The U.S. Wanted to Hide Nukes in Arctic Ice Tunnels. The Plan Blew Up in Their Faces

As far as these things go, Camp Century was a pretty good cover. It was nominally designed as an underground military research station, located about 150 miles east of the American air base at Thule, Greenland. The stated purpose of Camp Century was to improve the American defense capability in the Arctic — to develop better survival and transportation techniques, and to obtain more useful knowledge about the harsh climate and the physical properties of the region. In essence, we covered up for a super-secret operation using a kinda-secret one. The United States had been operating in the area since 1951, when the Thule air base and radar station first opened. In 1958, the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research Engineering Laboratories (CRREL) sent more than two hundred men (the facility was a strictly male society) to be the first team to deploy to Century. Don’t let the “Camp” in Camp Century fool you. This wasn’t just a bunch of tents in the tundra. This was as close to a modern town as you could get in the middle of nowhere. And it was all partially or completely underground. Which was good, because you wouldn’t want to spend too much time outside. This is an inhospitable environment to the extreme. Century was located only 800 miles from the North Pole. The average temperature was just under minus 10° Fahrenheit. The average annual snow accumulation was four feet, and it wasn’t uncommon to see temperatures plunge into the mi...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Books Military Science Source Type: news