How NASA Discovered a Military Base under Greenland

Buried here, under the Greenlandic ice  sheet, is an abandoned nuclear powered   military base. Built in secret by  the US Army in Danish territory. And remarkably we have hundreds of pages of  declassified documents and footage detailing   the construction of this base which we have  used to create this model of the facility. Today, it’s hidden beneath 90 metres of snow,   visible only to the surprise  of ground radar scanning crews   flying overhead. Appearing as bewildering  anomalous lines on their radar screens. These were the remnants of Project Iceworm. Project Iceworm was born from  an imagined nightmare cold war   scenario. A secret nuclear missile  silo that ensured mutual destruction,   even in the event the Continental  United States was wiped out. But the apocalyptic logic that underpins it,  and the military interest that has the United   States government trying to buy Greenland  for a second time, is still alive and well. This declassified document, titled “The Strategic   Importance of Greenland” gives us some  insights into the mindset of the United   States as they began a mission to break  international law for this Project. In particular, this paragraph: “In 1950 the nuclear deterrent capability  of NATO depended almost completely upon the   manned strategic air command bombers. Since  at this time aircraft from USA-bases could   not reach any targets in the Soviet Union  and since Greenland is on the orthodrome   between the two superpowers, the need for  airbases in the Arctic was very apparent. ” To help fill this gap in NATO’s  capability, the United States   was given permission by its NATO ally,  Denmark, to build Thule Air Force Base. Thule, here on the Eastern Coast  of Greenland, was, at its height,   a massive operation involving 13,000 personnel. A  hive of activity in an otherwise desolate region,   keeping early warning radars and a  fleet of B-47 Stratojets operational,   allowing them to fly regular  reconnaissance missions to Russia. That made it an ideal logistics hub  for Project Iceworm. By air and sea,   thousands of tons of construction  materials and machines could arrive. Where they would then be dragged 240  kilometres inland by specialized arctic   tractor trains. Here they go to work  excavating the vast network of tunnels. Peter Plows, based on snow millers used to  clear avalanche snow from the Swiss Alps,   were used to cut narrow trenches into the glacier.    These things made short work of the ice.   Churning through 900 cubic meters per hour,   throwing the excavated material over the  sides of the trench like giant snowblowers. As other heavy machinery arrived to clear the  debris. But simply digging a trench into the   snow does not create a nuclear powered missile  base. They needed to put a roof on this structure. The workers used an ‘undercutting’  technique which widened the trench   floor by simply scraping off the walls  at the bottom. This kept the top narrow,   which would later be closed off  with corrugated steel arches. Each trench was about 8 metre by 8 metres,   with an additional half metre of snow  filled in on top of the corrugated roof. Deeper trenches were worked in stages,  with the Peter Plows throwing their snow   onto shelves cut into the ice above, which in  turn would be plowed and thrown to the surface. It’s difficult, uncertain work in one  of the most brutal places on Earth.   Here temperatures regularly fall to negative 60  degrees. Not only is that enough to freeze skin   in less than a minute, it’s terrible for machines  too. Kerosene for aircraft turns solid at that   point, diesel gels, as do most lubricants. Engines  won’t start up and hydraulic pistons seize up.    Heated garages would have to be built directly  into the snow to keep these machines operable. The Sun disappears for a quarter of the  year and there’s no shelter from Greenland’s   infamous piteraq winds that exceed 325 km/h,  stronger than category 5 hurricanes, or from   the snowstorms that can smother the landscape  under three meters of snow in just two days. While this scale was never reached. The  final goal of Project Iceworm called for   tunnels ten times the length of the  London Underground. Spread out over   130,000 square kilometers,  an area larger than Greece. With 2100 launch tubes scattered  throughout, hosting 600 minutemen   intercontinental ballistic missiles that could  shuttle around the hidden base on train tracks. In order to prevent a counter  strike the soviets would need   to know the location of every single launch tube,   and each blast wasted on an empty tube saves  a more valuable target from destruction. Camp Century was a fraction of the size,   designed to prove it could be done. From  construction techniques, to installing the   first ever portable nuclear reactor under  an ice sheet. This was a giant experiment. Over 16 months of construction, including  through the constant arctic darkness,   a network of 26 tunnels totalling 3  kilometres in length were excavated.

Each tunnel had its function, with buildings  embedded inside to support the base or test   its military capability. The longest line  is 340 meters long, dubbed ‘Main Street’,   and it branches into quarters for 225 men, a  hospital, a library, a gym, a church and theater,   and railway tracks were laid down inside to  see how well they could move around missiles. The “Minuteman Mobility Test Train” seen here   is one effort to get it to  work in the continental US. The train was intended to be the  iceworm that the project took its   name from. Shuttling a nuclear missile  around these hidden underground passages. But this project needed a special variant  of the Minuteman, and Greenland’s proximity   to the Soviet Union allowed for modifications  to better suit it to operating under the ice. They came up with the Iceman. This was  not an intercontinental ballistic missile,   it was an intermediate range missile, and that  meant it could have one less stage than the   Minuteman’s three stage solid rockets. Shortening  the rocket considerably, and making the process   of rotating the missile into the vertical  position under the ice considerably easier. The Iceman warhead was going to be about  twice as powerful as the Minuteman’s,   with a range of 5300 kilometres, they  would cover 80% of Soviet Territory. But to keep the camp running and the  missiles ready, a crew had to stay   with them under the ice the entire time. The  nearest city was over 1500 kilometers away. This crew needed to eat, sleep,  shower and unwind under the ice.   Living spaces were created from  pre-fabricated wooden structures   assembled inside the tunnels. The walls  of these structures were separated from   the ice walls to prevent the heat inside  from conducting to the ice and melting it. Food and fresh personnel were regularly  flown in, but otherwise the site had to   remain self-sufficient. It was closer to  living in a submarine than in an Army camp. When the US Army proposed this plan in 1960,  they estimated this massive underground base   would become operational within three years. The  cost would be 2. 4 billion dollars, more than five   times that of the USS Enterprise aircraft  carrier launched that year, it took 400   million to run every year after that. From their  perspective, it was a perfectly justified expense. The United States was in the middle of  hallucinating a Missile Gap between NATO   and the USSR, combining faulty CIA reports and  JFK’s election campaign rhetoric to conjure a   vast Soviet arsenal of nuclear missiles that far  outnumbered American ICBMs. Widely shared reports   projected 500 ICBMs by 1961, rising to 1500 by  1963, while the US would only have 130 by then. There was no way to defend against a  Soviet first strike with so many missiles,   so the only strategic option was deterrence with  a reliable counter-strike. But, how to assure it? The US Navy’s solution was a fleet  of submarines roaming the oceans. In 1960, they got a major upgrade.   After spending billions of dollars,   the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic  missile was ready. It allowed Navy ballistic   missile submarines to launch without breaking the  surface, massively increasing their lethality. The Air Force had their B-52  bombers. They were fast,   nuclear-armed and could strike  across 14,000 kilometers. So, Operation Chrome Dome was started: fleets of  B-52 would fly non-stop from airfields all around   the world, so there’d always be some of  them in the air if a nuclear war broke out. They kept this up for seven  years, stopping only because   the B-52s kept dropping live atomic bombs  in accidents, but that’s another matter. That left the Army, and they wanted to feel  as big and mighty as the other branches too. Project Iceworm would be their  ticket into the deterrence role,   granting them the nuclear missiles they  wanted and a fortress to deploy them from.   However, the Danish had a policy of not  provoking the Soviet Union right on its border,   nor allowing nukes to be based on its territory.   That would turn it into a prime target in case   of a nuclear war on top of heightening Cold War  tensions, something made terrifically clear by   the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the Soviets  tried to smuggle missiles onto America’s doorstep. And so, the US Army pinned their hopes on  just keeping their work secret to avoid   provoking the Soviet Union, which  if you think about for 5 seconds,   you realize that that’s not how deterrence works. Trying to hide something this power hungry  demanded nuclear power. Anything else would   require shipments of fuel too conspicuous to hide. But that didn’t stop them from dragging  these 110 tanks full of diesel to run   its generators and machinery on a 70 hour  journey across the arctic to Camp Century. And so they constructed this nuclear  reactor inside tunnels of ice,   which the Army documented in incredible detail in  both film and this downloadable 164 page report.

This was the PM-2A, the first portable  nuclear reactor. A 1. 5 megawatt nuclear   reactor designed specifically to be  transportable in 37 containerised   modules. It began to arrive at Thule during the  final phase of construction aboard this ship. The whole operation really made me reconsider  how complicated nuclear reactors actually are.    A nuclear power plant is actually quite simple  if you ignore everything that can go wrong. You   just need a nuclear heat source, in this case  extremely high purity Uranium 235. That you   can see being handled with all the safety  equipment the US military could afford. In order to use as compact a design as  possible and allow them to be used for   as long as possible between refuelings,  these were 93% enriched uranium 235.    Modern commercial nuclear reactors use  uranium enriched to a maximum of 5%. Each of these cores contained 500 grams of Uranium  235, the rest was stainless steel. Which makes   this handling of the reactor cores even more  concerning as a layman, but at this stage these   fresh cores are just emitting alpha particles that  pose little risk to your DNA, however they are so   enriched that just putting too many fuel rods  close together would cause them to go critical. The team heading the project  carefully monitored sensors and   made calculations with slides rules  to measure one very important factor “The total U235 content of the assembled core is  13. 375 kilograms. Coefficient of reactivity 0. 935” See, even the US Army uses metric  for all the important stuff. That   coefficient of reactivity is very important. When it reaches 1 the number of neutrons being  released matches needed   to sustain the reaction. As long as it stays  below 1 the reaction cannot sustain itself. So we need a way to control that number. Here the  engineers slowly place the cores into the reactor,   taking note of their location on a piece of  paper, and then once everything appears safe,   the control rods begin to be raised slowly while  that coefficient of reactivity is monitored. Control rods are simply large blocks of  material that are excellent at absorbing   neutrons. Boron is the most commonly  used material. But when it gets struck   by a neutron it splits into lithium and helium,  and can never be used again. It’s gone forever. Not great for a secret nuclear base. So  in this case they used Europium Oxide   control rods. Europium is like the cat  of control rods. It has multiple lives. Absorbing neutron, after neutron, after  neutron, after neutron,   until it can’t take anymore and undergoes  beta decay to become Gadolinium 156 And as these control rods rise the neutrons  can finally reach the reactor cores,   and the number of fission reactions begins rise. Now here this with all five control rods withdrawn  6. 24 inches. PM-2a went critical at 0652. Ah shite, I thought we were  gonna have it all in metric   units. That’s 158. 5 millimetres  for the engineers in the room. Now that the core was critical it was  going to be creating A LOT of steam,   and from here a nuclear reactor acts pretty  much exactly like any other power generator. The core heated a primary closed  loop of highly radioactive high   pressure water which exchanged  its heat with a steam generator,   which had a secondary closed loop of water which  fed steam to the 1. 5 megawatt turbine generator,   before running to a condenser to  be cooled back into liquid water. But all closed loops need a final exit for the  heat, and this is typically done with an open   loop water heat exchanger. How do you solve that  problem when you are surrounded by ice, not water? This actually posed a massive problem,   even melting the ice and using that wasn’t  an option. In the event of an accident you   couldn’t run the risk of your coolant lines  freezing. So water was out of the question. The outside temperature could get down to  negative 60 degrees, so why not use air   instead? 3 air blast chillers used electric  motors to draw air over another closed loop   coolant line filled with glycol, which cooled the  secondary closed loop water line in the condenser. Incredibly the engineers involved with  this project underestimated the effect   of thermal expansion during assembly. The  glycol aluminium pipes were test fitted in   typical room temperatures, and assemblers  on site had to leave the maximum allowable   space between the ends of the pipes  to get everything to fit because they   shrunk so much in the arctic. Again, this is  a coolant line contaminated with radiation. This system didn’t eliminate the waste  water problem altogether. Lines leak,

pressure needs to be vented, and radiation isn’t  all too bothered about physical barriers. They   needed somewhere to dump all the waste  water and sewage from this facility. They drilled a massive hole in the ground with  steam and began dumping all the waste water,   sewage and radioactive waste into  this giant reservoir. A reservoir of   radioactive human waste that remains  buried under Greenland to this day. What blows my mind most about all this is that  they were essentially building this entire base   like an IKEA build by numbers kit. We get  references to it in the declassified report Every piece had markings indicating where it  belonged and what it would be connecting to.    And incredibly we have report after report  of how this construction project went wrong.    At one point a shroud for an air  blast cooler was put on backwards   because the markings were printed in correctly. We also got reports of how the control rod  racks weren’t straight and had to be manually   straightened with a blow torch and a wet cloth.   Incredible craftsmanship, but still worrying. The PM-2A was the real official objective of  Camp Century. This was an incredibly advanced,   experimental nuclear power  plant. The first ever to be   fully constructed out of parts shipped  through standard army logistics chains. But this was a ridiculously dangerous  design that could go supercritical   with some very basic mistakes. That  exact thing happened with the SL-1,   another product of the Army Nuclear Power  Program in 1961. When an operator just had   a little woopsie and pulled a control  rod out by 4 times the distance that was   required and caused the entire cooling pool  to explode instantly as superheated steam. That accident killed 3 people  that had to be buried in lead   coffins because their bodies were so radioactive. But that never came to pass for Camp Century.   That accident taught the Army Nuclear Power   Program that the reactor shouldn’t exceed that  0. 935 coefficient of reactivity number even if   one control rod is fully withdrawn. It would  only go critical if someone managed to pull out   a second rod too far. A redundant safety feature  that could only be foiled by a redundant idiot. Something else brought Camp Century to  its knees. After 33 months of operation   from first criticality in October 1960  to July 1963 the reactor was shut down. What defeated it, and ended Project Iceworm, was  not cost, technical difficulty or even political   pressure. It was the very ice they relied upon.   Greenland’s glaciers moved faster than expected,   so they would gradually crush the tunnels in their  path in a matter of years instead of decades. This is what they looked like in 1961.   And here they are just 4 years later. The only way around this problem was to basically  re-build the entire camp every two years.    Camp Century’s staff were already forced  to shave nearly two meters of ice off the   walls of their reactor room to prevent  the equipment inside from being mangled. It might have been feasible for a small  research project to sustain itself this way, but the US Army balked at having to  do this for the full-scale Project   Iceworm across thousands of kilometers.   There was no way they’d put sensitive   strategic capability at the mercy of  collapsing tunnels and bent railways. So, in 1966, Camp Century  was shut down, and by 1967,   it was abandoned. The nuclear reactor,  along with its radioactive fuel was removed, But that cavern in the ice remained. Filled  with 24 million litres of radioactive human   sewage. Along with 200,000 litres of  diesel fuel. All sealed inside the ice. In 2024 NASA got a glimpse of  the buried ecological disaster   with a Gulfstream equipped with  Synthetic Aperture Radar pods. It has drifted 93 meters under the ice,   and while its creators assumed this would be  an ice tomb it could never escape. That very   same Gulfstream was sent to measure the  accelerating movements of the ice sheet.    It’s expected that this buried ecological  disaster will resurface in about 100 years. No-one has ever attempted to create large-scale  installations under ice since Project Iceworm,   as far as we know. The Danish government didn’t   even know Camp Century’s true purpose  until 1996 when it was declassified. Despite the pre-roll of this  declassified film stating it   was done with the cooperation  of the Danish Government. And despite recent geopolitical controversy,  the US military still operates in Greenland.    I myself flew into Camp Raven aboard  a ski-equipment LC-130 on a resupply   mission to researchers. We made an entire  video about that trip that you can watch. And Thule is still there, now called the  Pituffik Space Base. (bee-doo-FEEK ) Helping   track the missile threats that  it was once trying to pose. We have created a new show using an incredible new  animation technique we developed with Lumafield,

whose industrial scanners allow us  to create these volumetric models   of anything we can fit inside,  allowing us to explore every   hidden nook and cranny of some of the  most intricate devices ever conceived. This week we explore the Nokia 3310, exploring how  its rugged, cheap, and yet incredibly innovative   design revolutionized mobile phones. Exploring  these CT scans is just so visually stimulating   we knew we needed to make a full series  using this new technique we developed,   and with the help of Nebula we hired a new  animator with a background in electronic   engineering to take the technique we developed  and help us make one of these videos every month. Next month we will be breaking down  the incredible first generation ipod,   which has a surprisingly amount of  electromechanical devices inside. It’s available exclusively to Nebula subscribers.   A monthly subscription is usually 6 dollars, but   with my link, or the QR code on screen right now  you can get an entire year's membership for just   $30. We are currently running this show as  a pilot, so if you want to see more of it,   you gotta sign up now. Or if you are sick of  signing up to new subscription services like I am,   we created a lifetime membership, if you  would just rather pay it and forget it. In a time when creative work is  getting harder and harder to find,   Nebula helped me hire a young  talented animator and create a   new series. That’s what Nebula is about.   Supporting creative work made by humans