Abandoned missile silo map kansas1/1/2024 ![]() military to use Greenland as a staging area. Danish officials had a policy of no nuclear weapons on Danish soil, even though it allowed the U.S. Nielsen says the experiment also failed because of politics. Problems with the nuclear reactor forced its removal in 1964 and by 1966, the Army had abandoned Camp Century altogether. Operation Iceworm was shut down because the walls of snow and ice kept moving, squeezing the tracks that carried the missile train. All the while, however, planners back at the Pentagon were trying to figure out how to use Camp Century to coordinate a secret missile installation.ĭespite the Cold War propaganda and amazing feats of engineering, the ice-bound underground installation ultimately didn’t work. Army researchers did perform some science, including drilling the first ice core to the base of the Greenland ice sheet, a core that provided information to scientists about the past climate. The underlying public message of Camp Century was to show how ordinary Americans (albeit soldiers) could live and work in a remote location, almost as a stepping stone to a space colony. “We had a hard time finding out about this,” Nielsen says. ![]() Nielsen also found accounts that soldiers living underground worried about exposure to radiation from a nuclear reactor that powered the station. They won a contest to visit Camp Century and their letters and diary entries sent home revealed much about the daily life in their frozen, underground city, according to Kristian Nielsen, head of the Centre for Science Studies at Denmark’s Arhaus University. So, too, were an unlikely pair of Boy Scouts, one from Kansas and one from Demark. Television crews and journalists from National Geographic and the New York Times visited as the camp took shape. The American public didn’t know about Project Iceworm until a Danish Parliament investigation published documents about the secret project in 1997, but they did know about Camp Century. From 1959 to 1961, they dug hundreds of feet into the compacted snow, fashioning an underground city with a sleeping quarters, laboratories, offices, a barber shop, laundry, library and warm showers for 200 soldiers. Once the location was settled, hundreds of military engineers and technicians trekked 150 miles from the existing Thule Air Base along Greenland’s northwest coast to the Camp Century site. Here's How the Truman Doctrine Established the Cold War
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