In the early 1960s the U.S. Army carved a town into the Greenland ice sheet, complete with a hospital, chapel, movie theater, 3,000 meters of tunnels, and the PM-2A, the world's first mobile nuclear reactor. Camp Century was publicized as an Arctic research station and profiled in the Saturday Evening Post. Declassified files later showed it was a proof of concept for something far larger.

This episode unpacks Project Iceworm, a plan for up to 600 modified Minuteman missiles nicknamed Iceman rotating through 4,000 kilometers of rail tunnels across 52,000 square miles of ice, kept secret from Denmark. It explains how Swiss snow millers cut the trenches, why viscoelastic ice sagged the reactor room ceiling, how the base's own ice-core scientists proved the plan impossible, and what a 2016 study says about melting exposing the diesel, PCBs, an ...