Nukes Below Zero

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It was summer 2017, but a blistering snow was pounding northern Greenland.

An environmental scientist struggled to drag a sled behind him, carrying a radar unit that was crucial to his mission, but he could barely stay on his feet.

Hurricane-level winds whipped across the barren ice, pummeling him with snow.

He couldn't feel his nose, and ice was forming on his cheeks and upper lip.

But he kept his eyes trained on a bright orange triangle just a few yards ahead.

It was his tent, the only shelter from the storm for more than 100 miles in any direction.

When he and his team of researchers landed in this wilderness a few days earlier, they'd been lucky.

The temperature was below freezing, of course, but the skies were clear and sunny, so the team was able to set up their tents and secure their heat and water sources.

But then, the weather turned violent.

Now, as he trudged along, The wind hammered the scientist down to his knees.

He tried to stand, but couldn't find the strength.

So he crawled with the sled strapped to his shoulders, fighting against a fresh torrent of powder in his face.

If he didn't get inside, he could freeze to death.

He looked over his shoulder to make sure the radar unit was still on the sled, but when he turned toward the tent again, all he could see was white.

The tent was gone.

The scientist felt his stomach lurch, but fought the instinct to panic.

He had to stay calm and move in a straight line, exactly where he knew his tent was or he could miss it completely.

He crawled inch by inch through the white-out until he finally spotted the bright orange again, just two feet in front of his face.

The tent was half buried in snow.

He began to dig frantically until he found the zipper, ripped the door open, and rolled inside, dragging the radar unit behind him.

By the time he turned around to zip the door closed, a pile of snow was already collecting inside the tent.

The tent walls flapped wildly from the winds outside.

He pulled the radar unit closer to him and turned it on, hoping it had captured the information that he needed before the snowstorm set in.

He held his breath until finally the unit beeped to life.

He smiled as images began appearing on the screen.

They were proof of what he and his team were looking for.

That 100 feet beneath his tent, buried in layers of ice, were the remains of an abandoned city.

Once home to more than 200 people, it was now a frozen relic, but the secrets it contained could still be deadly.

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From Balin Studios and Wondery, I'm Luke Lomana, and this is Redacted Declassified Mysteries, where each week we shine a light on the shadowy corners of espionage, covert operations, and misinformation to reveal the dark secrets our governments try to hide.

This week's episode is called Camp Century: City Beneath the Ice.

By many measures, the United States had it pretty good in the late 1950s.

Its citizens were some of the wealthiest people on Earth.

They had a new technology, television, beaming entertainment right into their living rooms.

And President Dwight Eisenhower was a war hero who had led the Allied armies to victory in World War II.

But many Americans in 1958 were too nervous to enjoy their prosperity.

They feared they were losing the Cold War to the Soviet Union as the Russians took control of the space race and built up an arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Just the year before, the Soviet Union developed technology that would allow them to launch missiles at targets anywhere in the world, even into the United States itself.

And a few months after that, the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik 1 into orbit, the world's first artificial satellite.

Some military experts feared that the Americans were at such a disadvantage that the Soviets could fire on multiple U.S.

cities before Washington would even have time to respond.

President Eisenhower thought the public hand-wringing about nuclear war was overblown, but he also knew he needed to do something dramatic to reassure the anxious public.

So he turned to his military leaders for bold ideas that would showcase American resolve and ingenuity.

And the Army delivered something so radical it seemed like science fiction.

A secret underground military base in one of the coldest places on Earth, Greenland.

The U.S.

already had a conventional military base there, but this would be something else altogether.

It would be both a massive military installation and a scientific research hub, 100 feet below the ice cap.

The location just over the North Pole would be close enough to the Soviet border that the Americans could keep a close eye on everything their rival did.

It would be a new front line of democracy.

If Eisenhower's generals could pull it off, the base would prove to the world that America could still innovate and inspire.

No matter what happened, the United States would not sit back and lose the Cold War.

But a select few inside our government knew that the base was intended to be more than just a surveillance station.

Its true, darker purpose remained hidden from the entire world for years.

In November 1957, Colonel John Kirchering sat across the dinner table from his wife, Marie.

He just got back home to Illinois after an Army training mission, and not a moment too soon.

That morning, the Soviets launched Sputnik 2 into orbit, and the entire country was in an uproar.

On the Sputnik 2 craft, the Soviets launched a dog named Laika into space.

Everyone, even the Soviets, expected her to die of oxygen deprivation the moment she left Earth's atmosphere.

Instead, she survived several days, demonstrating that the Soviets were learning how to put living creatures in space.

Next, they would send human beings.

Then, maybe entire military bases would be orbiting around the planet, far beyond the reach of American missiles.

When it came to space and weapons technology, the Soviets seemed to be leagues ahead of the U.S.

Across the table, Marie looked pale over the news.

Kirchering kept glancing at the TV in the den.

He knew President Eisenhower was about to deliver an address, and they were both anxious to hear what he would say.

When Eisenhower appeared on screen, Marie hurried over to turn up the volume.

The president sat solemnly behind his desk in the Oval Office and said that while he originally planned to deliver these remarks the following week, his message was too urgent to delay.

Eisenhower announced that even though the Soviets were ahead in some missile and satellite developments, America's overall military strength was still the dominant force in the world.

Kerkering knew the president was not being honest.

Eisenhower was trying to calm a jittery public.

They were terrified of nuclear war.

Kerkering himself had been an officer during World War II in the South Pacific.

when the U.S.

dropped two atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

It was up to him and his colleagues to make sure nothing like that ever happened again.

But as he watched his wife listening nervously to Eisenhower's speech, he suddenly thought of another radical idea he had recently heard.

It was a proposal from the Army Engineer Studies Center that, at first glance, seemed laughable.

It suggested the U.S.

could build a new military base beneath Greenland's ice sheet where temperatures routinely dropped to negative 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

But any such base posed enormous obstacles, including how to get building materials to such a desolate place and how to keep the lights on hundreds of feet below the ice cap.

The engineers proposed that, instead of running the base on diesel generators, they would build a nuclear reactor.

The idea of a nuclear plant in the Arctic certainly sounded futuristic, but to Kirchering, it made him uneasy.

Just a month ago, the world's first nuclear power plant had gone up in flames after a physicist turned on the reactor too soon.

And yet, for many world leaders, including Eisenhower, nuclear power was still the way of the future.

Despite Kirchering's hesitation, he decided that the city beneath the ice deserved a second look, given the position the U.S.

now found itself in, it was hard for Kirchering to fathom the sheer magnitude of the project, but the country was staring down the barrel of complete annihilation.

America needed to reassert its dominance on the world stage, and Kirchering was in a position to help.

18 months later, in May 1959, Kerkering bounced along in the passenger seat of an Army snow vehicle called a Polecat, slowly making its way across Greenland's frozen tundra.

They were losing daylight and still had a lot of work to do before sunset.

Kerkering had spent months championing the construction of an underground military base and research center here.

He was then appointed commanding officer of the project, leading a team from from the Army's Polar Research and Development Center.

He and his men were now on a reconnaissance mission.

The U.S.

Army was counting on them to find a location for Camp Sentury.

That's what they were calling the base, since it would be located about 100 miles from the rim of the polar ice cap.

But so far, finding the right spot was proving to be an almost impossible task.

They were looking for a flat patch of ice, at least a half a mile long, that was close enough to an existing airbase to transport supplies, but at the same time, far enough north that it wouldn't be affected by ice thaw every summer.

Kerkering sighed.

Everywhere he looked, the terrain was bumpy, and now they were approaching a hillside where the snow rose up in front of them like a white wall.

Kerkering wasn't even sure the Polcats could make it up the steep incline.

His driver asked if they should try to go around, but Kerkering said no, they had to push through.

They had too much ground to cover and no time for detours.

The driver hit the gas, pushing the polecat uphill.

Kerkering braced himself as the vehicle rammed over ice patches and snowdrifts, throwing him against the side.

He then looked back to see if the other two polecats following them were making it up the hill.

Finally, they reached the crest of the hill.

Kerkering expected a steep decline on the other side, but instead, their polecat leveled out onto a vast ice sheet.

He told the driver to stop.

Kerkering climbed out of the vehicle and onto the frozen ice sheet.

The rest of the team followed, taking in the icy expanse before them.

They were looking at a massive plateau, perhaps a mile wide, still frozen solid despite the slightly above-freezing weather.

For the first time that afternoon, Kerkering felt excited.

Two officers from the research center grabbed their surveying tools and hurried out onto the plateau.

They stabbed long measuring sticks into the ice, shouting that the ice sheet was completely level.

They ran out further and measured again, still flat.

Kerkering smiled.

This spot could work.

Four months later, in September 1959, a group of Army engineers huddled around a table in a makeshift mess hall on the ice, drinking hot coffee.

Outside, a snowstorm raged, and the engineers watched out the window as an entire morning of work was buried in snow.

They'd spent all summer living in tents on Greenland's ice sheet, right where Kerkering and his team first planted flags for Camp Century.

Unfortunately, these surprise snowstorms could ruin hours of work in a matter of minutes.

And with winter on their doorstep, the weather was only going to get worse.

Kerkering's second-in-command, Captain Thomas Evans, had been overseeing construction, and every one of these setbacks upset his nerves.

He stood at the mess hall window, feeling antsy as he downed his coffee.

Even with their weather challenges, they'd made amazing amazing progress over the summer, but they still had to complete the most important part of the project, the energy wing, where the nuclear reactor would live.

Evans was running out of time before winter made construction impossible.

Technically, the engineers didn't have permission from Denmark, which owned Greenland, to start construction.

The Danes were nervous that installing a nuclear-powered military base so close to the Soviet Union could be seen as an act of aggression, and the Soviets could retaliate.

But Evans and his team didn't want to squander Greenland's brief summer waiting for Denmark's approval, so they started on the project anyway.

They spent three months drilling and digging into the ice, slowly carving out the tunnels that would become the camp.

It had been the most grueling assignment of Evans' career.

Evans and his team had already dug the central tunnel, called Main Street, that ran the length of the camp.

about 1,100 feet long and 26 feet wide.

They had also dug the 25 other tunnels that branched off from it and would eventually house the mess hall, soldiers' living quarters, and research labs.

All of it was essentially invisible from where Evans was standing.

It mostly looked like a barren tundra, except for a narrow entranceway into the camp.

The only other side of the underground base was an open trench that would eventually be the tunnel where the nuclear power plant would be located.

The work crews were eager to finish the tunnel before winter set in, or they'd never meet their deadline of having the camp fully powered by next summer.

The U.S.

was already behind in the nuclear arms race.

They couldn't afford more delays.

The snowstorm finally died down around 5 p.m., but the Arctic sun was still bright overhead, giving the men several more hours to work.

Evans led the team out of the mess hall so they could survey the damage to the trench where several feet of snow had collected.

It would take the rest of the day to clear it out.

Evans ordered his team to fire up their massive snowplows and get to work.

They'd be out here till midnight if that's what it took.

Then he headed over to the entrance tunnel that led down into the belly of the camp.

Almost as soon as he entered, daylight disappeared, replaced by strings of industrial lights overhead.

The floors were made of packed snow that crunched beneath his feet.

The walls were made of metal, but they were covered in a thick layer of frost.

Other than his footsteps, it was so quiet underground that sometimes Evans felt like he was walking into a tomb.

But halfway down Main Street, he heard the banging of hammers coming from the far end of the tunnel.

It was the other project he wanted to check on, the prefabricated houses.

The tunnels of Camp Century would be full of wooden structures that were built back in the U.S.

The engineers couldn't heat the snowy tunnels of the camp or they would melt, but they could heat these small houses where soldiers would live.

Evans thought the wooden houses helped make the camp feel like a home.

That would be important during long winter nights when everyone here would essentially be trapped.

And to help convince the public that an underground city was a viable way of escaping nuclear attack.

That was one of the main reasons this project had been approved.

Though few people talked publicly about it, Eisenhower needed to show Americans that they were safe from the Soviets, even if that meant hiding them away beneath layers and layers of ice.

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In the summer of 1960, Captain James Barnett beamed as he led a camera crew into the energy wing at Camp Century.

Beside him walked the most trusted journalist in America, Walter Cronkite.

He'd come to tour the camp as a part of a documentary series called 20th Century.

It was Barnett's job to dazzle him, and by extension, the American public.

The goal was to tout the country's nuclear future and assure Americans that their government would go to any length to keep them safe.

Barnett led Cronkite through a snowy archway and past a construction area where six or seven engineers were building wooden platforms that would soon hold reactor equipment.

He stopped at a wooden railing that surrounded a deep hole in the snow floor.

Barnett told Cronkite to lean over the railing and look down.

Far below was the camp's water well, created by using steamers that melted the ice beneath the camp.

Cronkite asked Barnett how old the water was.

Barnett responded, We probably start off with 100-year-old water and end up in a 500-foot hole with several thousand-year-old water.

So water that's thousands of years old is running man's newest means of creating power.

Yes, sir.

Barnett explained that the water they melted in this wing would power the nuclear reactor.

Nuclear energy was foreign to most of the viewers at home, so he explained how it worked.

He said the water would keep the nuclear reactor from overheating, and it would also produce steam that could be turned into electricity by the turbines.

Then, Barnett led Cronkite further down the reactor tunnel until they arrived at a simple plywood building.

Barnett knew it didn't look like much from the outside, but he told Cronkite that this was the heart of the nuclear reactor.

As Barnett led the camera crew inside, he showed off a dizzying network of pipes and turbines running up the walls and across the ceiling until they reached the nuclear reactor core.

A crew was already working around it, unloading uranium rods and testing them.

Barnett told Cronkite that soon these rods would be lowered into the reactor's core and the plant would be ready to power Camp Century.

Later that day, Barnett stood next to Captain Evans outside the entrance to the camp.

He lit up a cigarette and watched as Walter Cronkite filmed the final segment for his documentary.

Men will stay behind here, in their city under the ice, to continue man's battle against nature.

He has brought his greatest scientific achievement, power from the atom to the very top of the world.

But can he live here?

Barnett knew it was the right question.

They only had a few months to finish building the nuclear reactor and convince Americans, Denmark, and most of all, the Soviets, that Camp Century was worth the investment.

On August 13th, 1960, Colonel John Kerkering strode down the middle of Camp Century's Main Street, flanked by a delegation of American and Danish diplomats.

They were all here for an inspection, and Kerkering desperately needed it to go well because tension was building between the U.S.

and Denmark.

The Danish were angry that the Americans started building the camp two months before they officially approved the project.

They were also concerned about a subterranean nuclear power plant on their soil that could discharge radioactive waste into the ice sheet.

And they wanted to know who would pay for the cleanup if the underground reactor exploded.

Privately, the Danish government had another big worry.

They suspected that the U.S.

would use this base to advance nuclear weapon technology, something they wanted no part of.

They had no interest in helping the U.S.

prepare for nuclear war.

But, most of all, the Danes were upset with the amount of media coverage the camp was generating.

The U.S.

had given documentary footage to American media outlets, creating a frenzy of interest back in the States.

Americans were fascinated with the camp, which was exactly what Kirchering had been counting on.

If all the U.S.

was on board for the project, it would be harder for the Danish government to pull the plug.

Kirchering understood the Danish concerns.

He just needed to convince them that Camp Century's potential outweighed its risks.

The U.S.

had spent the equivalent of $90 million in today's dollars building and assembling the base, which was on track to be completed in about six weeks.

Almost three-quarters of that went into building the nuclear reactor.

Kirchering reminded himself that the only thing the delegates needed to see today was progress.

Kirchering had brought Captain Evans along for the tour as well, since Evans had been at the camp since day one and could give the delegates a taste of what life was like for the soldiers under the ice.

The tour group walked into a long wooden building that was outfitted with various kinds of science equipment.

A few scientists were working at a long table, and Kirkering let Captain Evans explain their current project.

They were drilling and extracting ice cores.

Each of the cores had visible layers from every year's cycle of freezing and melting, like rings on a tree.

A single ice core contained about 100,000 years of Earth's climate history, providing a critical understanding of the weather that shaped the world.

Kirchering noticed one Danish diplomat lean in, look of interest on his face.

It seemed the icy relationship between Denmark and the United States was thawing before his eyes.

A few weeks later, in September 1960, an 18-year-old Danish soldier named Soren Gregerson walked into the mess hall at a Danish military base an hour outside of Copenhagen.

He was brand new to the army, but he was adjusting well to his new home.

As he waited in line for breakfast, one of the officers handed him a newspaper and told him to take a look.

He flipped it over, and there, below the fold, was his name in print.

It said, Soren Gregerson, selected by the U.S.

Army and Danish Ministry of Defense, to spend five months working as a junior scientific aide at Camp Century in Greenland.

Gregerson couldn't help but smile.

He'd gotten the call about this opportunity a few days ago and had been ecstatic, but seeing his name in print made it feel official.

The U.S.

and Denmark had finally put their differences aside and joined forces to lead Camp Century into the future.

Gregerson was a former Boy Scout from a small coastal town in Denmark with dreams of studying atomic science.

So he jumped at the chance to live and work at the base.

He couldn't believe that the Danish Ministry of Defense had chosen his application.

The article said he was as lucky as Aladdin finding the magic lamp.

And Gregerson had to agree.

He didn't know much about what his work at the base would entail, but he knew that the Americans would also be sending their own Boy Scout to live and work with him.

a fellow 18-year-old from Kansas named Kent Goring.

They wouldn't just be junior aides at the camp, they would be symbols of diplomacy between the U.S.

and Denmark.

Now that Denmark was officially on board with Camp Century, it was important for them to show a united front.

Gregerson tucked the newspaper under his arm and grabbed a breakfast tray.

It was going to be hard to concentrate on anything else over the next few weeks.

Soon, he'd be 100 feet below the surface of Greenland, living in the world's only subterranean, nuclear-powered military base.

In early November 1960, Gregerson shivered inside his parka as he ambled down the mess hall tunnel at Camp Century.

He'd been given a bundle of little plastic pegs and sent to press them into the tunnel wall, something he was told was routine maintenance.

His new American friend, Kent Goring, was behind him, placing pegs along the opposite wall.

They had been at the camp for a month, living and working alongside roughly 200 engineers, scientists, and soldiers.

Gregerson had been enjoying his time in this underground fortress.

He was shocked at how big it was and how the army seemed to meet every possible need.

In addition to the housing and mess hall, there was a barbershop, a library, even a movie theater.

The food was surprisingly good too.

He'd been expecting to rough it.

Instead, he was getting full-steak dinners.

Everyone got double portions because Captain Evans wanted to keep morale up among the men.

Until now, Gregorson and Goring had been doing fun stuff.

They watched soldiers soldiers test gas masks, they got to use the radio to call a nearby weather station, and they played chess with the meteorological team.

By comparison, their current assignment with the bags of pegs was boring, even though Gregerson knew it was the most important job he'd been given at the camp.

The engineers would use these pegs to measure how much the tunnel walls had closed in that week.

When Colonel Kirkering chose this location for Camp Century, He had hoped that the extremely cold temperatures would keep the ice around the tunnels frozen solid, solid, but the camp generators churned out a lot of heat, and they were slowly melting the ice.

Meanwhile, fresh snowfalls were causing the ice all around them to shift.

As a result, the tunnel floors were rising while the ceiling was getting lower, and the engineer corps had to constantly widen the tunnels.

Gregerson moved down the wall, inserting pegs along the way until he reached one of the smaller passageways connected to Main Street.

He turned the corner and stopped dead.

A week ago, the corridor had been tall enough for him to walk through.

Now, the ceiling was so low, he'd almost have to bend in half.

He knew the smaller corridors were closing in faster than the wider tunnels, but he'd never seen the ice shift this fast.

He was suddenly aware of just how far underground they were.

They were completely isolated from anyone who might be able to help.

if something went wrong.

Gregerson called down the tunnel to Goring and said he was going to report the ice melt to the engineers directly.

He reassured himself that they must know what they were doing and that there was no way they'd let the tunnels collapse.

About a month later, in December 1960, Gregerson stood in the nuclear reactor tunnel, feeling a mix of nerves and excitement.

Until now, the reactor team had encountered problem after problem with the reactor, and today was the first time Gregerson would see it up and running.

For weeks, every time the engineers turned on the reactor, it would give off so much radiation they'd have to shut it down immediately.

They had ordered sheets of lead to install around it to reduce the radiation releases, but winter weather was delaying their delivery, so the reactor team came up with a makeshift solution.

They told Gregerson and Goring to begin sawing frozen blocks of wood into piles of sawdust.

Then they told them to shove the sawdust into plastic bags and fill them with water from the well.

This waterlogged sawdust would be used to block the radiation until the lead arrived.

Once they finished filling the bags, an engineer fired up the reactor for the first time in weeks.

At last, they would find out if all the time and money they had spent on the reactor was worth it.

Gregerson held his breath and watched the operator monitoring the radiation levels, waiting for a signal that the levels were rising.

But minutes ticked by, and the monitor remained calm.

After 20 minutes, a small cheer broke out among the team.

Gregorson joined in.

He realized how tense the room had been, how everyone had been waiting for the radiation levels to skyrocket.

But they never did.

He asked if they were going to switch the camp over to the nuclear power system now, but the team leader said not yet.

First, they'd give it an hour, just to make sure all the systems were a go.

After 50 minutes passed, the anticipation in the air was palpable.

The whole team inched closer to the reactor, willing the hour mark to finally come.

Then

alarms began shrieking.

Gregerson looked to the control board, where he saw one of the engineers lunging for the reactor's off switch.

Out of nowhere, the radiation had skyrocketed.

They were now in danger.

Gregerson looked at Goring, who was already running for the bags of wet sawdust.

He dashed after him, grabbing a bag and tossing the sawdust around the reactor, trying his best to fully surround it.

They hoped that the hydrogen in the sawdust would soak up the radiation and keep everyone safe.

Once the reactor was packed in sawdust, Gregerson and Goring scrambled toward the back wall, trying to stay out of the way, as engineers started yelling at one another about what went wrong.

Gregerson wasn't sure what to do, but he understood how bad this failure was for the entire camp.

Their main energy source didn't work.

He glanced at Goring, and both of them headed down the hall.

They'd just be in the way if they hung around.

Once they were out of earshot, Goring told Gregerson he was nervous about all the radiation coming from the reactor.

He was beginning to wonder whether the army knew what they were doing down here.

One wrong move, and that reactor could blow and take the whole camp along with it.

Gregerson shook his head.

The reactor team said the camp was safe.

He wanted to believe that, but he knew that there were countless signs that they were on the brink of disaster.

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Probably so they never slip from her hands.

Could you imagine?

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Luckily, Reese's thought about that.

Wonder what else they think about?

Probably chocolate and peanut butter.

More than three years later, in July 1963, Captain Barnett was seething as he stalked down the reactor tunnel and told his team he had an announcement to make.

As the crew crowded around, Barnett stared grimly at the quiet reactor core.

which hadn't been running for weeks.

He and his team had spent countless hours trying to fix it, but it never worked long enough enough to power the base for more than a few days at a time.

The radioactivity levels made it too dangerous, even after the lead shield had been installed.

Before he could say anything, Barnett looked at his team and sighed.

He knew what he was about to say would make them furious, but he wanted to tell them in person.

The U.S.

government was pulling the plug on Camp Century.

Barnett said he hadn't even found out from the military.

He had been sent a stack of newspapers from home and happened to stumble upon a story about it.

As predicted, the team was outraged.

They were literally the last people on Earth to find out that their own program was getting axed.

The article called the reactor obsolete, especially compared to the Navy's newest technology, Polaris submarines.

These high-tech subs were capable of launching nuclear missiles while still submerged underwater.

meaning that the U.S.

could now send missiles anywhere in the world, virtually undetected.

That was a far better investment than a stationary nuclear reactor somewhere north of the Arctic Circle.

The Navy had officially pulled the U.S.

ahead of the Soviet Union's missile capabilities.

By comparison, the Army's work at Camp Century was a failure.

Barnett didn't know what to say.

As a captain, he was good at giving orders.

But this morning, he didn't have any.

So he just thanked his team for being part of the project and told them to be proud of the work they did.

Tonight, they could drown their sorrows however they saw fit.

He dismissed his crew for the rest of the morning, then headed out to find Captain Evans.

They needed to speak with Colonel Kirchering and plan the closure of the plant.

As he walked through the corridors, a low groan echoed overhead.

It was the sound of the ice sheet shifting above him.

Barnett realized that this project had always been on borrowed time.

Maybe he'd been too naïve not to see that.

But, as it turned out, the base had another mission, one that would remain a mystery for decades.

In 1997, 33 years after the nuclear reactor was turned off for good, Soren Gregerson was settling into his office at the University of Copenhagen.

He was 55 years old now and a professor of seismology.

In the three decades since his internship at Camp Century, he'd made a name for himself studying earthquakes and geophysics.

Over the years, he'd also given interviews about his adventure at Camp Century.

He'd always spoke fondly about the five months he spent there.

But as the years passed, the world forgot about the frozen city.

And eventually, people stopped asking about it altogether.

That morning, Gregorson took a sip of coffee and started leafing through the stack of newspapers on his crowded desk.

and a headline caught him by surprise.

It was an article about Camp Century.

He began reading.

Then his stomach stomach dropped.

According to the article, a leaked document discovered by a Danish historian showed that Camp Century had not just been a research facility and military base, it had also been a front for a covert operation called Project Iceworm.

If Camp Century's nuclear program had been successful, the U.S.

Army had planned to secretly extend the camp.

They wanted to build nuclear missile launch sites deep beneath Greenland's ice sheet that would be capable of striking Moscow.

And they had plans to build and stockpile more than 600 nuclear missiles within these secret annexes.

But the technical difficulties proved too great, so Project Ice Worm never went into effect.

Gregerson couldn't believe it.

He had thought he was on the frontier of science and human ingenuity.

But the whole time, this bold and innovative science experiment was actually just a potential front for a dangerous Cold War game.

His mind flashed back to all the time he had spent wandering around those slowly collapsing tunnels.

He shuffled through the papers on his desk until he found that day's copy of the Danish newspaper, Politiken.

It was the same paper that announced he would be joining Camp Century back in 1960.

Now he scanned the paper to see if it was also reporting on Project Iceworm.

Sure enough, one article stated that the Danish government should have been more suspicious about Camp Century from the beginning.

Maybe he should have been more suspicious too.

He hated the idea that he unknowingly contributed to something that could have been turned into a weapon of war.

And he had to wonder, what else would they discover about Camp Century now that more and more documents were being leaked?

Gregorson would sit with those questions until the day he died in 2023.

A year later, NASA radar revealed that after six decades, Camp Century was still relatively intact, entombed under 100 feet of ice.

But now the camp had a new problem, global warming.

Greenland's melting ice sheet threatened to expose the camp and all the radioactive and toxic waste that the U.S.

Army left behind.

Captain James Barnett's team removed the nuclear reactor from Camp Century in 1964, the same year most of the staff left.

And by 1967, the camp was abandoned altogether.

Everything besides the reactor was left intact under the ice.

The once bold experiment is now largely seen as a failure, but it wasn't a total bust.

The research station ended up being the most fruitful part of the camp's existence.

The scientific data collected from those ice cores set the groundwork for the emerging field of paleoclimatology.

the study of climates of the past.

It's used to understand historical climate patterns and compare compare them to current climate changes caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Much of what we currently understand about climate change is thanks in part to the scientists who worked at Camp Century.

Today, Greenland's government and climate activists are calling for a cleanup of the remnants of the camp.

An estimated 53,000 gallons of diesel fuel and more than 6 million gallons of radioactive waste were left behind.

If that waste were to somehow leak, the results could be catastrophic and poison water far beyond Greenland.

In 2017, the Danish government sent a team of researchers to the spot where Camp Century once stood.

Their job was to test the ice for dangerous levels of radiation.

They reported that the ice above Camp Century is not yet radioactive and that the camp will likely stay frozen beneath the ice until the year 2100.

But the team have been sworn to secrecy by the Danish government not to reveal the rest of their findings.

Today, the U.S.

is trying to buy Greenland, not because its location provides military benefits, but because of the shipping lanes that have opened in the Arctic, largely due to climate change.

Follow Redacted Declassified Mysteries, hosted by me, Luke Lamana, on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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From Balin Studios and Wondery, this is Redacted, Declassified Mysteries, hosted by me, Luke Lamana.

A quick note about our stories.

We do a lot of research, but some details and scenes are dramatized.

We use many different sources for our show, but we especially recommend the book Camp Century, The Untold Story of America's Secret Arctic Military Base, Under the Greenland Ice by Henry Nielsen, Walter Cronkite's 1961 report for CBS, The City Under the Ice, and the documentary, The Hidden City Beneath Greenland's Ice.

This episode was written by Aaron Lann, sound design by Ryan Patesta.

Our producers are Christopher B.

Dunn and John Reed.

Our associate producers are Ines Rennie Kay and Molly Quinlan Artwick.

Fact-checking by Sheila Patterson.

For Balin Studios, our head of production is Zach Levitt.

Script editing by Scott Allen.

Our coordinating producer is Samantha Collins.

Production support by Avery Siegel.

Produced by me, Luke Lamana.

Executive producers are Mr.

Balin and Nick Witters.

For Wondery, our senior producers are Laura Donna Palo Vota, Dave Schilling, and Rachel Engelman.

Senior managing producer is Nick Ryan.

Managing producer is Olivia Fonte.

Executive producers are Erin O'Flaherty and Marshall Louie.

For Wondery.

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Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere.

When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.

Are we really safe?

Is our water safe?

You destroyed our town.

And crimes like that, they don't just happen.

We call things accidents.

There is no accident.

This was 100%

preventable.

They're the result of choices by people.

Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime.

These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet.

Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about us and the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it.

Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.