A Lost Bet, a Poisoned Legacy: Camp Century, a Ticking Toxic Bomb Under Greenland’s Ice

Ben Cramer, with documentation from the Robin des Bois association, Athena21, 22/2/2026
Translated by Tlaxcala

In the service of NATO - to confirm the strategic value of the Danish colony in the early days of the Cold War, the US USAmerican military installation was reinforced in 1951. As part of NATO. But this 1951 “Greenland defense treaty” mentions neither ballistic missiles, nor the portable nuclear reactor, nor the H-bombs... Obviously.

In 1993, declassified U.S. Air Force documents revealed that, for most of the 1960s, bombers from the Strategic Air Command (SAC) carrying nuclear weapons regularly flew over Greenland. However, this territory of over 2 million km² is subject to a Danish ban on any presence of nuclear weapons on its soil, according to a protocol established in 1957. Hence the negotiations between Washington and Copenhagen over shared responsibilities, analyzed by experts including Hans Christensen.

Two archive photos from 1959, the year of creation, to 1964, the end of work at Camp Century. On the left, the melt rate in the Thule region. © Colgan.

This military installation was carried out at the expense of the Kalaallit (Inuit) people. For example: to give its green light for the expansion of Thule Air Base, Copenhagen did not bother to consult the local population, represented by the Hunters' Council. Instead of a consultation, the Danish government ordered in May 1953 the transfer/deportation of the indigenous people of Thule (the Inughuits), a small Inuit community living from traditional hunting and fishing. 187 of them were forced to leave their ancestral lands to be exiled to Qaanaaq, 150 kilometers to the north. They would not receive compensation until 1999.

Camp Century without 'Atoms for Peace'

In June 1959, construction began on Camp Century, 204 km south of Thule Base, 1,290 kilometers from the North Pole. 24 hours a day, taking advantage of the polar day, 150 to 200 men from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) were at work. Officially, the aim was to sustain a community of scientists dedicated to climate research. But in fact ....

Camp Century represented the first step in the top-secret “Iceworm” project. Behind this facade, the pioneering base's purpose was to study the feasibility of a ballistic missile launch site under the ice cap to target the USSR. Even though the installation, including its “pocket” nuclear reactor, had been revealed by the Saturday Evening Post as early as 1960, the existence of this project, including its nuclear aspect, was only finally made public in 1997 by the Danish Institute for International Affairs, a research institute under the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Pentagon aimed to build a military complex of approximately 135,000 km² (an area larger than Greece) in which up to 11,000 soldiers could be stationed. It was planned to store there - with the ambition of being undetectable! - 600 Minuteman ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads and to move them between 2,100 silos hidden beneath the Arctic ice, in order to confuse Soviet intelligence. But no missiles were ultimately deployed at the base.

FAUSTO GIUDICERasmus Paludan: portrait of a troublemaker

   FG, BastaYekfi, 18/4/2022

The man who set fire to the Swedish suburbs during the Easter weekend and in the middle of Ramadan earned his time in the limelight. Express portrait.

Rasmus Paludan, by Morten Ingemann

Rasmus Paludan was born in 1982 in North Zealand to a Danish mother and a Swedish father, which allowed him two years ago to obtain Swedish nationality as well as Danish, and should open a path for him to become a candidate in Sweden’s legislative elections next September. He will probably have no more chance of being elected there than in Denmark, where he received only a few thousand votes, but this should widen his influence on the so-called social networks, where he is spreading out, multiplying provocations, but without meeting the expected success.

 Rasmus has a leftist younger brother - who called in a video not to vote for him in 2019 - and a feminist poet little sister, who also makes electronic music. He got married last fall to a 21-year-old woman, whose anonymity has been preserved and who is only known to the public as having had love affair since she was 17 with Peter Madsen, alias Raket-Madsen, the rocket and submarine inventor who is serving a life sentence for the murder, preceded by rape, of the Swedish journalist Kim Wall. Is this a sham marriage? We don't know. In any case, this news has put an end to the constant rumours of Rasmus' homosexuality, as Rasmus is also the subject of a complaint from a children's rights NGO for exchanging sexual comments with people under 15.

Rasmus has two personal problems: his brain and his overweight.

 

In 2005, at the age of 23, he was in a car accident that resulted in a 25% loss of brain power and compromised his law studies. But he learned enough law to specialize in all kinds of complaints and lawsuits, whether against the author of a message that Hitler hadn't finished the job of ridding the world of "fags" or against his namesake Rasmus Padulan Malver for improper use of his "middle name" (Padulan) as a surname.

 

But he has lost more cases than he has won and has been convicted a respectable number of times for his hate speech against Muslims.

Rasmus has specialized in one particular activity: he publicly burns Korans, often after wrapping them in bacon or smearing them with pork fat, both in Denmark and in Sweden, under police protection, in the name of the sacrosanct right to freedom of expression. To do this, he created a start-up, which presents itself as a political party but is more of a one-man business: Stram Kurs or Hard Line. The company's philosophy is summed up in two Instagrammed words: "ethnonationalist and libertarian". In short, he is a 21^st century crusader, who wants to cleanse Denmark of the Muslim spawn before it finally takes over at the end of the great replacement in progress.