How NASA Discovered a Military Base under Greenland

0:00 Buried here, under the Greenlandic ice sheet,

0:03 is an abandoned nuclear powered military base.

0:05 Built in secret by the US Army in Danish territory.

0:09 And remarkably we have hundreds of pages

0:12 of declassified documents and footage detailing the construction

0:15 of this base which we have used to create this model of the facility.

0:20 Today, it’s hidden beneath 90 metres of snow,

0:23 visible only to the surprise of ground radar scanning crews flying overhead.

0:28 Appearing as bewildering anomalous lines on their radar screens.

0:33 These were the remnants of Project Iceworm.

0:38 Project Iceworm was born from an imagined nightmare cold war scenario.

0:43 A secret nuclear missile silo that ensured mutual destruction,

0:47 even in the event the Continental United States was wiped out.

0:51 But the apocalyptic logic that underpins it,

0:54 and the military interest that has the United States

0:57 government trying to buy Greenland for a second time, is still alive and well.

1:02 This declassified document, titled “The Strategic Importance of Greenland”

1:06 gives us some insights into the mindset of the United States as they began

1:11 a mission to break international law for this Project.

1:14 In particular, this paragraph:

1:17 “In 1950 the nuclear deterrent capability of NATO depended

1:20 almost completely upon the manned strategic air command bombers.

1:23 Since at this time aircraft from USA-bases could not reach any targets

1:27 in the Soviet Union and since Greenland

1:29 is on the orthodrome between the two superpowers,

1:31 the need for airbases in the Arctic was very

1:34 apparent.” To help fill this gap in NATO’s capability,

1:37 the United States was given permission by its NATO ally,

1:40 Denmark, to build Thule Air Force Base.

1:43 Thule, here on the Eastern Coast of Greenland, was,

1:46 at its height, a massive operation involving 13,000 personnel.

1:49 A hive of activity in an otherwise desolate region,

1:54 keeping early warning radars and a fleet of B-47 Stratojets operational,

1:58 allowing them to fly regular reconnaissance missions to Russia.

2:02 That made it an ideal logistics hub for Project Iceworm.

2:06 By air and sea, thousands of tons

2:08 of construction materials and machines could arrive.

2:11 Where they would then be dragged 240

2:14 kilometres inland by specialized arctic tractor trains.

2:17 Here they go to work excavating the vast network of tunnels.

2:21 Peter Plows, based on snow millers used

2:23 to clear avalanche snow from the Swiss Alps,

2:26 were used to cut narrow trenches into the glacier.

2:29 These things made short work of the ice.

2:31 Churning through 900 cubic meters per hour,

2:34 throwing the excavated material over the sides

2:36 of the trench like giant snowblowers.

2:39 As other heavy machinery arrived to clear the debris.

2:42 But simply digging a trench into the snow

2:44 does not create a nuclear powered missile base.

2:47 They needed to put a roof on this structure.

2:50 The workers used an ‘undercutting’ technique which widened the trench

2:53 floor by simply scraping off the walls at the bottom.

2:56 This kept the top narrow,

2:58 which would later be closed off with corrugated steel arches.

3:01 Each trench was about 8 metre by 8 metres,

3:04 with an additional half metre of snow filled in on top of the corrugated roof.

3:08 Deeper trenches were worked in stages,

3:10 with the Peter Plows throwing their snow onto shelves cut into the ice above,

3:14 which in turn would be plowed and thrown to the surface.

3:18 It’s difficult, uncertain work in one of the most brutal places on Earth.

3:22 Here temperatures regularly fall to negative 60 degrees.

3:25 Not only is that enough to freeze skin in less than a minute,

3:29 it’s terrible for machines too.

3:31 Kerosene for aircraft turns solid at that point,

3:34 diesel gels, as do most lubricants.

3:36 Engines won’t start up and hydraulic pistons seize up.

3:40 Heated garages would have to be built directly

3:43 into the snow to keep these machines operable.

3:45 The Sun disappears for a quarter of the year and there’s

3:48 no shelter from Greenland’s infamous piteraq winds that exceed 325 km/h,

3:53 stronger than category 5 hurricanes,

3:56 or from the snowstorms that can smother the landscape

4:00 under three meters of snow in just two days.

4:03 While this scale was never reached.

4:05 The final goal of Project Iceworm called for tunnels

4:07 ten times the length of the London Underground.

4:10 Spread out over 130,000 square kilometers, an area larger than Greece.

4:15 With 2100 launch tubes scattered throughout,

4:19 hosting 600 minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles that could

4:23 shuttle around the hidden base on train tracks.

4:26 In order to prevent a counter strike the soviets would

4:29 need to know the location of every single launch tube,

4:32 and each blast wasted on an empty

4:35 tube saves a more valuable target from destruction.

4:38 Camp Century was a fraction of the size, designed to prove it could be done.

4:43 From construction techniques,

4:44 to installing the first ever portable nuclear reactor under an ice sheet.

4:49 This was a giant experiment.

4:51 Over 16 months of construction, including through the constant arctic darkness,

4:56 a network of 26 tunnels totalling 3 kilometres in length were excavated.

5:01 Each tunnel had its function, with buildings embedded inside to support

5:04 the base or test its military capability.

5:07 The longest line is 340 meters long, dubbed ‘Main Street’,

5:11 and it branches into quarters for 225 men, a hospital, a library,

5:16 a gym,a church and theater, and railway tracks were laid down inside

5:20 to see how well they could move around missiles.

5:23 The “Minuteman Mobility Test Train” seen here is one

5:26 effort to get it to work in the continental US.

5:30 The train was intended to be the iceworm that the project took its name from.

5:34 Shuttling a nuclear missile around these hidden underground passages.

5:38 But this project needed a special variant of the Minuteman,

5:41 and Greenland’s proximity to the Soviet Union allowed for modifications

5:45 to better suit it to operating under the ice.

5:48 They came up with the Iceman.

5:50 This was not an intercontinental ballistic missile,

5:53 it was an intermediate range missile, and that meant it could have one less

5:56 stage than the Minuteman’s three stage solid rockets.

5:59 Shortening the rocket considerably,

6:00 and making the process of rotating the missile

6:04 into the vertical position under the ice considerably easier.

6:07 The Iceman warhead was going to be about twice as powerful as the Minuteman’s,

6:11 with a range of 5300 kilometres, they would cover 80% of Soviet Territory.

6:17 But to keep the camp running and the missiles ready,

6:19 a crew had to stay with them under the ice the entire time.

6:23 The nearest city was over 1500 kilometers away.

6:27 This crew needed to eat, sleep, shower and unwind under the ice.

6:31 Living spaces were created from pre-fabricated

6:34 wooden structures assembled inside the tunnels.

6:36 The walls of these structures were separated from the ice walls

6:39 to prevent the heat inside from conducting to the ice and melting it.

6:44 Food and fresh personnel were regularly flown

6:46 in, but otherwise the site had to remain self-sufficient.

6:49 It was closer to living in a submarine than in an Army camp.

6:53 When the US Army proposed this plan in 1960,

6:56 they estimated this massive underground base

6:59 would become operational within three years.

7:01 The cost would be 2.4 billion dollars, more than five times that of the USS

7:07 Enterprise aircraft carrier launched that year,

7:09 it took 400 million to run every year after that.

7:13 From their perspective, it was a perfectly justified expense.

7:18 The United States was in the middle of hallucinating

7:21 a Missile Gap between NATO and the USSR,

7:24 combining faulty CIA reports and JFK’s election campaign rhetoric to conjure

7:28 a vast Soviet arsenal of nuclear missiles that far outnumbered American ICBMs.

7:34 Widely shared reports projected 500 ICBMs by 1961, rising to 1500 by 1963,

7:41 while the US would only have 130 by then.

7:46 There was no way to defend against a Soviet first strike with so many missiles,

7:51 so the only strategic option was deterrence with a reliable counter-strike.

7:56 But, how to assure it?

7:59 The US Navy’s solution was a fleet of submarines roaming the oceans.

8:03 In 1960, they got a major upgrade.

8:06 After spending billions of dollars,

8:08 the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile was ready.

8:11 It allowed Navy ballistic missile submarines

8:13 to launch without breaking the surface, massively increasing their lethality.

8:18 The Air Force had their B-52 bombers.

8:20 They were fast, nuclear-armed and could strike across 14,000 kilometers.

8:25 So, Operation Chrome Dome was started:

8:27 fleets of B-52 would fly non-stop from airfields all around the world,

8:32 so there’d always be some of them in the air if a nuclear war broke out.

8:37 They kept this up for seven years,

8:39 stopping only because the B-52s kept dropping live atomic bombs in accidents,

8:44 but that’s another matter.

8:46 That left the Army, and they wanted to feel

8:49 as big and mighty as the other branches too.

8:51 Project Iceworm would be their ticket into the deterrence role,

8:55 granting them the nuclear missiles they wanted

8:58 and a fortress to deploy them from.

9:00 However, the Danish had a policy of not

9:03 provoking the Soviet Union right on its border,

9:05 nor allowing nukes to be based on its territory.

9:08 That would turn it into a prime target in case

9:11 of a nuclear war on top of heightening Cold War tensions,

9:14 something made terrifically clear by the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962,

9:19 when the Soviets tried to smuggle missiles onto America’s doorstep.

9:23 And so, the US Army pinned their hopes on just

9:26 keeping their work secret to avoid provoking the Soviet Union,

9:29 which if you think about for 5 seconds,

9:31 you realize that that’s not how deterrence works.

9:34 Trying to hide something this power hungry demanded nuclear power.

9:38 Anything else would require shipments of fuel too conspicuous to hide.

9:42 But that didn’t stop them from dragging these 110 tanks full of diesel to run

9:47 its generators and machinery on a 70

9:50 hour journey across the arctic to Camp Century.

9:53 And so they constructed this nuclear reactor inside tunnels of ice,

9:57 which the Army documented in incredible detail

10:00 in both film and this downloadable 164 page report.

10:04 This was the PM-2A, the first portable nuclear reactor.

10:08 A 1.5 megawatt nuclear reactor designed specifically

10:11 to be transportable in 37 containerised modules.

10:14 It began to arrive at Thule during

10:17 the final phase of construction aboard this ship.

10:20 The whole operation really made me

10:22 reconsider how complicated nuclear reactors actually are.

10:25 A nuclear power plant is actually quite simple

10:28 if you ignore everything that can go wrong.

10:30 You just need a nuclear heat source,

10:33 in this case extremely high purity Uranium 235.

10:36 That you can see being handled with all

10:39 the safety equipment the US military could afford.

10:42 In order to use as compact a design as possible and allow

10:45 them to be used for as long as possible between refuelings,

10:49 these were 93% enriched uranium 235.

10:53 Modern commercial nuclear reactors use uranium enriched to a maximum of 5%.

10:59 Each of these cores contained 500 grams of Uranium 235,

11:03 the rest was stainless steel.

11:05 Which makes this handling of the reactor cores even more concerning as a layman,

11:09 but at this stage these fresh cores are just

11:12 emitting alpha particles that pose little risk to your DNA,

11:15 however they are so enriched that just putting too many

11:19 fuel rods close together would cause them to go critical.

11:22 The team heading the project carefully monitored sensors

11:25 and made calculations with slides rules to measure

11:28 one very important factor “The total U235

11:32 content of the assembled core is 13.375 kilograms.

11:38 Coefficient of reactivity 0.935” See,

11:42 even the US Army uses metric for all the important stuff.

11:46 That coefficient of reactivity is very important.

11:49 When it reaches 1 the number of neutrons being released

11:52 matches the number of neutrons needed to sustain the reaction.

11:56 As long as it stays below 1 the reaction cannot sustain itself.

12:01 So we need a way to control that number.

12:04 Here the engineers slowly place the cores into the reactor,

12:07 taking note of their location on a piece of paper,

12:11 and then once everything appears safe, the control rods begin to be raised

12:16 slowly while that coefficient of reactivity is monitored.

12:19 Control rods are simply large blocks

12:21 of material that are excellent at absorbing neutrons.

12:24 Boron is the most commonly used material.

12:26 But when it gets struck by a neutron it splits into lithium and helium,

12:32 and can never be used again.

12:34 It’s gone forever.

12:35 Not great for a secret nuclear base.

12:38 So in this case they used Europium Oxide control rods.

12:42 Europium is like the cat of control rods.

12:45 It has multiple lives.

12:46 Absorbing neutron, after neutron, after neutron, after neutron, after neutron,

12:52 until it can’t take anymore and undergoes beta decay to become Gadolinium 156

12:57 And as these control rods rise the neutrons can finally reach the reactor cores,

13:02 and the number of fission reactions begins rise.

13:06 Now here this with all five control rods withdrawn 6.24 inches.

13:12 PM-2a went critical at 0652.

13:16 Ah shite,I thought we were gonna have it all in metric units.

13:19 That’s 158.5 millimetres for the engineers in the room.

13:24 Now that the core was critical it was going to be creating A LOT of steam,

13:28 and from here a nuclear reactor acts

13:30 pretty much exactly like any other power generator.

13:33 The core heated a primary closed loop of highly radioactive

13:37 high pressure water which exchanged its heat with a steam generator,

13:41 which had a secondary closed loop of water

13:44 which fed steam to the 1.5 megawatt turbine generator,

13:47 before running to a condenser to be cooled back into liquid water.

13:51 But all closed loops need a final exit for the heat,

13:54 and this is typically done with an open loop water heat exchanger.

13:58 How do you solve that problem when you are surrounded by ice, not water?

14:03 This actually posed a massive problem,

14:05 even melting the ice and using that wasn’t an option.

14:08 In the event of an accident you couldn’t

14:10 run the risk of your coolant lines freezing.

14:13 So water was out of the question.

14:15 The outside temperature could get down to negative 60 degrees,

14:19 so why not use air instead?

14:21 3 air blast chillers used electric motors to draw

14:24 air over another closed loop coolant line filled with glycol,

14:28 which cooled the secondary closed loop water line in the condenser.

14:32 Incredibly the engineers involved with this project

14:36 underestimated the effect of thermal expansion during assembly.

14:39 The glycol aluminium pipes were test fitted in typical room temperatures,

14:43 and assemblers on site had to leave the maximum allowable space between the ends

14:48 of the pipes to get everything to fit because they shrunk so much in the arctic.

14:54 Again, this is a coolant line contaminated with radiation.

14:58 This system didn’t eliminate the waste water problem altogether.

15:02 Lines leak, pressure needs to be vented,

15:04 and radiation isn’t all too bothered about physical barriers.

15:07 They needed somewhere to dump all the waste water and sewage from this facility.

15:12 They drilled a massive hole in the ground

15:15 with steam and began dumping all the waste water,

15:18 sewage and radioactive waste into this giant reservoir.

15:22 A reservoir of radioactive human waste

15:24 that remains buried under Greenland to this day.

15:28 What blows my mind most about all this is that they were

15:32 essentially building this entire base like an IKEA build by numbers kit.

15:36 We get references to it in the declassified report Every piece had

15:46 markings indicating where it belonged and what it would be connecting to.

15:49 And incredibly we have report after report

15:52 of how this construction project went wrong.

15:55 At one point a shroud for an air blast cooler

15:57 was put on backwards because the markings were printed in correctly.

16:01 We also got reports of how the control rod racks weren’t straight

16:04 and had to be manually straightened with a blow torch and a wet cloth.

16:09 Incredible craftsmanship, but still worrying.

16:11 The PM-2A was the real official objective of Camp Century.

16:15 This was an incredibly advanced, experimental nuclear power plant.

16:18 The first ever to be fully constructed out

16:21 of parts shipped through standard army logistics chains.

16:25 But this was a ridiculously dangerous design

16:27 that could go supercritical with some very basic mistakes.

16:31 That exact thing happened with the SL-1,

16:34 another product of the Army Nuclear Power Program in 1961.

16:37 When an operator just had a little woopsie

16:40 and pulled a control rod out by 4 times

16:42 the distance that was required and caused the entire

16:46 cooling pool to explode instantly as superheated steam.

16:49 That accident killed 3 people that had to be

16:52 buried in lead coffins because their bodies were so radioactive.

16:56 But that never came to pass for Camp Century.

16:59 That accident taught the Army Nuclear

17:01 Power Program that the reactor shouldn’t exceed

17:04 that 0.935 coefficient of reactivity number even

17:07 if one control rod is fully withdrawn.

17:09 It would only go critical if someone managed to pull out a second rod too far.

17:13 A redundant safety feature that could only be foiled by a redundant idiot.

17:14 Something else brought Camp Century to its knees.

17:17 After 33 months of operation from first criticality in October

17:21 1960 to July 1963 the reactor was shut down.

17:25 What defeated it, and ended Project Iceworm,

17:28 was not cost, technical difficulty or even political pressure.

17:31 It was the very ice they relied upon.

17:35 Greenland’s glaciers moved faster than expected,

17:37 so they would gradually crush the tunnels in their path

17:40 in a matter of years instead of decades.

17:43 This is what they looked like in 1961.

17:45 And here they are just 4 years later.

17:47 The only way around this problem was

17:50 to basically re-build the entire camp every two years.

17:53 Camp Century’s staff were already forced to shave nearly two meters of ice off

17:57 the walls of their reactor room

17:59 to prevent the equipment inside from being mangled.

18:02 It might have been feasible for a small

18:05 research project to sustain itself this way,

18:07 but the US Army balked at having to do

18:10 this for the full-scale Project Iceworm across thousands of kilometers.

18:13 There was no way they’d put sensitive strategic capability

18:16 at the mercy of collapsing tunnels and bent railways.

18:20 So, in 1966, Camp Century was shut down, and by 1967, it was abandoned.

18:26 The nuclear reactor, along with its radioactive fuel was removed,

18:30 But that cavern in the ice remained.

18:33 Filled with 24 million litres of radioactive human sewage.

18:37 Along with 200,000 litres of diesel fuel.

18:40 All sealed inside the ice.

18:43 In 2024 NASA got a glimpse of the buried ecological

18:47 disaster with a Gulfstream equipped with Synthetic Aperture Radar pods.

18:51 It has drifted 93 meters under the ice,

18:54 and while its creators assumed this would be an ice tomb it could never escape.

18:59 That very same Gulfstream was sent to measure

19:02 the accelerating movements of the ice sheet.

19:04 It’s expected that this buried ecological

19:07 disaster will resurface in about 100 years.

19:10 No-one has ever attempted to create large-scale installations under

19:14 ice since Project Iceworm, as far as we know.

19:17 The Danish government didn’t even know Camp Century’s

19:20 true purpose until 1996 when it was declassified.

19:24 Despite the pre-roll of this declassified film stating it

19:28 was done with the cooperation of the Danish Government.

19:31 And despite recent geopolitical controversy,

19:33 the US military still operates in Greenland.

19:36 I myself flew into Camp Raven aboard

19:39 a ski-equipment LC-130 on a resupply mission to researchers.

19:43 We made an entire video about that trip that you can watch.

19:47 And Thule is still there, now called the Pituffik Space Base.

19:51 (bee-doo-FEEK) Helping track the missile threats

19:53 that it was once trying to pose.

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