The entry says that Camp Century had a purpose the Army did not write into its reports. This piece sets out what is known of that purpose, from the two historians who have worked through the papers, Erik Weiss in the United States and Nikolaj Petersen in Denmark, and from the Danish inquiry of 1997 that printed them. It is short because the record is short: a single folder of documents, found by accident, and a plan that was never put to the people whose ice it would have been dug in.

The Army’s bid

In the late 1950s the United States Army was losing the argument over who would hold the country’s nuclear weapons. The Air Force had the bombers and the intercontinental missiles; the Navy was building Polaris submarines; the Army’s Jupiter missiles had been handed to the Air Force in 1956. Around 1960 the Army’s Engineer Studies Center produced a study of the strategic value of the Greenland ice cap, and the idea in it was a way back into the deterrent. Medium-range ballistic missiles could be based under the ice, 600 of them, in a network of tunnels cut in the snow, and moved between launch points by rail so that no Soviet planner could know where any of them was on a given day. Petersen, whose 2008 article in the Scandinavian Journal of History is the fullest account in English, describes it as “the mobile deployment of up to 600 MRBMs under the Greenland Icecap. It was designed around 1960 by the US Army as its bid for a share in the US strategic deterrent, and later presented as a candidate for a NATO nuclear force.”

Camp Century was the test of whether the tunnels could be built and lived in, and the Army was open about half of that. Elmer Clark’s history of the camp, written for the Corps of Engineers in 1965, discusses tunnels as roads: a subsurface roadway system “would be economically feasible only if major installations were envisioned.” Among the advantages he lists for building under the snow are that it “is easier to camouflage” and “is less vulnerable to enemy attack.” In 1962 a short experimental railway was laid in a trench at the camp, and the Army’s Command Information Office put out a news release that August headed “Top of the World Railroad”. Willi Dansgaard, who rode past it in 1964, wrote forty years later that “our experience of the railway in Camp Century clearly shows why Iceworm had to be abandoned.”

The paper of 1962

The project’s formal statement was a secret paper dated 1 February 1962, “Deployment of NATO MRBM’s in the Greenland Icecap (The U.S. Army’s Iceworm Concept)”. Its timing was not an accident. The Kennedy administration was arguing with its allies over a NATO nuclear force, and over whether medium-range missiles for Europe should be on land, at sea or somewhere else; a missile field under Greenland, which was Danish territory and therefore European, was the Army’s answer to a question the State Department was asking. Petersen found the paper in the records of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, with a covering letter of 5 February 1962 from its chairman, Walt Rostow, to Paul Nitze at the Pentagon. That year it was put to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. William Colgan and his colleagues, in their paper of 2016 on what the camp left under the ice, summarise the proposal as a railway beneath 130,000 square kilometres of the ice sheet supporting 600 missiles, and date its rejection to 1963. Dansgaard’s summary of the Danish inquiry’s account gives a tunnel system of about 4,000 kilometres, 11,000 men and 140,000 square kilometres; other accounts give 52,000 square miles. The numbers differ because the plan was never fixed. New tunnels were to be cut every year, so that the network grew and the missiles kept moving.

Petersen’s judgement on why it died is in his abstract: the project “was considered favourably in the higher echelons of the Kennedy Administration, who were cautiously optimistic concerning the possibility of getting the necessary consent from the Danish Government. An analysis of Denmark’s nuclear policy demonstrates the utter lack of realism of this assumption, but the project failed on other – mainly technical and organizational – grounds and was never broached to the Danes.” The technical ground is the subject of the entry. By 1963 the Army’s own survey had the trenches at Camp Century closing at an average of thirty inches a year, faster where anything warm stood in them, and the camp was about to give up year-round occupation. A tunnel system a thousand times longer, with a railway and 600 warm missiles in it, would have needed an army of men with chain saws to keep it open. The organisational ground was that the Army did not get the mission. The medium-range missiles for Europe went to sea.

Denmark

Denmark had kept nuclear weapons off its soil as a matter of policy since 1957, and Greenland was Danish soil. The 1951 agreement that gave the United States its Greenland bases said nothing about what could be stored in them, and in November 1957 the Danish prime minister, H. C. Hansen, had given the American ambassador a paper that the Americans read as permission to store nuclear bombs at Thule without asking. Dansgaard, remembering the official Danish position of the period, put it as a line that has been called a diplomatic masterpiece: “The Danish government does not want to be asked that kind of question.” Camp Century itself was no secret from Denmark. Danish liaison officers served at it, Danish scientists visited it, and a Danish-American agreement set the limit on the reactor’s liquid waste that Clark’s report quotes. What Denmark was not told was what the camp was for.

The papers surfaced in a Danish inquiry that had been called for another reason. In January 1968 an American B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs had crashed on the sea ice off Thule, and in the 1990s, as documents on that accident were released, the Danish parliament asked the Danish Institute of International Affairs to establish what had been in Greenland during the Cold War and who had known. Petersen was on the team. In the United States National Archives, in the Policy Planning Staff’s records for Europe in early 1962, the researchers came on the Iceworm folder by chance. The material was declassified on 26 September 1996, and the institute printed it, with the H. C. Hansen paper and the agreements of 1941 and 1951, in the second volume of Grønland under den kolde krig, published on 17 January 1997. That is when Denmark, and Greenland, learned that the camp in the Army’s films had been a model of a missile field.

What it leaves

Colgan and his colleagues open their abstract with the purpose rather than the camp: “In 1959 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century beneath the surface of the northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet. There they studied the feasibility of deploying ballistic missiles within the ice sheet.” The study answered its question without anyone having to read it as such. The trenches closed, the reactor came out, the camp was abandoned, and the Army’s conclusions of 1965, that undersnow camps were feasible for about ten years with constant maintenance, were the end of Iceworm whether or not the people who wrote them knew the name. What the plan leaves behind is the waste under the ice that the entry’s last section describes, and a question the papers of 1997 opened and nobody has closed: whether a government that was not asked about a thing can be asked to pay for clearing it up.

Sources

• Nikolaj Petersen, “The Iceman That Never Came: ‘Project Iceworm’, the search for a NATO deterrent, and Denmark, 1960–1962”, Scandinavian Journal of History 33 (1), 75–98, 2008. The abstract and the notes are open; the article is paywalled, and this piece relies on them and on the sources below. The notes identify the paper of 1 February 1962, Rostow’s letter of 5 February, the news release on the railway, the folder in the Policy Planning Staff records, its declassification on 26 September 1996 and its printing in the Danish inquiry’s second volume. tandfonline.com
• Danish Institute of International Affairs (DUPI), Grønland under den kolde krig: Dansk og amerikansk sikkerhedspolitik 1945–68, two volumes, Copenhagen, 17 January 1997. Volume 1, pages 319 to 325, analyses Iceworm; volume 2, pages 312 to 363, reproduces the documents. Not available online; cited through Petersen and Dansgaard.
• Erik D. Weiss, “Cold War Under the Ice: The Army’s Bid for a Long-Range Nuclear Role, 1959–1963”, Journal of Cold War Studies 3 (3), 31–58, 2001. The American side, cited by Petersen and by Colgan; paywalled and not read for this piece. doi.org
• Willi Dansgaard, Frozen Annals: Greenland Ice Cap Research, Niels Bohr Institute, 2005, chapter 5, “The Iceworm”: his summary of the Danish inquiry’s account, the Danish government’s line, and the sentence on the railway. nbi.ku.dk
• Elmer F. Clark, Camp Century: Evolution of Concept and History of Design, Construction and Performance, CRREL Technical Report 174, 1965. The subsurface road concept, the advantages of camouflage and invulnerability, the Danish-American agreement on waste, and the closure rates. archive.org
• William Colgan and others, “The abandoned ice sheet base at Camp Century, Greenland, in a warming climate”, Geophysical Research Letters 43, 8091–8096, 2016. The railway of 1962, the proposal to the Joint Chiefs, the 130,000 square kilometres and 600 missiles, and the rejection in 1963. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com