The Last Word On Nothing

At the height of the last Cold War the U.S. military burrowed into a glacier in northernmost Greenland and installed a nuclear reactor. The reactor was small—“experimental,” the army called it—and designed to power a base that had also been built under the ice. The base was called Camp Century, and it could house up to 200 scientists and military personnel in several tomb-like tunnels. While there wasn’t much to do in the “city under the ice” aside from work, sleep, and eat, its residents lived in relative comfort, considering, of course, that they were inside a glacier at the top of the world. 

There were showers and meals made hot by atomic power, there were bunk beds, a gym and a library. During the days, while scientists conducted research in one region of the base, engineers working in another began drilling down into the ice, to see how just how deep they might go. When I researched Camp Century last year for a piece I was working on, an ice base veteran named Austin Kovacs told me he’d never felt weird living there, so close to the reactor.

Every day, he told me, soldiers walked through the base swinging Geiger counters back and forth, like priests toting censers, listening for the uptight ticks or flat-out screech that would indicate trouble. But these sounds never came, and so the soldiers’ routine passage through the tunnels, the calm sweep of their counters in the darkness, came to feel like some kind of safety.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot of that story. With Greenland in the news, with fresh threats and bullying pouring out of the White House each day. What it all says about who we are, what we’ll do. Would the U.S. really try to take Greenland, or buy it? Would we really invade? 

The president says America “needs” Greenland for security reasons, but as a few reporters have noted, old agreements between the U.S. and the Kingdom of Denmark (which Greenland is still part of) already allow the American military great latitude when it comes to defending itself, NATO, and Greenland. There were, during the middle years of the last Cold War, several American military bases and airfields on the massive island. Camp Century, with its sketchy reactor and sci-fi vibes, was merely the strangest of them. 

And yet no takeover or annexation was necessary for the construction of any of those bases—not even for the creation of a subglacial nuclear-powered one. Maybe it goes without saying that the Danes were not pleased to learn of Camp Century, and the Inuit, who make up the majority of the island’s population, were never asked for their consent. The U.S. simply went ahead and did what it wanted—what it thought would be cool. All this is to say that when the president suggests Greenland should be invaded or otherwise overtaken for “security” reasons, it is nothing more than a lie. And yet this word, security, has been repeated so often by politicians and the media that one day soon, if we are not very careful, it may become a chant, a refrain, reassuring as the soft tick of Geiger counter in a tunnel under the ice.

One by one most of America’s Cold War bases in Greenland were shut down as the threat of war with the Soviet Union lessened, or changed shape. In 1964 Camp Century’s nuclear reactor was fished up from the ice and hauled back to the States for burial somewhere out West. A few years later the base was abandoned. Much of the infrastructure—and a great many tons of radioactive wastewater, along with human and chemical waste—was simply left in place, to be slowly absorbed by the glacier. When Austin Kovacs went back to survey Camp Century a couple years after it was shut down

“… he found [it was] a total ruin. In a series of photographs he made of the base, one can see something like a mining disaster unfolding in slow motion. Tongues of snow spill down passageways. Steel structures collapse on themselves. Wood beams splinter like bones. The photos give form to the glacier’s overwhelming and otherwise invisible weight. Humans had been gone only a short time, but already there was the suggestion of an inevitable one-way journey—the debris being crushed, then swallowed, never to rise again.”

Kovacs and his survey team were the last humans to visit the site. After they left, the base vanished into the ice and was all but forgotten for half a century. When I first began writing about it, I thought of Camp Century as a sort of time capsule, hidden away beneath the ice, a cluster of artifacts waiting to resurface and remind us of our folly. 

Now I see the story as an American parable, one among many, all of them linked to the one we’re living through now. When I asked Kovacs if he’d ever told his children stories of his life under the ice he thought for a moment and said No. When I asked why, he couldn’t say.