City under the Ice: The Closed World of Camp Century in Cold War Culture

Abstract

Located on the beeline between the two nuclear superpowers, Greenland took on vital strategic importance during the early phases of the Cold War. As part of its polar strategy, the USA constructed several bases in Greenland. Camp Century, known as ‘City under the Ice’, was an experimental-military American city built entirely inside the ice sheet in 1959–1960. A 225-person, nuclear-powered army base, Century was the precursor for a much larger installation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (which never materialized), but was also used to project popular images of techno-scientific control, nuclear containment, and American values into Cold War American culture. Applying Paul Edward's closed-world metaphor to photos, film, books, and articles about Camp Century enables us to see both the strengths and the fragility of public discourses about the camp. Century was depicted as an outstanding example of man's never-ceasing quest for knowledge, as the epic conquest of the harsh Arctic environment by US Army engineers, as an Arctic sword and shield against the Soviet aggressor, and as a friendly collaboration between the USA and Denmark (in 1953, the former colony of Greenland became part of the Danish Realm). In the end, Camp Century had to be abandoned due to the glaciological forces of the moving ice sheet which crushed the tunnels, but also due to changes in Cold War politics and the political difficulties underscoring nuclear installations on Danish territory.

Key Words:

• Greenland
• Cold War
• US Army
• Camp Century
• popular culture

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this article is part of a larger research project, Exploring Greenland: Science and Technology in Cold War Settings, conducted in collaboration between Aarhus University and Florida State University. The Carlsberg Foundation generously funded the research project.

Notes

1 Greenland was under the sovereignty of Denmark, and US military presence in Greenland was regulated by a Danish-American defense agreement. It was—and still is—Danish policy not to have nuclear weapons on its territory, although the Danish Prime Minister, H. C. Hansen, in a secret note of 18 November 1957 to the US Ambassador, confirmed that the US could go ahead with the deployment of nuclear weapons to Greenland. However, since this was not the official policy of Denmark, the US Administration had no way of knowing the extent and scope of Hansen's “green light” (Petersen, 1998).

2 The iconicity of war rooms and fallout shelters is probably best illustrated by reference to Stanley Kubrick's ironic Cold War masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), in which both types of closed worlds play an important role.

3 Historical research has shown that the Danish Government implicitly allowed for US bombers carrying nuclear weapons to be deployed at Thule AB (Petersen, 1998; Olesen, 2011).