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Camp Century’s degrees of coldness: From Cold War icon to climate change-induced problemKristian H. NielsenIt sounds like something out of a James Bond movie: a secret military operation hidden beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. But that’s exactly what transpired at Camp Century during the Cold War. When science journalist Julia Rosen on 4 August 2016 reported on Camp Century under the heading “Mysterious, Ice-Buried Cold War Military Base”, she conjured up the image of James Bond. Camp Century, the main subject of this article, in fact has many things in common with 007. Like Bond, Camp Century was used as a showcase for Western values and supremacy. Like Bond, who often had to fight his enemies in cold regions, Camp Century represented the military mobilization of the Far North against communism. And like many Bond movies from the Cold War period, stories about Camp Century featured nuclear issues that were central to national security and citizenship. As Spencer Weart argued in Nuclear Fears, James Bond showed that, with respect to using and commanding nuclear power, “ordinary citizens had no role but could only wait helplessly, trusting the hero with his special abilities and technological gadgets”. Camp Century essentially served to convey the same conclusion.Camp Century was a military research base built by the US Army Corps of Engineers with permission from the Danish Government inside the ice cap of northwestern Greenland during the Arctic summers of 1959-60. At the time of its construction, Camp Century was covered widely as the “city under the ice” with its own portable nuclear reactor supplying heat and electricity for up to 200 men. The reason why Rosen and Science magazine in August 2016 chose to report on this particular facility, which by then had been largely forgotten and lying deep under the ice, was a new scientific study published in Geophysical Review Letters. Based on regional climate models showing increased surface melting in northwestern Greenland, researchers of the study concluded that abandoned waste at Camp Century, including radioactive coolants for the nuclear reactor and persistent organic pollutants, could be “remobilized” around 2100. As they predicted, the results immediately gave rise to disputes over who will clean up after Camp Century. Once a Cold War icon buried in ice, Camp Century now represents a “hot” political problem induced by a warming climate.This article aims to explore several dimensions of Camp Century in light of the discussion of degrees of coldness in the Cold War introduced by the editors of this issue. It will be shown that Camp Century mobilized coldness in multiple and flexible ways. Camp Century, quite simply, was a symbol of coldness due to the fact that it was built into the ice cap. As the US Army’s film about Camp Century remarked, “it boasts the largest deepfreeze in the world”. The Arctic coldness resonated well with the geopolitical coldness that was the very reason for building Camp Century. As part of the polar concept devised right after World War II by US military leaders—what Time Magazine in 1947 aptly called “deepfreeze defense”—Camp Century was an attempt to project military power in Greenland.To this end, Camp Century served as an Arctic military laboratory, ideal for experimenting with how to best operate in regions dominated by snow, ice and permafrost. It relied on a “cool” and collaborative approach to the problems encountered in the cold environment. Experiences gained at Camp Century indicated that the hostile, frozen environment could be made a little “warmer” in the sense that by means of science and engineering it would be able to accommodate human, i.e. military, activities. The many journalists who were invited by the US Army to visit Camp Century reported this conclusion widely. Not reported but merely suggested was the fact that using Greenland’s vast ice cap as part of NATO’s nuclear deterrence was the underlying motivation behind Camp Century. Ironically, as military leaders in the early 1960’s learned that subsurface bases such as Camp Century were technically feasible, i.e. that Greenland’s ice cap could well be subject to massive militarization, the Cold War itself began to thaw and new concerns about the environmental and human consequences of the extended military presence in Greenland gained in importance.Greenland and geopolitical degrees of coldness in the early Cold WarScience will permit our use of Greenland as an Arctic sword and shield—a mighty bastion of deterrent power essential to the NATO concept.This powerful statement about Greenland, made in a joint report by the Arctic Institute of North America and the Office of Naval Research to the House of Representatives, implied that Greenland could accommodate NATO’s forward deployed military forces, aka “the sword”, and US strategic bomber and missile forces, aka “the shield”. Science obviously was seen as the key to open up this Arctic space for further militarization. The statement shows that Greenland had become important for both legs of NATO strategy—“a mighty bastion of deterrent power”—yet still remained largely unknown. Thus, two degrees of coldness in relation to Greenland may be discerned from the outset: On the one hand, Greenland had become a geopolitical “hot spot” for military projection of power in the Cold War. On the other, Greenland, due partly to its climatic conditions, remained a scientific “blind spot”, as vast and impressive, but also as cold, antagonistic and frightening as the ice cap itself.Already during World War II, Greenland had become a major staging base for trans-Atlantic movements of troops and equipment and was meteorologically important for supplying weather data needed to produce reliable weather forecasts of the North Atlantic. By the close of the war, as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union quickly grew, Greenland increasingly was seen as a potential war zone. This was due primarily to its central location between the two superpowers across the Circumpolar North. Soon after World War II, the polar concept or strategy seems to have been accepted in both Washington and Moscow. It was based on the premise that future conflicts would involve high northern latitudes as these provided the shortest route between the two competing powers.The polar concept was made known to the general public as early as February 1946 when General of the Army Henry Arnold announced in National Geographic that an enemy air power from across “the roof of the world” could readily deliver devastating blows at “our population centers and our industrial, economic, or government heart”. Arnold made the argument that air power would provide the best available defense against attacks made across the Arctic and the best means of striking the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. One year later, Time magazine came up with a telling metaphor for the polar concept: “deepfreeze defense”. Time reported that strategists in the United States now saw Greenland, depicted in the accompanying illustration as a castellated fortress in the Arctic, as “invaluable, in either conventional or push-button war”, and “a forward position for future rocket-launching sites”.Insert fig. 1 about here.Caption: Greenland and Alaska depicted as “mighty” military bastions in the Circumpolar North. The circle routes indicate flying distances from the two Arctic fortresses. Map by R.M. Chapman, Time, 27 January 1947, p.6.Time’s metaphor embodied the same kind of ambiguity as the notion of a “cold war”. Where the adjectives “deepfreeze” and “cold” signify stillness and emotionlessness, the nouns “defense” and “war” imply conflict and overt aggression. “Deepfreeze defense”, thus, ascribed two new meanings to Greenland, both of which relate to the geopolitical “coldness” of Greenland mentioned in the beginning of this section. Greenland would be mobilized as a defense area, as would many other remote parts of the world, in the emerging struggle between the two superpowers. It would remain “cold” in military and political terms, as in “short of overt military hostilities”, precisely the same way the Cold War was “cold”. At the same time, the Greenlandic defense bastion would remain “deep-frozen” simply because it would be located in one of the coldest regions of the world.The “deepfreeze defense” projected for northern Greenland immediately led to intense diplomatic negotiations between Denmark and the United States. The US Government simply asked Denmark if it would be possible to buy Greenland. Estimated offer: US $100 million, or about US $1 billion in present-day value. Denmark declined. Although no official reason was given, the long historical relationship between Greenland and Denmark and the resulting emotional ties between the two distant parts of the Kingdom of Denmark certainly played a role. Shortly after having declined the US offer, Denmark in cooperation with leading Greenlanders embarked on a sweeping process of modernization aiming to improve living standards and build socio-technical infrastructure necessary for a modern Greenlandic society. One of the first steps was to change the status of Greenland to a Danish county in 1953.Since Denmark so clearly refused to sell Greenland to the United States, the negotiations resulted in an agreement between the two countries, signed 27 April 1951. The agreement allowed the United States, in accordance with NATO strategy, to establish and operate military bases in Greenland. Soon after the agreement was signed, Operation Blue Jay, code name for the construction of Thule Air Base in northern Greenland, began. In the summer of 1951, around 12,000 men and 300,000 tons of cargo arrived at Thule. Thule Air Base was by far the biggest facility in Greenland and one of the largest bases ever created by the United States in its worldwide network of modern air bases. To make space for Thule Air Base, but also because the Danish authorities wanted to keep interactions between US soldiers and the indigenous people in the region to a minimum, inhabitants of two nearby settlements, Uummannaq and Pituffik, were relocated to newly established housing developments in the new town Qaanaaq. At the time, the authorities presented the relocation as voluntary. Only a few compensation claims were raised, but they were easily brushed aside by the authorities. Controversy about the decision arose in the mid-1980’s resulting in two Danish court rulings in 1999 and again in 2003 that offered minor financial compensation but rejected claims for land rights.Thule Air Base proved to be the most important stronghold in the polar strategy according to which nuclear deterrence of the Soviet Union depended on strategic bombing conducted by the US Air Force’s Strategic Air Command via air bases in Greenland and Alaska. Moreover, Arctic operations potentially would include carrier air strikes against Soviet bases in the sub-Arctic, necessary surface action by the Army and Navy to defend required bases, missile defenses against Soviet air attacks on the United States or Canada via the Arctic routes, and surveillance systems to supply early warning against enemy attacks. The formative years of the Cold War in the late 1940’s when the notion and understanding of the Cold War as a state of conflict that, due partly to the global threat of nuclear war, would not involve direct military action, thus coincided with the discovery or consolidation of the strategic importance of Arctic regions. Situated on the straight line between Washington and Moscow, Greenland certainly became vital to the defense policy of the United Stated as an Arctic defense area. For military strategists and politicians, the Cold War was geopolitically cold because “hot” military operations, in particular nuclear attacks engaging the two main opponents, were not an option, but also because military strategy and defense policies to a large extent revolved around Arctic regions. With the establishment of Thule Air Base in the early 1950’s and later Camp Century at the turn of the decade, Greenland became fully embedded in the geopolitical coldness of the early Cold War.Cool war-gaming and heated environmental issuesOr, maybe Greenland was just a delicate piece of war-gaming played in some defense institute, with hazelnut coffee and croissants.Greenland was a key strategic area in the geopolitical Cold War where the political coldness between East and West would be juxtaposed with the geographical coldness of the Arctic. Yet, Greenland also played a role in defining the cultural dimensions of the Cold War that took shape when nuclear geopolitics diffused into cultural arenas across the world. As the brief quote from Don DeLillo’s ambitious Cold War novel Underworld suggests, the geopolitics of Greenland implicated a distant, somewhat elusive and partly virtual place where “delicate war-gaming” took place. Elsewhere in the book, there is this ironic dialogue about Greenland dated 1978:“What’s the secret about Greenland?”“First, does it exist? Second, why does it keep changing its size and its location? Third, why can’t we find anyone who’s personally been there? Fourth, didn’t a B-52 crash about ten years ago that the facts were so hush-hush we still don’t know for sure if there’s a nuclear weapon aboard?”He pronounced it nucular.“You think Greenland has a secret function and a secret meaning. But you think everything has a secret function and a secret meaning,” she said.According to DeLillo, Greenland was unreal in the popular imagination during the Cold War, shrouded in military secrecy and dominated by the exact and cool (yet, at the same time deeply perverse) logic of nuclear deterrence. These are features shared by what historian of technology Paul Edwards identifies as “closed world discourse” of control through high-technology military systems and attempts to command the entire globe through surveillance systems, computer simulations, and cybernetic theory. Thus, Greenland no longer was the source of romantic stories about Arctic wilderness and heroic explorations, but rather became gradually integrated into closed world discourse. Greenland attained a new form of rational-technological coldness by becoming tied to an impenetrable and calculating heterogeneous assemblage of scientific theory, computer networks, military power and political ideology designed to dominate the geopolitical and nuclear realities of the Cold War. Like the nuclear superpower struggle, Greenland would be contained, and its coldness in some ways enforced, by the application of military science and technology.Another example showing how cold regions helped produce degrees of coldness affiliated with scientific reasoning and nuclear disaster is provided by the 1951 TV adaptation of Philip Wylie’s 1946 short story “Blunder”. The TV show features a scientist named Carl Everson, located in a wooden cabin “somewhere in the Arctic”. His only companion is his wife, Jane Everson. Although not a scientist herself, she is very concerned about her husband’s scientific experiments with “bismuth fission”. Based on previous comments from Carl and on the fact that they had to go all the way to the Arctic to do the experiment, she concludes that something could go terribly wrong. Her intuition is correct. As other scientists in the United Kingdom and the United States desperately try to intervene in Everson’s experiments by radio transmissions and by flying to his cabin in a plane, Carl Everson—his wife having resigned—sets off the fission reaction, destroying the world in an uncontrolled chain reaction.In “Blunder” the remoteness of the Arctic becomes a precondition for the crucial scientific experiment that eventually leads to nuclear doomsday. Whereas Edwards’ closed worlds are created by the military-industrial complex, to use President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s memorable phrase from his farewell address in 1961, the perpetrator in “Blunder” is a lone wolf. Nevertheless, the message is the same. The future of the world lies in the hands of experts, some of whom are driven by cool reasoning rather than human compassion and understanding. In “Blunder”, the physical remoteness and coldness of the Arctic become metaphors for the social remoteness and coldness of the people in charge of the defining technology of the Cold War, nuclear chain reactions. The Arctic offers estrangement and coldness in physical as well as mental terms.Another theme that is important to understand Greenland’s degrees of coldness in the Cold War is that of contamination. Environmental historian John McCannon places this theme at the heart of understanding the history of the whole of the Arctic in the period. McCannon emphasizes that the geopolitics of the Cold War not only turned the Arctic into a strategic battlefield for nuclear deterrence, but also generated high levels of pollution threatening the vulnerable ecosystem like never before. . Like the surfacing of the US nuclear submarine Skate at the North Pole in March 1959, an image that McCannon sees as being as iconic of the Cold War as mushroom clouds and space travels, the construction of Thule Air Base resulted in intrusion of military-technological systems into pristine and isolated surroundings (see figure 2).Insert fig. 2 about here.Caption: Military “contamination” in Greenland: View across the deck of a landing ship that carries a cargo of trucks and vehicles during Operation Blue Jay at Thule, 1951. ? Getty Images. The LIFE Picture CollectionWhereas the cultural connotations that could be extracted from works such as Underworld and “Blunder” imply detachment and devastation, contamination points toward infection and debasement. Needless to say, these are not metaphors of coldness. They rather suggest that the meanings attached to Greenland in the Cold War extend beyond the simulated nature of closed worlds to unintended, but nevertheless real and material consequences for people and environment. McCannon observes that such meanings took on prominence during later decades of the Cold War with the rise of environmentalism and further argues that they essentially were sparked by early Cold War contaminations. The coldness of Greenland—enforced by geopolitical strategy and war-gaming—became entangled with heated debates about the implications of military activities for Arctic environments and peoples. As already mentioned in the introduction, environmental concerns about US bases in Greenland are, of course, still prominent as are calculated geopolitical speculations about exploiting the Arctic for specific purposes.Degrees of resistance to the militarization of northern GreenlandThe Iceworm concept of deploying a ballistic weapons system in tunnels beneath the surface of the North Greenland icecap, as an alternative or supplement to a land- or sea-based NATO MRBM [medium-range ballistic missile] force under NATO command and operation, is sufficiently attractive and feasible—both militarily and technically—to warrant further study.Not far from Thule Air Base, the US Army established three military research bases: Camp TUTO (Thule Take-off) in 1954 at the foot of the ice cap, Camp Fist Clench in 1957 on and inside the ice cap about 320 km east of Thule, and finally Camp Century in 1959 about 250 km east of Thule. All three bases formed part of the Army’s research and development program to facilitate sustained military operations in Greenland by building covered trenches beneath the surface of the ice cap—what was known as the subsurface concept. The subsurface structures were designed for protection and concealment. In the late 1950’s, building on favorable results gained at Camp TUTO and Camp Fist Clench, an Army think tank in the Pentagon called the Planning Studies Division developed the top-secret Project Iceworm. The Iceworm concept, which is referred to in the quote above from a Department of Defense assessment performed in 1962, would involve a total militarization of Northern Greenland.The analysts at the Planning Studies Division intended Project Iceworm to be a competitor to the US Navy’s Polaris and the US Airforce’s Minuteman missile systems. Fully developed, it would cover an area of about 130,000 m2, roughly three times the size of Denmark or Switzerland. It would have thousands of missile launch sites with up to 600 medium-range ballistic missiles, a planned, modified version of the Minuteman named Iceman. The proposed Iceman missiles would be located closer to the Soviet Union compared to Minuteman missiles installed in hardened silos in the United States. The Iceman thus could have two stages rather than three and still arrive at its target in substantially less time and with greater accuracy than the Minuteman. Built into the ice cap, the entire system would be well hidden and the deployment pattern could be made flexible due to the large geographic dispersion of the system. Moreover, the system would be protected by the ice cap and by the fact that a nuclear detonation on one part of the system would not affect other parts.Camp Century was being planned at the same time as Project Iceworm, but in another division of the Army. It was the first attempt to build an entire subsurface base. Subsurface construction on the ice cap involved cut-and-cover techniques using effective snow millers, traditionally employed to clear roads of avalanche snow in the Alps, to excavate or cut straight trenches about 8 meters deep. The trenches were covered with corrugated steel arches and then gradually covered with snow deposited by the snow millers. After a short period of time, the snow would harden and become self-supporting. At Camp Century, a total of 21 tunnels (cut-and-cover trenches), including a long central tunnel, the so-called Main Street, extending through the center of the camp and giving access to all other tunnels and the surface, were built from June 1959 to October 1960. Providing power and heat for the camp was one of the main infrastructural tasks. For logistical reasons—a few pounds of uranium contains as much energy as thousands of drums of fossil fuel—it was decided to test one of the Army’s new transportable, i.e. modular and skid-mounted, nuclear power plants at Camp Century (see figure 3). The final report on Camp Century, completed after the nuclear power plant had been removed again in 1963-64, concluded that subsurface ice-cap bases were indeed feasible and that small nuclear power plants offered significant advantages in reducing logistical burden of their support.Insert fig. 3 about here.Caption: Camp Century’s nuclear reactor was installed in the largest trenches, approximately 12 meters deep. The image shows the glycol trench where the cooling liquid for the reactor was stored. The Danish-American agreement permitted up to 50 millicuries (1.85 GBq) per year of radioactive cooling liquid waste disposal in the ice cap. In accordance with this agreement all solid waste was to be removed from Greenland and disposed of in accordance with AEC regulations, i.e., placed in concrete casks and dumped into designated locations in the ocean or buried in one of the designated land area burial grounds in the United States. ? POLFOTOThe Department of Defense study group in their 1962 assessment essentially reached the same conclusion (see quote above). Project Iceworm and Camp Century had been planned in response to President Eisenhower’s 1953 New Look strategy emphasizing extended massive retaliation with nuclear weapons at the expense of conventional forces. As a result, the Army faced extensive cuts. Project Iceworm resulted partly from Cold War fears of the enemy’s missile threat—fears that mounted after the launch of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957—and partly from inter-service rivalry over research and development funds. It was an attempt by the Army to secure for itself a place in the existing nuclear deterrence strategy. Although resistance from Denmark, already under pressure from the Soviet Union because of the presence of semi-permanent US bases in Greenland, was anticipated, the study group dispassionately considered the options: As a NATO country and a potential candidate for the European Economic Community, Denmark would be forced to weigh her possible contribution to the defense of Europe against her subjective aversion against all matters nuclear. If it could be clearly demonstrated that Iceworm would contribute materially to the survival of Denmark and her NATO allies, the Danes might take the plunge. Danish resistance might be overcome by discreetly encouraging the belief that Iceworm would (a) minimize the opportunities of the Germans acquiring a national nuclear capability, (b) add to Danish stature within the NAC [North Atlantic Council, the principal political decision-making body within NATO], and (c) represent a major contribution to NATO’s European heartland, toward which Denmark is moving within the EEC.Despite the positive evaluation, Project Iceworm was shelved. According to Cold War historians Erik D. Weiss and Nikolaj Petersen, the reasons for abandoning the project were manifold: The study group’s arguments for how to persuade Denmark to accept the concept were not entirely convincing. The idea met with significant resistance from the US Airforce and US Navy. Anticipated Soviet military responses also presented an obstacle. Unfavorable evaluations of the concept of mobile missile deployments and the turn of opposition against medium-range ballistic missiles in favor of inter-continental ones played a role. Finally, basic engineering problems such as those encountered at Camp Century mattered in the decision against Iceworm.At Camp Century, the US Army engineers learned that even if tunnels under the ice were indeed technically feasible, they were rather difficult to maintain. As it was well understood from the beginning—and for this reason the engineers expected the life span of Camp Century to be about ten years—snow and ice are viscoelastic materials. The ice cap, although it may seem immobile, slowly spreads outward from the center. Calving glaciers occur as the ice cap arrives at the coast and breaks off. Consequently, tunnels built in ice will tend to deform. At Camp Century, the problem seemed to be enhanced due to the higher temperature in the tunnels. Concentration of heat in some of the tunnels meant that the ice and snow deformed more rapidly than predicted by several fold. Attempts were made to cool the tunnels, and snow trimming in the tunnels turned out to be burdensome, particularly with hand tools.Other problems included deterioration of snow floors in tunnels due to vehicle traffic and continuous drifting of snow that tended to block the portal ramp to Main Street. What the engineers had encountered was what historian of science Janet Martin-Nielsen calls “the other cold war”: the struggle with the Arctic environments, which threatened to impede American capabilities in the region. Martin-Nielsen describes snow deformation studies performed in ice tunnels at Camp TUTO from 1954 to 1964. From data collected before 1958, the researchers concluded that it would be possible to build tunnels with an acceptable rate of deformation estimated to be about 0.30 m per year. They also developed a technique they thought would overcome the deformation problem: creating overpressure in sealed ice tunnels to counteract the effects of deformation. The experiments, however, were unsuccessful. From then on, the subsurface concept would only imply installations with limited time span. Ten years seemed to be a careful estimate. Camp Century, however, was shut down as an all-year base in 1963 and finally abandoned in 1965 after only five years of operation. Martin-Nielsen concludes that the US Army engineers had tried to conquer the snow and ice, but ultimately failed. Instead, they contented themselves with pursuing a kind of “détente with nature” where collaboration and negotiation with the coldness of the ice cap would prevail.Degrees of coldness in the city under iceCity under the ice—man, oh man, they don’t believe me back home. You have to see it to believe it.Camp Century was more than a military research and development base where researchers and engineers struggled with the cold and hostile environment. The US Army also used Camp Century as part of a larger publicity campaign aimed at “selling Greenland” to prove the continued relevance of the Army in an age defined by nuclear deterrence. The journalists invited to Camp Century were “embedded” into the Army, which makes it unsurprising that their stories contained nothing but praise and wonder for the achievements of the Army engineers. They would often refer to Camp Century as the “city under ice”, giving the impression that the base was a small sheltered American community. The reports marveled at the fact that it had proven possible for the men to lead a relatively comfortable life in tunnels under the ice cap. Few journalists bothered to mention the tunnel deformation problem addressed in the previous section, and those who did tended to neglect it by confidently stating that the researchers and engineers would surely overcome it. Stories about Camp Century used terms such as incredible, tribute to the imagination, science-fiction, and difficult to believe. The readers of such stories could easily have gained the impression that Camp Century bordered on the surreal just as DeLillo described entire Greenland in Underworld. This also was roughly the conclusion that the GI quoted above, in an interview with journalist Charles Michael Daugherty, tried to convey.Walter Wager, the first journalist to visit Camp Century, was a writer and producer for CBS and NBC. Like most other journalists visiting Camp Century, he explicitly dealt with the coldness of Greenland in writing about the chilling effects produced by the ice cap. His book opened as “a report on what is probably the last and most dangerous frontier on earth”. The danger and chill that Wager felt, first and foremost, was related to Greenland’s cold weather, with temperatures dropping to minus 60 degrees Celsius during the winter and freezing storms raging. Even at minus 20 degrees, the chill factor of winds blowing 40 km/h would be enough to freeze exposed areas of the face in less than a minute and make “travel and life in temporary shelters dangerous”. Danger on the trail to Camp Century stemmed from concealed crevasses in the ice cap that would be particularly dangerous in a storm or fog. “White-outs”, a weather condition in which visibility is severely reduced due to milky mists, also could result in vehicles or people wandering of the trail. In short, the ice cap made Wager chill in physical and psychological terms. It represented “something immense, intangible, and unfriendly”. White-outs to Wager seemed almost “alive”; he saw them as the materialization of “a pure science-fiction fantasy oddly reinforced by the strange fact that the fast moving white-out stopped exactly at the edge of the ramp road as it dared to go no farther”. Wager contrasted the strangeness, danger, and coldness of the ice cap to the snugness, comfort, and warmth found inside Camp Century. Comparing the base to a city was one of the rhetorical means used by Wager to communicate this contrast:Camp Century is a cool but comfortable American community in miniature. It has street lights, a hospital, a library, a laundry—and even a parking problem. The shafts or trenches gouged out of the icecap are dimly illuminated by lamps drawing electricity from an atomic generator, the source of current for the washing machines and the high-fidelity phonographs and the air pumps.“Cool, but comfortable” was Wager’s conclusion. Even if the ice-cap environment was cold, even hostile, inside Camp Century, a small piece of the United States in some strange way transposed to the ice cap, the men would sit in relative comfort and enjoy their favorite records and books. This image was the enactment of a new type of Arctic heroism which would replace mastery of the harsh environment itself with mastery of the knowledge and technology required to conquer the environment in more complete and enduring ways than was the case for past heroic explorers. Whereas traditional Arctic explorers such as Knud Rasmussen and Roald Amundsen demonstrated they could penetrate the Arctic wilderness by the use of extraordinary physical strength and sheer willpower, the new Arctic explorers, such as the engineers of Camp Century, relied on cool, rational scientific thinking, innovative engineering, collaborative teamwork, and the hearth of their homeland. Their heroism was collective, rather than individual, and they performed their tasks in a disciplined and effective manner.Like the space and Antarctica programs explored by historian James Spiller, the Greenland research and development program, albeit much smaller in size, was used to define national identity in the United States in the 1950’s and into the early 1960’s. Camp Century in the Far North proved that Americans, despite the comforts of modern life, would still be able to lead the world, but now did so in terms of science and technology. Overcoming the geographical frontier now required meeting scientific and engineering challenges. The men in Camp Century—“ice worms” as they would often call themselves—were characterized by dispassionate pragmatism, inventiveness, and cool-headedness. In the words of Wager, as the ice worms stubbornly hacked out the remarkable US town under the ice, they would “prove that ordinary men can survive in the far reaches of the Arctic”. They were “free men who sincerely believe in their difficult and strenuous work” and who “inspired by the careful planning and excellent leadership of their quiet competent commanders worked together with a minimum of fuss and literally no human friction”. No friction, no “heat”, and none of the emotional problems—fear, confusion, bitterness, or panic—that, according to Wager, so plagued twentieth-century men and women.For Wager, the surest sign that science and technology not only would allow conquest of the ice cap, but also counted as a defining feature of Americans’ national character, was the nuclear reactor. It was “a modern miracle, a remarkable scientific achievement in which all Americans can take pride”, he wrote. Wager in passing mentioned that the nuclear reactor producing electricity and heat for Camp Century also was “hot”, as in radioactive. Still, this latter “hotness” was under full control, he assured his readers, as the reactor was “probably one of the least dangerous pieces of machinery in the entire tunnel town”. Of course, this was not entirely true. In fact, because of high levels of radiation in the tunnels, additional shielding had to be installed soon after Wager left. Also, low-level radioactive liquid waste was discharged into an unlined sump in the ice cap throughout the operation of the reactor from November 1960 to July 1963, when the Army decided to discontinue year-round operation in order to reduce research and developments costs in Greenland. After it had been shut down, the reactor was left to cool off for a year, and then in the summer of 1964 it was finally dismantled, removed from Camp Century, and shipped to the United States. The reactor, however, was still “hot”. Residual radiation levels were considerably higher than expected and daily permissible exposure of crew members disassembling the unit was shorter than calculated, which meant that more men were required to accomplish the task in time to meet the shipping schedule. After the reactor had been removed, Camp Century served as a summer camp until 1966 where it was terminally shut down, as the US Army announced that Camp Century had served its purpose as proof of the subsurface concept. It was expected that the remains of Camp Century, including abandoned waste at the site, would be entombed under the ice cap forever.Camp Century heats up againAnd it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically, but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it.The “underworlds” traversed in DeLillo’s novel are the more or less hidden, more or less tangible connections that underpin human existence, history, and society. “Everything’s connected”, as Jesse Detwhiler, DeLillo’s waste theorist and garbage archaeologist, who also came up with the philosophical reflections about waste in this section’s epigraph, says. Camp Century, to be sure, was a physical underworld, buried under the ice cap. When the nuclear reactor occasionally failed, the tunnels would turn pitch dark until the standby diesel power plant would take over. Except for the ramp on Main Street, no amount of light penetrated into the tunnels. Camp Century, moreover, for many years remained a historical underworld as it became largely forgotten up until the mid-1990’s when Danish historians uncovered in US national archives the evaluation of Project Iceworm by the Department of Defense. It then resumed its dormant existence deep under the ice until, as mentioned in the introduction, a team of researchers in 2016 projected that by the turn of the century the increasing melting of ice will eventually release harmful substances buried at the Camp Century site to the environment. Once abandoned, forgotten, and even suppressed, Camp Century’s waste now demands attention. It is up to politicians, engineers, and others to “build a system to deal with it”.Managing its many waste products was an important part of the design of Camp Century from the beginning. Camp Century had three dumps: one for water-borne biological waste (the sewage sump), one for radioactive waste water, and a sanitary fill where trash and other non-water-borne waste could be buried in snow trenches in the same manner as in normal sanitary fills in land areas. Sewage was dumped into an unlined snow pit and left to melt its way down into the ice cap. As Camp Century neared completion in September of 1960, the approach of winter and the great amount of work remaining to be done resulted in locating the sewage sump too close to the nearest tunnels. A distance of at least 150 m had been recommended; the actual distance was only 45 m. Moreover, the sump was not vented as according to the recommendations. As a result, the odor became “almost unbearable” in the nearest quarters by the following summer and traces of sewage odor were detectable throughout the tunnels. Subsequent ventilation of the sump reduced the odor but did not eliminate it. A total of 24 million liters of grey water, including sewage was disposed in this sump. Low-level radioactive coolant for the nuclear reactor, in accordance with a Danish-American agreement permitting up to 1.85 GBq of radioactive waste per year, was discharged into another unlined sump. Other wastes include physical waste, such as buildings and railway, of approximately 9.2 thousand tons, an estimated 200.000 liters of diesel fuel and a nontrivial quantity of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).The waste abandoned at Camp Century belongs to the environmental legacy of the Cold War in the Arctic. Although entirely negligible compared to other sources of pollution left from the Cold War, such as the massive dumping of radioactive wastes and hardware at sea by the Russians, it nevertheless is problematic. The discussion about what to do with the waste as it will eventually resurface due to global warming feeds into the long-standing debate about the unintended consequences of US bases in Greenland and Denmark simply using Greenland to maintain good relations with its NATO allies. Thule Air Base, in particular, has been the center of many controversies from the forced relocation of local inhabitants to the B-52 crash in 1968 and the long proceedings concerning compensation of the workers involved in cleaning up after the crash. The discussion about who should assume responsibility for cleaning up after Camp Century became quite heated by late 2016, when Greenland’s foreign minister Vittus Qujaukitsoq threatened to withdraw Greenland from the Danish Commonwealth in frustration with what he called “Danish arrogance”. Denmark calmly agreed to set up an expedition that will visit Camp Century for the first time in the summer of 2017 to monitor the situation. Camp Century, the ice-buried Cold War icon, has begun to stir again. ................
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