America abandoned this Arctic silo 60 years ago. Now, it could solve Nato’s Greenland problem

High above the Arctic Circle, surrounded by Greenland’s frozen wastes, American scientists conducting a secret research project hit upon a brilliant idea.

Suppose nuclear missiles could be hidden inside the polar ice cap? These instruments of Armageddon might be able to survive a Soviet strike and then wreak terrible revenge.

Alas, the US military had to abandon this dream after finding that constantly shifting ice fields were never going to be safe homes for missile silos.

But the location of this scheme in the 1960s – a once-secret “city under the ice” known as Camp Century – may hold the key to resolving a diplomatic problem that European governments never believed they would have to face. Namely, the prospect of America seizing Greenland from Denmark.

“If we don’t take Greenland, Russia or China will – and I’m not letting that happen,” said President Donald Trump on Sunday. “One way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland.”

The dawning realisation that he is deadly serious has triggered a scramble for solutions, intended to avoid the catastrophe of America using force against an ally.

“If the United States chooses to attack another Nato country militarily, then everything stops,” said Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister. “Including our Nato [agreement], and thus the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War.”

The clock on defusing the crisis is ticking. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, will meet Danish representatives as soon as Wednesday.

For now, plans are being laid for a new Nato mission to secure Greenland, perhaps involving British forces. But if that idea is not enough to satisfy Trump, the solution may lie on a small, temperate island 4,000 miles away.

Cyprus has hosted British military bases throughout its 65-year history as an independent state. Today, RAF Akrotiri on the southern coast serves as Britain’s busiest overseas base, while GCHQ has a vital listening post in the eastern Dhekelia area.

What makes these facilities different is that both are located on British sovereign territory. The Union Flag flies over Akrotiri and Dhekelia, whose 98 square miles – or 3 per cent of the island of Cyprus – are, legally speaking, just as British as Cornwall or Sussex.

Suppose America’s military installations in Greenland were to be converted into “sovereign base areas” on the Cyprus model. Given that this arrangement has worked for nearly seven decades on a small and crowded Mediterranean island, it should be relatively simple to replicate on a vast and largely empty territory like Greenland. Could this be the answer?

“It might be a way of giving Trump the sort of victory that he wants, so it has a plausibility,” replies Michael Clarke, a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.

Any possible solution has to deal with the fact that Trump’s public reasons for taking Greenland make no objective sense.

“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security,” he said earlier this month, apparently unaware that America already has an agreement with Denmark, signed in 1951, allowing the United States to “construct, install, maintain and operate” any military base on Greenland and to “station and house personnel”.

The US military also enjoys free access to the seas around the island. If Trump is right to claim that “Russian and Chinese ships” are now prowling these waters, then America can already counter this threat with whatever deployments might be necessary. There is simply no need for Trump to “have” Greenland.

During the Cold War, America used its rights under the 1951 agreement to build a far-flung archipelago of at least 17 installations across the island, ranging from airfields to radar stations and weather observatories.

In the high north, over 1,000 miles from Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, US engineers tunnelled into a glacier to create Camp Century in 1960. Powered by a subterranean nuclear reactor, this secret maze of living quarters and research facilities – codenamed “Project Iceworm” – housed 200 experts studying the possibility of hiding missile silos beneath the snow.

When that proved impossible, Camp Century was shut down in 1967. Later, as the Cold War came to an end, America dismantled all but one of its military installations in Greenland, withdrawing virtually all of its 6,000 personnel.

Today, the only remaining US facility is Pituffik Space Base on the shores of Baffin Bay, 138 miles west of the carcass of Camp Century. Here, about 200 American personnel watch for incoming ballistic missiles as part of the US Early Warning System.

If Pituffik were to become US sovereign territory, just as RAF Akrotiri belongs to Britain, then Trump would be able to say that he had planted the Stars and Stripes in the snow and gained new land for the United States.

If the same status were to be accorded to the abandoned tunnels and unusable silos of Camp Century – and perhaps the locations of all the other former military sites – then 17 US flags might appear on the map, and perhaps a few hundred square miles of Arctic ice cap might be added to America.

Given that Greenland covers over 836,000 square miles and has only 56,000 people, this would make little practical difference. No-one’s life would be changed if the Stars and Stripes were to fly over some uninhabited snow-bound creeks and inlets far above the Arctic Circle.

Even if the boundaries of any sovereign base areas were to be drawn as expansively as possible, and Trump gained a few thousand square miles, that would only amount to a fraction of Greenland.

“The real issue is that Trump wants to add a big chunk of territory to the United States so that he gets his face on Mount Rushmore,” says Prof Clarke. “He’s not going to get the Nobel Peace Prize, so he wants another sort of prize.”

About 40 per cent of the current territory of the United States was purchased, with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Alaska Purchase of 1867 being the most famous examples, and Trump apparently yearns for something comparable.

Granting America sovereign base areas in Greenland may be a way of handing him the territorial prize that he craves without, in practice, changing very much.

Marion Messmer, the director of the International Security Programme at the Chatham House think tank, agrees that this “could be” a solution, while adding that any territorial concessions made under American pressure would be a bitter pill for Denmark and Greenland.

“It would still be a big concession for Denmark and Greenland, but a better concession than risking an American attack, so I can see why Denmark and Greenland might go for that,” she says.

“For Denmark and Greenland, it is such a matter of national security that they probably could make far-reaching concessions just to end this.”

There must be a danger that Trump may act unilaterally and simply declare US sovereignty over Pituffik, and perhaps the chain of defunct installations, including Camp Century. Denmark’s best option could be to pre-empt him by offering to convert these facilities into sovereign base areas as part of an overall settlement.

Some possibilities are infinitely worse. Marco Rubio has said that America wants to buy the entirety of Greenland, reviving Trump’s proposal from his first term. But the Danish government has neither the legal power nor the appetite to sell its territory and citizens to a foreign power.

If no solution is possible, Denmark could stand firm and rally its European allies, hoping that Trump’s attention may turn elsewhere. But that option would increase the risk of America resorting to military action – and just about anything would be better than that calamity.

Yet even if the confrontation could be resolved by giving the US sovereign base areas, Prof Clarke believes this outcome would still weaken the West.

“Nato will have suffered because of that – the fact that they’ve had to buy him off – and Denmark will have suffered, so Nato would still come out of this weaker,” he says. “But it would not be as destructive as the possible alternative.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]