A secret base as in James Bond’s novels. With long tunnels that would have thinned out at large depths to reach control rooms, control centers, storage silos and platforms from which to launch, in case of escalation, i nuclear missiles hidden by the glacial cap of the Greenland. Remote coordinates, isolated and covered by the snow that would have well camouflaged the entire underground installation. This was the goal of a clandestine and decidedly top secret plan designated as Iceworm project.
Now that Washington returns to put your eyes on theGreen island covered with ice that stands out between the North of the Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean, raising the opposition of the Kingdom of Denmark, it is impossible not to rethink when the United States, after trying to buy the island without success in 1946, thought to make it a carrier to hit Strategic objectives in Soviet Union in the middle of the cold war.
In the framework of the latent conflict between the western and eastern bloc, the ability of a given power to first and successfully hit the nuclear arsenals opponents, inhibiting the capacity for retaliation of a “second shot“, it represented the only chance of survival. Over the years, American and Soviet strategists concentrated on all those projects that would allow to” hide and protect “from possible opposing attacks the ballistic missiles, which represented deterrence and that they could not yet be transported and launched by the submarines.
Thus, while the Soviets developed armored trains to transport intercontinental ballistic missiles In secret bases of the remote Siberia, the Americans thought about how to hide up to 600 of their nuclear missiles in a coverage installation called “Camp Century “. A large base camp for scientific research that would have arisen less than 200 kilometers from the US air base of Thule, established in 1951, and almost a thousand kilometers from the north point of the earth.
Camp Century and the “Iceworm program”
The structure called Camp Century was officially approved by Denmark, which did not oppose even the installation of a mini nuclear power plant powered by the first Semi-motor nuclear generator of the world, a PM-2A that would have supported the experiments conducted by a team of US scientists. Unfortunately, the real intent of the Pentagon was to establish a base camp to dig a series of tunnels under the ice that would have hosted prefabricated compartments capable of “support storage, transport and launch of nuclear ballistic missiles specially designed“In a secret plan: the Iceworm project.
From the 1959 to 1960, a detachment of theUS Army Engineer Corps He dug several miles of tunnels under the glacial cap of northern Greenland using the method “cut and cover“: Once a large trenches is excavated, an arched steel roof was placed to be laughed by the snow that would soon be recompact and frozen. Once the ice keeping and the feasibility of the entire project is verified, the Pentagon’s planners would have continued to dig the engineers, for tens of thousands square meters, until they reach the ability to install “Furniture launching platforms under the ice“With a distance of 6 kilometers with each other. Ready to be used in case of need, and furniture precisely in order not to be easily located by the Soviets.
In the secret installation, which should have reached an expansion of 3,000 km of underground tunnels, they would have been kept until 600 nuclear missiles in the medium -range modified to resist the extreme cold conditions. Called, to stay on topic, “Iceman missiles“.
Two shocking discoveries
It did not spend much time before the heads of the project, barricaded in the frozen tunnels between military and observers of the secret services, found themselves communicating to the Pentagon that the ice would not guarantee the desired stability. Greenland’s ice, as big as the state of Texas, was neither stationary nor stable, and already in 1962, the ceiling of the room that housed the nuclear reactor had started to lower, imposing expensive maintenance actions that could not be considered as definitive . In 1963, the nuclear reactor was replaced with diesel generators: scoring the first big one setback of the program.
The cagottage samples collected over time had confirmed the “pressing concerns“Of the scientists of the structure, which in the course of five years of research parallel to the military program, had completed fundamental surveys for the study of our planet. According to what reported, the scientists sent by the Pentagon had accumulated over 110,000 years of climatic data. With their analysis they could say with certainty that “The climates of the past had been extremely variable, due to both the changes in the inclination of the earth’s axis, and of the orbital oscillations“, and that the glacial cap will”He was moving so quickly that the entire installation would prove unusable in a few years“. In short, the ambitions of the Polarono polar strategists and the entire Iceworm project was literally melting like snow in the sun.
In 1965 the entire structure was abandoned and the project was buried under a blanket of ice and secrecy. What is still surprising today is that, as regards the Department of Defense of the United States, the equipment, the fuel supplies and the reduced amount of radioactive waste produced by the nuclear reactor they could safely remain where they were.
A dangerous secret
The details of the program that provided for the construction of an American secret missile base in northern Greenland, including dossiers “Strategic value of the Greenland glacial cap“Dating back to 1960, they remained secret for decades. In January of 1995 These dossiers were examined during an investigation into theemployment and storage of nuclear weapons conducted byDanish Institute of Foreign Policy on the mandate of the Parliament. The investigation had been started following the dissemination of declassified information regarding an accident in 1968 at the American Air Base of Thule, and which had led to the loss of a strategic bomber B-52 who transported nuclear weapons. Four bombs at hydrogen Mark 28.
In 2016, a group of scientists said it is “Only a matter of time“And that the current phase of climate change will gradually lead to
Reduction of the ice that covers the remains of Camp Century, bringing to light not only the few remaining secrets of the Iceworm program, but also the old radioactive waste that the Pentagon has abandoned in Greenland.