Thin Ice: The History of US Involvement in Greenland
Donald Trump's quest to acquire Greenland has a precedent in US Cold War history. We should consider it a cautionary tale.
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[Hey folks, it’s Derek breaking in here to welcome Gretchen Heefner to Foreign Exchanges. Gretchen is a Professor of History at Northeastern University, where she teaches classes on the Global Cold War, The Origins of Today, and Environmental History. She is the author of Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and The Missile Next Door: The Army of the American Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2012). She holds an MA in International Economic Policy from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and a PhD in History from Yale University. Her work focuses on the surprisingly intimate connections between national security regimes and the everyday, whether it be through the deployment of nuclear ICBMs across the American West, or the construction of massive military bases in some of the most inhospitable places. I’m very excited to have her contributing to FX!]
President Donald Trump has been making noise about buying the world’s largest island, Greenland. Overlooked in the debate about whether this is a good idea and how it would possibly happen is the fact that the US has already been in Greenland for 70 years, and it's been mostly bad for Greenland and a mind-bogglingly expensive quixotic venture for us.
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.
But external efforts to simulate the utterly ordinary could not erase the harsh realities of trying to conquer nature’s extremes. That far north, the same problem that had bedeviled explorers confronted the US military juggernaut: supply. Every item that the Americans needed and wanted had to be shipped from home across long and tenuous supply lines that crossed oceans and bays, often frozen in. The window for supplying northwestern Greenland is exceedingly short—just a few months in the summer. Once ashore at Thule Air Force Base, the materials had to be hauled across the ice to Camp Century. Walter Cronkite, who visited Camp Century in 1961, called the route “the most dangerous road in the world.”
The most dangerous road consisted of 128 miles of ice and snow that, at best, could be traversed in three days. Specially designed tractors crawled slowly up onto the ice, never certain what was solid ground. Crevasses yawned open like stretch marks as the ice shifted, swallowing men and equipment whole. Men were told never to leave their vehicles if stranded, lest they freeze in minutes.
So why do it? Army officials told Cronkite that Camp Century was a research facility, but that was not quite true. Important research did occur in the icy caverns. But the main purpose of the facility was as a base camp for “Project Iceworm,” the army’s top secret, fantastical plan to create a subglacial system of rail tunnels and cars that could shuttle nuclear tipped missiles around, completely invisible from the air above. Deterrence on ice.
“Iceworm” proved unworkable, in part for reasons that a pair of Eagle Scouts discovered during their 6-month publicity trip to Camp Century. Shortly after the portable nuclear power arrived in late 1960, the army invited the scouts—one American and one Dane—to overwinter under the ice. After the initial thrill wore off, the monotony sank in. It was usually too cold and dangerous to leave the ice tunnels. Logistical glitches made news from outside slow in arriving. There was not much for the young men to do. And so they were tasked with doing something no one else had time for: each day they set out to measure how quickly the Camp Century ice tunnels were caving in.
With pegs and wires, they went from trench to trench measuring how much space remained between the floor and the ceiling, and from wall to wall. They noticed the effect of “squeezing in” right away. The engineers who designed Camp Century knew that eventually the walls would collapse, crushing all that remained inside. But they had underestimated how fast that would happen. The mess hall quickly began to slump, probably from the heat of bodies and cooking. The roof above the nuclear reactors was dangerously fragile. And this was just in the first year.
While the camera panned across a plain of windswept ice that seemed to go on forever, Cronkite wondered how long man could try to control the forces of nature. The answer was much shorter than the military had imagined. The nuclear reactor lasted just over two years. Camp Century became a summer-only facility and in 1966 it was simply abandoned. Nearly all materials left inside, including chairs, beds, prefab walls and doors, were meant to be crushed by the moving and morphing ice and snow.
That is not all that the US military left behind, however. At Camp Century, human and radioactive waste and toxic chemicals were simply ejected directly into the ice. In 2016, a team of researchers predicted that melting ice from climate change would eventually expose the materials left below. Elsewhere, too, items the military brought into Greenland were generally on a one-way ticket. Across the island the military has left an abundance of stuff: boxes, cans, wood, plastics, food scraps, and containers. The military produced a lot of trash. Eventually, it would also leave piles of metal car frames, airplane parts, and machines; some buried in the winter snows, others thrown into the nearby waters. Less obvious—but no less significant—was the hazardous waste from the daily operations of the base: used oils and solvents, paint sludge, plating residue, asbestos, jet fuel, PCBs, battery acid, and more besides. Greenlanders have frequently requested that US and Danish authorities clean up the Cold War mess.
The 1968 crash of a B-52 bomber trying to land at Thule is indicative of how insignificant the Greenland environment was to US interests. The aircraft was carrying four thermonuclear bombs. Although the devices did not detonate, the crash into sea ice caused the conventional explosive aboard to ignite, scattering radioactive waste around the area. Since the area was remote and sparsely populated, the US planned to simple leave the wreckage in place, allowing the materials to seep down into the ice and water below. The Danish government protested and demanded a clean-up operation. Contaminated ice was shipped to the United States for disposal. One of the four thermonuclear devices was never found.
As 21st century expansionists foolishly muse about deepening the US presence in Greenland, it would be well to attend to this history. The main reason for leaving Greenland alone, of course, is that Greenlanders who have fought for greater independence from Denmark are not looking for a new colonial overlord. But if democracy and anti-colonialism are not enough to dissuade, a dose of cold reality might be. Strategists and politicians in Washington might dream of mineral rights and access to Arctic shipping lanes. But as the military learned in the 1960s, extreme environments have a way of confounding even the simplest and best-engineered plans.
Russell Owen, “The North Polar Region,” New York Times, January 12, 1947, SM12; Ernest Sorge on “white desert” quoted in Jon Gertner, The Ice at the End of the World (Icon Books, 2019), xix; Fitzhugh Green, “Abode of the White Terror,” New York Times, May 17, 1931, 80.
Beautifully done! A lot here most of us don't know. But we must know that you can't beat Mother Nature.
Gretchen's got a great podcast voice. BRING HER BACK