ABSTRACT
“City under the ice—man, oh man, they don’t believe me back home. You have to see it to believe it!” Such were the words of one US GI who in 1961 spent a three-month term in Camp Century, a nuclear-powered US Army research and development facility constructed inside Greenland’s icecap. In this essay, we explore the relationship between Camp Century and atomic urbanism during the height of the Cold War by drawing on academic work done on the planning of US Army bases around the world and the design and aesthetics of civil defence architecture. Camp Century was designed as a forerunner for Project Iceworm, the Army’s grand scheme to install more than 600 nuclear missiles in tunnels under the ice. Like other US Army outposts, Camp Century also embodied core values of American cities and American way of life. Powered by a portable nuclear reactor and generally technologically innovative, Camp Century was sheltered against its hostile environment, climatically and geopolitically. The camp demonstrated to an US audience, who followed the construction and daily life of the camp through magazine articles, books and TV shows, that US values would prevail. Although the life span of Camp Century was very short––about five years––the story about the “City under the Ice” shows just how widespread and flexible the ideas pertaining to atomic urbanism were during the height of the Cold War.
