They called it the “Iceworm Project.” And yes, it may sound like a spy novel, or one of those classic movies set in the Cold War that never go out of style.And you are not mistaken.This project was one of many secrets that were raised in the context of political tension, where the mystery and the latest technological advances, combined with the hope of going ahead of the Kremlin. A fantastic network very close to the North Pole, which we are sure you would like to know.
Camp Century, the secret city of ice
The person on whom I have the responsibility of shaping to this incredible and secret project was John H.Kerkering, a colonel of the United States army who was to build an underground city under the Greenland ice in record time, and safe from Russian spies.
We were in 1959, during the Cold War, that time when the missiles of Occide They pointed to the communist enemy, and the Kremlin, for its part, put the eye of its objective on Western imperialism .The arms race to overcome each other had no limits, hence from time to time , curious projects such as Iceworm will be financed.Companies that, surprisingly enough, have not long since come to light...
The first sketches of the city took place in the Center Development and Polar Research of the United States .The idea was to use an island located between the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, to dig into it an authentic underground city that would serve as a tactical and geographical position, to develop its objectives nuclear defense, and bury there a few missiles as expected ntive.It was a really strategic place that would be disguised as «scientific base». Why not? It was certainly a good plan.And they never raised any suspicion.
On that island, temperatures reached -56ºC .The work was going to be a challenge, but the purpose It is worth it.To do this, powerful tunneling machines were used to move to the place, very sophisticated machines for the time that would serve to build a complex network of long underground corridors, where to hide a genuine and immense nuclear power plant.And how much does that cost them? 5 million dollars of the time.They did not repair expenses as you can see…
The city had no more or less than 30 interior buildings .They even had an authentic three-kilometer railway line that joined twenty-one interior tunnels and a central street of a thousand meters, where comfortable wooden-lined houses, medical centers, leisure spaces such as theaters, cinemas, hairdressers, libraries...dozens of amenities next to the nuclear power plant, of course.
A placid life for a context of war where the military tried to perform their duties with tense calm.In winter there were about 85 people, while in summer they doubled the staff.Something monumental that cost them every year about 8 million dollars (today would be about 60).But now comes the key question... Did it help you?…
The end of the Iceworn project
Not at all.After a few years of surveillance and investigation, the project was abandoned due to the high cost in 1966, due to the uselessness and for something that escaped from the hand of man: the movement of the glaciers and the collapse of the tunnels, which obviously ended up collapsing.No one thought about it before...
A project that began in 1959 remained in the rigorous frozen mystery, until 1997.Interesting that the secret began to unfreeze due to the restlessness of Denmark (one of the few countries that I declare to be free of all types of nuclear weapons), upon discovering that on one of its islands near Greenland, nothing was hidden and nothing less than the remains of a nuclear power plant... Where had that come from? The secret city of Camp Century did not take two days to be in the public domain to suddenly become a curiosity, a relic of those times of... Cold War. But yes, the United States did not give it any importance.
Image Christine Zenino, Christine Zenino
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