Between 1947 and 1989, at the end of the Second World War, the world separated into two camps. On one side, the United States and its allies, on the other the USSR and its own. For more than forty years, during the Cold War, tension only increased between the two camps without ever reaching the point of no return, which would have corresponded to an unprecedented nuclear war. Today, the Cold War is an event of the past, but traces of its occurrence can still be found, if one looks hard enough.
This is the case of the military base Camp Centuryrediscovered by the American space agency during a flight over Greenland, which was buried under the ice of the North Pole. The usefulness of the latter, code name: Project Icewormwas quite simply to be able to trigger the apocalypse on the USSR.
“ We didn’t know what it was at first ”
It was in April 2024, during an ordinary mission to map the ice of Greenland that Camp Century revealed itself to NASA scientists. Indeed, by flying over the North Pole aboard a scientific plane, the NASA Gulfstream III, scientists from the American space agency made this incredible discovery.
However, at first glance, and quite logically, the scientists did not know what they were looking at when they analyzed the images.
“We were looking for the ice bed and we saw Camp Century come up. At first we didn’t know what it was. In the new data, the individual structures of the secret city are visible as they have never been before” said Chad Greene, a cryosphere specialist at JPL in a NASA statement.
A relic of the Cold War which could have been the origin of a nuclear apocalypse on Soviet territory.
Project Iceworm an abandoned project
In the midst of the Cold War, the United States took possession of certain icy lands in Greenland to set up a secret base. Camp Century therefore “came out of the ice” from 1959, but had to be abandoned eight years later in 1967. Indeed, as recalled Spacethe cost of the work to prevent the tunnels from collapsing was far too high.
The purpose of these tunnels was to camouflage intercontinental missiles which contained nuclear warheads. Indeed, ideally located in the Arctic Circle, the base built almost 70 years ago would have allowed the United States to easily retaliate or attack the USSR from this location.
Fortunately, for the world at large, the Cold War never reached the point of no return that would have caused Earth to experience a nuclear apocalypse.
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A Cold War base, threatened by an increasingly hot world
At the end of the Second World War and in the midst of the Cold War, the major concerns of the great world powers were certainly not the environment and its defense. Today, we would perhaps have liked that to be the case.
Indeed, when Camp Century was abandoned in 1967, much of the equipment, weapons and fuel were left there. Probably because it was thought, at the time, that Greenland’s ice was eternal. Except that in recent years, the great powers have become aware of one thing: human activities have a harmful impact on the environment and the planet.
So, Camp Centuryits infrastructure, but also its equipment could end up in the open air, potentially causing significant ecological damage. That’s why, since 2017, the US and Danish governments have worked together to monitor and secure Camp Century in the face of global warming.
Source : NASA Earth Observatory / Space
