The Army’s Underground Nuclear Ice Village [Video]

In 1959, the united states Army began building a massive complex underneath the frozen surface of Greenland. It’d be a center of analysis, to the good thing about mankind! It can also be an excellent spot to launch Cold War nukes.

The installation was named ” Camp Century ” -rather than after some famous dead American-because, as an Army report stated , the base’s Danish collaborators held ” a special aversion to maps which read like an obituary column.” So, ” Century” it was.

Camp Century was to be a place of unprecedented scientific research-a new center for exploring the means through which mankind could both conquer and understand the flora and fauna. Not less than that was the line. But really, and as stated on the very first page of the aforementioned report, Camp Century was a Cold War power move: ” With the appearance of such weapons as the atomic bomb, the supersonic longrange bomber, and the intercontinental ballistic missile, it was inevitable that military attention must be interested in the remote arctic regions which lie athwart the shortest air routes between the foremost land masses of the Northern Hemisphere.”

That is to claim, the u. s. , inside the depths of Cold War tension, wanted a neater strategy to sling missiles at Moscow. An underground base, covered with snow and ice, can be an excellent strategic accomplishment-the report makes repeated reference to any such design being particularly well-shielded from ” attack.” And so the Army’s engineers set to work in earnest.

Enormous trenches were dug out of the ground. Immensely heavy pieces of kit and pre-fab structures were lugged to the construction site at an agonizing two miles an hour. A specially designed ” portable” nuclear reactor-the smallest of its kind at the time-was delivered by ship to power the total complex.

And considering the complete thing was buried beneath a frozen wasteland, the amenities sounded pretty cushy: Camp Century boasted fresh running water for the over 100 men residing within, a rec room, library, hospital, church, and kitchen, moreover the requisite labs and communication facilities (it was a military base, of course).

It was a remarkable engineering project, but building a nuclear-powered igloo missile silo proved harder than anticipated. The immense heat from a nuclear plant and everything it powers, combined with walls of snow? One can find where here is going. Constant melting, digging, and re-digging, in addition as the shifting ice plates, turned the construction marvel into something of a nightmare. It was abandoned in 1966, before any nukes were ever known to were dropped at the location. A search party in 1969 found only twisted wreckage.

So was it a hit? Type of. The Army had its strange underground world for several years, yes. Until it collapsed onto itself. Nonetheless it never served to thwart Russian nukes, nor did it house any of its own. But did it ever should? Luckily, that never ended up mattering. Still-it’s a reminder of the lengths to which the Cold War spurred, to any such radical extent, a manic want to outdo the enemy. Enough to build a nuclear power plant in a block of ice. [ BLDGBLG ]

Photos courtesy of Ray Hansen and Frank J. Leskovitz

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This post is tagged: frozen wasteland, intercontinental ballistic missile, military attention, northern hemisphere, underground base, united states army