NASA Rediscovered a Forgotten Cold War Nuclear Base Buried in the Greenland Ice Sheet

NASA researchers, working in Greenland, inadvertently rediscovered a Cold War military installation that had been buried and largely forgotten beneath the ice. The base was part of a top secret American programme designed to survive a first strike nuclear attack by the Soviet Union - a hardened, concealed facility intended to remain operational even after an initial exchange of nuclear weapons.

What the project ultimately demonstrated was that the Greenland ice sheet is not the stable, static platform military planners had assumed. Nature had other ideas, and the base had to be abandoned. The experience sent military engineers looking elsewhere for survivable nuclear infrastructure - options that ranged from the genuinely creative to the extraordinary, including the briefly considered possibility of embedding ballistic missiles directly within the ice sheet itself, and proposals that extended as far as the moon as a potential platform for nuclear deterrence.