President Trump's recent initiative to buy Greenland from Denmark is reminiscent of the long-standing U. S. interest in this region of the planet. Greenland was viewed by the top military and political leadership of the United States as an important outpost in the fight against the USSR, since the basing of aircraft and missiles on it gave an important advantage at the beginning of the proposed war. To deploy the US army on the island, it was planned to create bases on the island that could provide themselves with autonomous energy and everything necessary in case of loss of communication with the "mainland". One of these bases was Camp of the Century, which was created as part of the large Ice Worm project.
The emergence of Americans in Greenland
The US military gained access to Greenland in 1941, even before the US entered the war with Germany. Under an agreement signed by Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Danish Ambassador Henrik de Hauffmann, the United States took over the protection of the island, since the Danish kingdom by that time was occupied by German troops and could not take care of the island. In addition, there was a danger of German troops landing there or the arrival of a Danish collaborationist administration. The agreement allowed the United States to build a large Thule Air Force base on the island, which became the northernmost of all such American military installations.
Construction of ice tunnels and installation of residential barracks in them.
At the end of the war, Denmark regained its sovereignty, but the US military presence on the island did not end. On the contrary, the beginning of the Cold War prompted the White House and the Pentagon to think about expanding the American military contingent in the Arctic. An attack by each other's superpowers across the North Pole was quite possible. Soviet polar stations and American geographical expeditions have shown that the construction of special military facilities beyond the Arctic Circle for modern technology is not such an insurmountable task. The Cold War, having captured the Arctic, should have become truly cold from that moment!
In 1951, the old agreement on military bases in Greenland was revised and renegotiated. Denmark was a member of NATO and therefore agreed to the construction of new military facilities on its territory related to the protection of the United States and Canada and the entire alliance in general from the Soviet threat. In addition to Thule, two more Air Force bases arose - Narssarsuaq and Sordenstrom. All three sites were primarily supposed to provide fuel for strategic bombers on their way to targets in the USSR. In addition, the Americans later deployed BMEWS and DEW Line facilities on the island.
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"Camp of the Century" and "Ice Worm"
However, in 1959, construction began on another large facility, the so-called "Century Camp", 240 km from the Thule base. The latter is located on the coast (now there are several hundred maintenance personnel left there), while the new site was prepared directly in the Greenland ice sheet, which remained untouched for tens of thousands of years. The climatic conditions of the area in which the construction was planned were incredibly difficult: winds up to 200 km / h, temperatures down to -55 ° C, snow that could fall any day of the year. Despite all this, it was necessary to build a shelter capable of accommodating 200 soldiers and providing them all with the necessary for carrying out combat duty.
Airlift of materials and the necessary equipment for the construction of the base was impossible, because the only way of transportation was a giant sled, which was pulled by tractors at a speed of 3 km / h, overcoming the path from Tula in about 70 hours.
Tunnel construction.
Naturally, for such a large-scale work, even if it was carried out extremely far from any civilization (even the Greenlandic settlements were located strongly to the south, and the Eskimos who lived on the site of "Thule" were relocated to another place), some kind of cover was needed. Such a cover was scientific geological and glaciological work, which was also carried out during the construction process, but, of course, was not the main goal of the Americans' activities - these surveys were carried out by units of the US Corps of Engineers.
As tunneling shields to create huge trenches in the snow and ice, the builders used modified rotary snow blowers. The trenches were reinforced with steel beams, on which steel sheets were placed on top and again thrown with snow and ice. Inside the resulting tunnels, wooden barracks were installed, which did not adjoin the walls so as not to heat the snow. The longest tunnel, according to historians, was 300 meters long.
Additionally, a system of tunnels was created directly in the glacier itself. Engineers built a well in one of the tunnels, which provided fresh water, and also brought several dozen passages to the surface in case of emergency evacuation of personnel. In just a few years of the base's existence, 26 tunnels with a total length of about 3 km were built. The base included sleeping quarters, a kitchen and a dining room, a hospital and a laundry room, a communications center, as well as a chapel, a lounge, and even a separate room for a hairdresser.
The heart of the base was the small nuclear reactor PM-2, installed in 1960, the delivery of which became a real headache for the engineering troops, since the metal became fragile due to the harsh cold weather. As one of the builders explained, "we followed all the instructions and even surpassed them, because there was no certainty that it would work as it should." However, the reactor operated successfully for 33 months before it was shut down and dismantled.
Entrance to the underground city.
The construction of Camp of the Century was supposed to be the beginning of the ambitious Iceworm project, the goal of which would be to build tens and hundreds of rocket launchers directly in the glaciers of Greenland. Using the experience of the "Camp of the Century", US Army engineers expected to build 135,000 km² of tunnels (three times the size of Denmark) with the possibility of expanding to 260,000 km². Here 600 missiles could be hidden on launchers with 60 command centers. 200 soldiers of the "Camp of the Century" were to replace 11,000 troops, whose entire service would take place under the ice. For these launchers, a modification of the Minuteman missile was developed, capable of hitting targets on the territory of the Soviet Union.
Such serious work in Greenland, albeit within the framework of an agreement between the NATO allies, could not but disturb the Danish government. The Danes expressed their displeasure that the American command and the government simply did not inform Copenhagen how much work would be done on the island. However, the Danes, as a junior partner in this situation, could not do anything. It would have been impossible to force the Americans out, and it was impossible to force them to terminate the previous agreements.
The Americans, in turn, have invested too much effort and money in the Ice Worm to simply abandon it. The Pentagon generals still firmly believed that the stake on Greenland would pay off in a future war:
A similar conclusion was made in a special report of the engineering troops regarding the use of the Greenland ice sheet to create launchers. The US army, in general, did not want to follow the lead of politicians who tried to promote the project of creating a united armed forces of NATO, and won back funding for itself by any means. Including betting on such exotic as the Antarctic belt in Greenland.
Construction of a nuclear power plant.
However, the command was forced to curtail the operation not due to lack of funds or pressure from politicians from Congress or the White House. It turned out that nature itself opposed the project. Movements of ice and snow, as well as the threat of melting due to the economic activities of the "Camp of the Century" have shown that it is extremely unreasonable to place such large objects in glaciers. The likelihood of an accident at launch turned out to be too high - ice movements could damage the launch systems or even fill up the charges in the under-ice storage facilities. The catastrophe of 1968, when a bomber with nuclear warheads on board crashed near the Thule, showed the validity of fears about the Greenland weather and the impact of climate on the mechanisms.
Also, problems were revealed with a nuclear reactor, which had to be stopped. The Danes have been constantly worried about nuclear materials, and they have increased pressure on the United States to maintain Greenland's status as a nuclear-free zone.
The closure of the camp and its current state
In 1964, the reactor ceased to operate, and in 1966 the American military finally left the camp. The tunnels gradually collapsed, burying the remains of the equipment and, most importantly, the storage with the reactor's radioactive waste - at the end of 1962, it already contained about 180,000 liters. The reactor was taken out, but everything that remained of its work was stored in the tunnels, as the military considered that the glacier itself was a reliable shelter.
Left: at the control panel at the station. Right: installation of a waste container for a nuclear reactor.
Until 1997, the existence of the Ice Worm program and the entire military component of the Camp of the Century were classified, and therefore it was not clear what and in what quantities the Americans left in Greenland. The Tula base continued to work, but no one spoke about the camp located several hundred kilometers away. Only after the end of the Cold War, a Danish expedition explored the remains of the camp, and in 2016 it turned out that, due to the melting of glaciers, it could be completely free of snow cover by the end of the 21st century. Equipment and radioactive waste storage will be uncovered, which can lead to leakage and contamination of the surrounding area.
Yaroslav Golubinov