The Real Reason America Built a City Under Greenland’s Ice — It Wasn’t Just Research

Camp Century was America's secret city under the Greenland ice: a nuclear-powered Cold War base sold as research, and built as the test site for Project Iceworm, a plan to hide 600 nuclear missiles beneath the ice sheet. In 1959 the US Army began carving tunnels into the Greenland ice cap, about 130 to 150 miles from Thule Air Base. Officially, Camp Century was a "remote research community" with a chapel, a barbershop, a cinema and a portable PM-2A nuclear reactor. A 1960 Army study saw something else: a hidden, mobile nuclear missile force on rails beneath an area about three times the size of Denmark. This documentary follows the money and the politics behind it: the 1946 American offer to buy Greenland, the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement, the forced relocation of the Inughuit from Thule, Eisenhower's New Look budget fight that left the Army with the smallest share, and Danish Prime Minister H.C. Hansen's secret 1957 statement on nuclear weapons, a "no" that worked like a quiet yes. We also look at how the ice itself defeated the plan, the reactor's radiation problems, the ice core that became one of the earliest long climate records, the 1968 Thule B-52 crash with four hydrogen bombs, the 1995 Thulegate scandal, and the Cold War waste that climate change may one day expose. Drawing on declassified US diplomatic records, Danish historians, Greenlandic voices and the scientists still monitoring the site. Key topics covered: Camp Century and Project Iceworm explained Why Greenland mattered between Washington and Moscow The 1953 Thule relocation and Qaanaaq H.C. Hansen's secret statement and Denmark's nuclear policy Soviet warnings to Denmark in 1957 The PM-2A portable nuclear reactor under the ice Army versus Navy: the budget war behind Iceworm Ice cores, Willi Dansgaard and a green Greenland 416,000 years ago The 1968 Thule B-52 crash and Operation Crested Ice Thulegate, buried waste and who pays for the cleanup NASA's 2024 radar image of the city under the ice #CampCentury #ProjectIceworm #Greenland #ColdWar #NuclearHistory #Thule #Denmark #MilitaryHistory