The Big Picture TV Series playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_hX5wLdhf_Jwfz5l_3NRAcCYURbOW2Fl Arctic & Antarctic playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL75CED10E68DA8A64 more at http://scitech.quickfound.net/ "The first release of the 1961-1962 THE BIG PICTURE series tells the story of a research and development project undertaken by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in Greenland. This city under the ice cap referred to as Camp Century, is a new concept of polar construction. It is today's Modern Army in action on a new frontier of solid ice and snow. During this 30-minute presentation, you will see how snowy wastelands are developed into a completely built city equipped with every convenience from a nuclear power plant to a shower. Camp Century is an important element in the Army's continuing polar research program. "City Under the Ice" is an outstanding example of man's never ceasing quest for knowledge." "The Big Picture" episode TV-514 Originally a public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Project Iceworm was the code name for a US Army Top Secret proposal during the Cold War (a study was started in 1958), to build a network of mobile nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. The ultimate objective of placing medium-range missiles under the ice - close enough to Moscow to strike targets within the Soviet Union - was kept secret from the Danish government. To study the feasibility of working under the ice, a highly publicized "cover" project, known as "Camp Century" was launched in 1960. However, unsteady ice conditions within the ice sheet caused the project to be cancelled in 1966. Political background Details of the missile base project were classified for decades, first came light in public in January 1997, when the Danish Foreign Policy Institute (DUPI) was asked by the Danish Parliament to research the history of nuclear weapons in Greenland during the Thulegate scandal. Description To test the feasibility of construction techniques a project site called Camp Century was started, located at an elevation of 6,600 feet (2,000 m) in northwestern Greenland, 150 miles (240 km) from the US Thule Air Base. The American radar and air base at Thule had been working successfully since 1951. Camp Century was, at the time, described as a demonstration of affordable ice cap military outposts. The (secret) Project Iceworm was to be a system of tunnels 4,000 km in length, used to deploy up to 600 nuclear missiles, which would be able to reach the USSR in case of nuclear war. The missile locations would be under the cover of Greenland's ice sheet and were supposed to be periodically changed. While Project Iceworm was secret, plans for Camp Century were discussed with and approved by Denmark and the facility - including its nuclear power plant - was profiled in the Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1960. The "official purpose" of Camp Century, as explained by the US Department of Defense to Danish government officials in 1960, was to test various construction techniques under Arctic conditions, explore practical problems with a semi-mobile nuclear reactor, as well as supporting scientific experiments on the Icecap. A total of 21 tunnels were built with a total length of 3,000 meters; these tunnels also contained a hospital, a shop, a theater and a church. The total number of inhabitants was around 200. From 1960 until 1963 the electricity supply was provided by means of the world's first mobile/portable nuclear reactor, designated the PM-2A and designed by Alco for the US Army. Water was supplied by melting glaciers and tested to determine if germs such as the plague were present... Within three years after it was excavated, ice core samples taken by geologists working at Camp Century demonstrated that the glacier was moving much more intensively than had been anticipated, and would destroy the tunnels and planned launch stations in about two years. The facility was evacuated in 1965 and the nuclear generator removed. Project Iceworm was cancelled for good and Camp Century closed in 1966... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program ...PM-2A: 2 MWe, plus heating. Camp Century, Greenland. Initial criticality October 3, 1960. The first "portable" nuclear power reactor. Brought to Greenland in parts, assembled, operated, disassembled, shipped back to CONUS... This plant was shut down 1963-1964. PM-2A operated at a uranium-235 enrichment of 93 percent...

• published: 13 Feb 2018
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