that turn into icebergs in the sea. We’ve all seen this happen in nature documentaries. It’s a more or less continuous process: The Greenland Ice Sheet is always moving.

And this was a major problem for Camp Century and Project Iceworm. All your perfectly drilled tunnels, trenches, and caverns won’t remain that way. They might narrow, as the ice crunches in around them. They might expand, at which point the ceilings would no longer have the support of the carefully measured walls. By 1962, only a few years into the operation, the ceiling of the room housing the PM-2A reactor had dropped precipitously, and had to be raised five feet in order to continue operations.

Government scientists scrambled to determine the ramifications of an ice sheet moving so much faster than had been anticipated. After taking ice core samples, the scientific team presented the bad news: The shifting of the ice sheet would make Project Iceworm unfeasible in just two years. The ballistic missile firing positions would be gone. The tunnels and trenches that allowed personnel to move around the base would be no longer. No more movie theater. No more fitness center. No more bar. Everything would be swallowed up by the forces of nature.

Camp Century was cleared of personnel in 1965, and formally closed the following year. Project Iceworm never really got off the ground.

In 1969, a special U.S. Army team traveled to the remnants of Camp Century to survey the damage to the facility. They found significant warping and buckling of the metal arches, steel beams, and wooden timbers in the facility’s foundation. The buildings, still furnished and untouched since the day of the final evacuation, were slowly being crushed under the weight of the moving ice. When the team left the facility, they assumed that the secret of Project Iceworm would be permanently hidden under the ice, never to be heard from again.