A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
President Trump's talk of buying or seizing the Danish territory of Greenland has raised tensions with that ally and fellow NATO member. Jay Price of member station WUNC reports on an earlier chapter in the long, geopolitical tangle there between the U.S. and Denmark.
(SOUNDBITE OF US ARMY PROMOTIONAL FILM "CAMP CENTURY")
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: On the top of the world, below the surface of a giant ice cap, a city is buried.
JAY PRICE, BYLINE: Well, maybe not a city. The army promotional tape is a little enthusiastic, but there was an experimental military base hidden under the ice and powered by one of the first portable nuclear reactors.
(SOUNDBITE OF US ARMY PROMOTIONAL FILM "CAMP CENTURY")
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: In this remote setting, less than 800 miles from the North Pole, Camp Century is a symbol of man's unceasing struggle to conquer his environment.
PRICE: And now kind of a symbol of taking advantage of an ally. When construction started on the base, the United States hadn't asked Denmark for permission, something required by treaty. It was 1959, the Cold War was raging, and the U.S. Army had decided to test the idea of hiding bases from Soviet view under the ice.
JOHN FRESH: There was a main street, main tunnel, if you will, and off to that were tunnels to the left and right, mess hall. There were sleeping quarters.
PRICE: In the early 1960s, John Fresh (ph) was a young soldier, assigned to photograph Army experiments in the Arctic. Twice, he made the three-day overland trip from his small base on the coast to Camp Century and stayed in the prefabricated buildings there, buried in more than two miles of tunnels. There was a clinic, library, even a theater.
FRESH: We had everything you could imagine - lights, and heat, and all that kind of stuff. It was cold. I mean, you know, when you walk down there, you could feel it's, you know, like walking into a freezer.
PRICE: The Army video makes it sound like an adventure, but a tour of duty at Camp Century was cold, wet and often boring. On the surface, conditions could be extreme. That far north, it's dark 24 hours a day for months in the winter. Temperatures can fall to minus 70 and winds have been clocked at well over 125 miles an hour. Under the ice, things weren't great either. The tops and sides of the tunnels needed constant trimming with chainsaws as the ice continually pressed inward, threatening to crush the camp. Dozens of tons a week had to be removed.
FRESH: Someone miscalculated. They said, well, we were built in a place where the ice cap isn't really moving. Well, that was wrong.
PRICE: After just a couple of years, the Army decided the tunnels were too hard to maintain. The camp was abandoned and its buildings were crushed by the ice and buried deeper and deeper. Recent NASA measurements found the remnants are now about 100 feet below the surface. A dark, secret side of Camp Century might have been buried along with it, but for an unrelated incident a couple of years later.
CHRISTIAN NIELSEN: There was a lot of deception going on and also a lot of hidden agendas.
PRICE: Christian Nielsen teaches science history at Aarhus University in Denmark. A 1968 crash of a U.S. jet with nuclear bombs aboard eventually led to an investigation of past American behavior in Greenland. It found that a Danish prime minister had secretly approved the presence of U.S. nuclear weapons. And what's more, that the United States had planned on putting some under the ice - a lot of them.
NIELSEN: We know a lot about Camp Century, but we don't know so much about Project Iceworm.
PRICE: Project Iceworm, out of view of the Soviets, ready to pop up anywhere. The plan was to place 600 nuclear missiles under the ice, along with 11,000 troops and rail networks to move the missiles through thousands of miles of tunnels.
NIELSEN: I mean, we only have secondary material describing the project. So I think there's still a lot of things to be uncovered.
PRICE: And these days, Denmark has fresh worries about its much larger ally - an ally that hasn't always been straightforward about its plans. For NPR News, I'm Jay Price in Durham, North Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF WHEN COLORS ARE FADING'S "HOMESICK") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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