‘Project Iceworm’: The secret nuclear city under the ice [Socialist History S1 Episode 4]

In 1959 the US Army began building a base beneath the Greenland ice sheet, presented to the press, to Congress, and to the Danish government as a scientific research station. This was a cover story. The real plan, code-named Project Iceworm, was to bury a network of tunnels housing up to 600 nuclear missiles under the ice, invisible to Soviet satellites, on land taken from Indigenous people who were never consulted, in a country that had declared itself nuclear-free.

In this episode we take a deep dive into the breathtaking scale of the classified plan, why the moving ice ultimately defeated it, the radioactive waste left behind, the straight line to Trump’s push to take Greenland today, and more.

This is part of the first season of Socialist History, our new series on The Socialist Program. In each episode we unpack a different CIA or Pentagon operation, each of which was given its own code-name as Project Iceworm was.