US interest in Greenland goes back to World War II, but it was the Cold War that made the island—then a Danish colony—of particular interest to strategic and military planners. The US Air Force, to be blunt, needed a place to park its bombers close enough to reach targets in the Soviet Union by flying over the North Pole. In 1951 it began construction on Thule Air Base, a giant facility capable of housing 5000 airmen on Greenland’s northwestern coast, well within the Arctic Circle. From there military activities spun out across the frigid land. By the late 1950s, over 20 unique locations were occupied for defense-related programs. A decade later they were nearly all abandoned.
Some of these military sites hugged Greenland’s jagged and rocky coast. Others spread inland, onto the giant ice cap that covers over 80 percent of the island in a white dome roughly three times the size of Texas. In some places the ice is two miles thick. Few people—Greenlander or foreigner—have dared cross it. Winter temperatures plunge to negative 50F, winds are fierce, and much of the year is cast in utter darkness. In the 1930s, a polar explorer and naval officer declared the ice cap the “globe’s greatest curiosity.” Others have labeled it the “white desert”; a “bleak and barren” land; “lifeless”; and the “icy waste.” It is monotonous and terrifying, at the very least. Being on top of Greenland was, the explorer continued, “like standing on the surface of the dead moon, a million years devoid of life, and waiting for a single vagrant meteor to break the spell.”1
The US military confronted these conditions as it made its assault on Greenland. Every aspect of moving, building, living, and operating there was arduous. Construction workers reported that they could not remove their gloves for fear of metal burn, but working with gloves was like “eating grapes while wearing boxing mitts.” The wind could take your breath away; eyelashes froze shut; frostbite set in quickly. Pilots complained that strange currents jolted their planes this way and that and whiteouts came without warning.
It was somewhat surprising, then, that the US military decided to build on the ice cap itself. After a series of experimental projects in ice cap construction, military engineers began the construction of Camp Century in 1959. It was there that the army would send 200 men to live year-round, nestled into subglacial tunnels and caverns where prefabricated rooms were installed and filled with all the comforts of home: hot and cold showers, laundry rooms, a barber shop and cinema, and plenty of steak and potatoes. Camp Century was not a home for seasoned polar explorers, but a mini-America where enlisted men could listen to record players in their shirtsleeves, all powered by a portable nuclear reactor that was hauled slowly across first the ocean and then the ice.