# The U.S. Army secretly planned to hide hundreds of nuclear missiles in tunnels under the Greenland ice

**Verdict: Proven.** Confirmed by declassified U.S. Army documents published by a Danish government inquiry in 1997: the Army genuinely planned to deploy up to 600 nuclear missiles in a tunnel network under Greenland, and built the publicly celebrated research station Camp Century (nuclear reactor and all) as both a proof of concept and a cover. The missiles were never fielded; unstable, flowing ice killed the plan.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: Cold War (1959–1966); declassified 1990s · First circulated: 1995–1997 (Danish DUPI inquiry) · Believed by: Accepted as documented Cold War history since the 1997 Danish disclosure
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/project-iceworm

## Summary
Camp Century was sold to the world in 1960 as a marvel of peacetime science: an under-ice 'city' beneath the Greenland ice sheet, powered by the first mobile nuclear reactor, where U.S. Army engineers studied Arctic construction and glaciologists drilled the first ice core to bedrock. What the public (and even the Danish government that hosted it) was not told is that the base doubled as a feasibility test for Project Iceworm, a top-secret plan to bury up to 600 nuclear missiles in a shifting maze of ice tunnels aimed at the Soviet Union. The scheme was abandoned when the ice itself proved too unstable, and it stayed secret until Danish investigators forced the documents into the open in the 1990s.

## The claim
That behind the celebrated scientific research station Camp Century lay Project Iceworm: a genuine U.S. Army program to excavate a 4,000-kilometer network of tunnels under the Greenland ice sheet and deploy up to 600 mobile nuclear missiles (a shortened Minuteman variant the Army wanted to call the 'Iceman'), served by 60 launch control centers and thousands of soldiers living permanently under the ice, all without the knowledge or consent of Denmark, the country that owned Greenland.

## Origin and timeline
- 1951: Under a U.S.–Denmark defense agreement, the United States gains broad rights to build and operate military installations in Greenland, including the large air base at Thule (now Pituffik) in the far northwest, the logistical anchor that later makes an under-ice base possible.
- 1959-06: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers begins construction of Camp Century on the ice sheet about 150 miles east of Thule, cutting a grid of trenches into the snow with Swiss-made 'Peter Plow' rotary cutters and roofing them with steel arches, then letting snow drift over the top.
- 1960: Camp Century is completed: roughly 21 interconnected tunnels totaling nearly two miles, housing barracks, a mess hall, hospital, laboratory, chapel, store, and even a theater for up to 200 personnel, all buried a few meters beneath the surface. The Army publicizes it heavily as a peaceful Arctic science station.
- 1960-10: The portable PM-2A nuclear reactor (assembled from components flown to the ice cap and billed as the world's first 'mobile' nuclear power plant) goes critical and begins supplying the camp's heat and electricity. A 1960 Army report, 'Strategic Value of the Greenland Icecap,' lays out the case for using the ice sheet as a missile basing area.
- 1960–1963: Under the classified Project Iceworm concept, Army planners study deploying up to 600 nuclear missiles (a shortened two-stage version of the Minuteman the Army proposed calling the 'Iceman') across a tunnel grid some 4,000 km (2,500 mi) long, with 60 launch control centers and about 11,000 soldiers living under the ice. The plan is never shared with the Danish government.
- 1963–1966: Glaciologists based at Camp Century drill the first ice core all the way through the sheet (about 1,390 meters) and a few meters into the bedrock beneath, a genuine scientific triumph. The same glaciological work reveals that the ice is deforming and flowing far faster than assumed.
- 1964–1965: Measurements show the tunnels are steadily crushing and shifting as the ice moves; the PM-2A reactor is shut down and removed in 1964, and the camp is scaled back to summer-only use. Engineers conclude that missile trenches would be deformed and endangered within a couple of years of construction.
- 1966–1967: Camp Century is effectively abandoned and Project Iceworm is quietly cancelled: the Greenland ice proves too mobile to host a stable, hidden missile base. The tunnels, and the waste left behind (diesel fuel, sewage, PCBs, and the reactor's low-level radioactive coolant) are left to be buried by falling snow, presumed entombed forever.
- 1995–1997: The Danish Institute of International Affairs (DUPI), investigating the history of nuclear weapons in and around Greenland after the 1968 Thule B-52 crash, uncovers and publishes the declassified Iceworm documents. Project Iceworm becomes public for the first time, revealing that Denmark had unknowingly hosted the groundwork for an American nuclear missile field.
- 2016: A study led by glaciologist William Colgan in Geophysical Research Letters warns that climate change could reverse the assumption of permanent burial: if the ice sheet shifts from net accumulation to net melting, Camp Century's abandoned physical, chemical, and radioactive waste could be re-exposed within the coming century or two.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Camp Century was not just a science station; it was cover for a secret nuclear missile plan.
  Evidence: Confirmed by the declassified U.S. Army record itself. Documents released through the Danish DUPI inquiry in 1997, including the 1960 Army report 'Strategic Value of the Greenland Icecap,' describe Project Iceworm as a plan to base up to 600 missiles under the ice, with Camp Century serving as the publicly acknowledged proof-of-concept for living and building on the ice cap. This is the U.S. Army's own paperwork, not an outside allegation.
- Claim: The Army wanted to deploy hundreds of nuclear missiles in a giant grid of ice tunnels.
  Evidence: Confirmed as a genuine plan, though never built. The declassified concept called for roughly 600 missiles (a shortened Minuteman variant the Army wanted to call the 'Iceman') dispersed across a tunnel network on the order of 4,000 km, served by about 60 launch control centers. It never advanced past planning and prototype: no missiles were ever placed under the ice, and Danish consent to nuclear deployment was never sought or given.
- Claim: Denmark, which owned Greenland, was kept in the dark about the missile purpose.
  Evidence: Confirmed, and this is the sharpest part of the cover story. Denmark approved Camp Century as a research and Arctic-testing station; the classified missile-basing objective behind it was deliberately withheld from the Danish government. The gap became a genuine political controversy in Denmark once the documents surfaced in the 1990s, tangled together with the separate scandal over U.S. nuclear weapons at Thule.
- Claim: The plan was abandoned because the ice sheet was too unstable to hold it.
  Evidence: Confirmed by the base's own engineering and glaciological data. Within a few years, measurements at Camp Century showed the ice deforming and flowing far faster than planners had assumed: the tunnels were being crushed and displaced, and the reactor was pulled out in 1964. The same ice movement that doomed a hidden missile field also produced the landmark 1966 ice core, making the science and the failure two sides of the same finding.

## Why people believe it
- This is one of the rare entries where the audacious 'the military secretly planned this' claim is simply true, confirmed by the U.S. Army's own declassified documents, so the fascination is less about whether it happened than about how completely the cover story worked, hiding a nuclear missile scheme inside a beloved feel-good science project for decades.
- The cover was unusually convincing because it was largely real: Camp Century genuinely ran a nuclear reactor, genuinely housed scientists, and genuinely produced the first ice core to bedrock, a result still cited in climate science today. A cover story that also does real, publishable science is far harder to see through than an obvious front.
- Denmark's exclusion gives the story a live political edge: an allied government hosted the groundwork for a foreign nuclear missile field on its own territory without being told, which turned an old Cold War curiosity into a real accountability question once the papers came out.
- The modern climate angle gives Iceworm an unexpected second life: the assumption that the ice would bury the abandoned base forever is now in doubt, so a secret from the 1960s has become a 21st-century environmental and diplomatic problem rather than a closed case.

## Open questions
- How much Danish officials actually knew or authorized remains debated. Prime Minister H. C. Hansen gave the U.S. ambassador an informal, secret assurance in November 1957 that Washington read as a green light to store nuclear weapons in Greenland, without briefing his own cabinet or the public, part of what historians describe as a gap between Denmark's public no-nuclear stance and its private conduct toward the U.S. military presence at Thule. How far that private latitude extended to the specific missile-tunnel ambitions behind Camp Century, as opposed to the separately documented practice of nuclear weapons transiting and being stored at Thule, is not fully resolved; that practice triggered its own reckoning after a nuclear-armed B-52 crashed near the base in 1968.
- The environmental legacy is a matter of probability rather than a fixed date. The 2016 Colgan et al. study found that a shift from net snow accumulation to net melting at the Camp Century site is plausible within about 75 years under a high-emissions climate scenario, which would eventually remobilize the buried waste, but under a lower-emissions path the timeline lengthens considerably, and the study itself frames the risk as scenario-dependent rather than settled. The precise present-day volume and condition of some of the waste, including the reactor's radioactive coolant, is also not fully known.
- It isn't clear how complete the declassified record is. Even after the 1997 disclosure, military archivists have indicated that some Iceworm-related material may still be classified or awaiting declassification, and no single released archive appears to consolidate every planning study the Army produced on the concept between 1960 and its cancellation.

## Sources
- Project Iceworm, Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm
- Camp Century, Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century
- When the Pentagon Dug Ice Tunnels in Greenland to Hide Nukes, History.com (A&E Television Networks) (2023): https://www.history.com/articles/project-iceworm-cold-war-nuclear-weapons-greenland
- Grønland under den kolde krig: Dansk og amerikansk sikkerhedspolitik, 1945–68 (Greenland During the Cold War: Danish and American Security Policy, 1945–68), Dansk Udenrigspolitisk Institut / Danish Institute of International Affairs (DUPI) (1997)
- The United States and Greenland, Part I: Episodes in Nuclear History 1947–1968, National Security Archive, George Washington University (2025): https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2025-06-03/united-states-and-greenland-part-i-episodes-nuclear-history
- The abandoned ice sheet base at Camp Century, Greenland, in a warming climate, W. Colgan et al., Geophysical Research Letters (AGU) (2016): https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016GL069688
- Camp Century, Atomic Heritage Foundation / National Museum of Nuclear Science & History (2017): https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/camp-century/
- Camp Century: The secret Arctic military base beneath the Greenland ice, CNN (2025): https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/15/science/camp-century-secret-arctic-base-cold-war
- What this secret nuclear base in Greenland can tell us about climate change, National Geographic (2020): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/camp-century-nasa-greenland-us-military

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