US ARMY ICEWORM / ICEMAN

ICEWORM

This was the background to Project ICEWORM: a strategic concern over the vulnerability of US ICBMs, a political need for the Army to acquire its own long-range missile capability, and an American misperception that the Danes could be persuaded to permit a large nuclear arsenal in Greenland.



ICEWORM began in 1960 with a study by the Planning Studies Division of the US Army Engineer Studies Center, the Army's equivalent of the Air Force's RAND Corporation think tank. The study proposed building a network of thousands of miles of tunnels under the ice, excavated as trenches and then covered over again. The tunnels would link together launch stations, each a minimum of four miles from any other and with at least three feet of ice cover, giving protection up to 30 psi overpressure. Overpressure is a measure of blast strength – 1 psi overpressure will shatter glass, 3 psi will collapse a wood frame house, and 5 psi will destroy all buildings save those made of reinforced concrete.



Six hundred ICEMAN IRBMs, enough to destroy 80% of the target list in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, would be shuttled between launch stations through the tunnels, probably on trains. The network would be controlled by sixty launch control centers (LCCs), each with 100 psi overpressure protection. Small nuclear reactors would provide power to the LCCs and launch sites. The whole complex would cover 52,000 square miles, beginning 300 miles east of Thule.



The 30 psi protection of the launch sites would be less than the 300 psi of early Minuteman silos, but the real armor of the missiles would be their invisibility beneath the ice cap. The Russians would need an estimated 3,500 eight-megaton warheads to destroy the system after construction – or, if the distance between launch sites was increased to 9.8 miles, 550 100-megaton warheads. Not only that, but new excavation could be kept constantly ongoing, expanding to 2,100 launch points five years after deployment. The Soviets would never be able to build missiles faster than we could excavate new launch sites.



The ICEMAN missiles would be modified Minuteman ICBMs, shortened to two stages. They would have a 3,300 nm range, a CEP of 0.8 nm, and a 2.4 megaton warhead, potentially upgradeable to 4 megatons. The system would have a 20 minute response time after receiving orders to launch, or 40 to 60 minutes if under attack.



11,000 men would be required to operate, supply, and protect the system, including 400 Arctic Rangers and 200 Nike-Hercules SAM operators. The remote LCCs would be resupplied from Thule via ski-equipped aircraft.



This was a truly monumental engineering project, Ozymandian in scope. ICEWORM would have covered an area the size of Alabama - there are countries smaller than ICEWORM would have been. ICEWORM used sheer size to try to cope with the scale of the war it was intended to fight. It wouldn't have been a structure or base or even a city, it wasn't architecture; ICEWORM was geology, it was terrain. It was reengineering the entire landscape for human purposes.



Despite this, the Army estimated that construction would take only three years and a mere $2.37 billion ($17.25 billion today), with operating costs of $409 million per year ($2.98 billion). The primary technical difficulties were thought to lie in the difficulty of adapting both men and missiles to the extreme cold, but these seemed surmountable.



The Air Force and Navy, needless to say, decried the proposal as redundant with the Air Force's Minuteman ICBMs and the Navy's Polaris SLBMs, and vulnerable to attack by airborne forces. The Army's counterargument was that, compared to the Minutemen, the system was isolated from populated areas, reducing civilian casualties in the event of a Russian strike, and offered better protection than the Air Force's missile silos. Unlike the submarines, ICEWORM would be “on-station” at all times, more accurate since it launched from a fixed location, and, since it could use buried landlines rather than radios, would have more secure communications. Finally, the ICEMAN missiles would have greater yield and better accuracy than either of the main competitors. While difficulties were foreseen with the Danes, it was generally felt that they could be brought around.

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PMN1 said:

Any idea how big the two stage Minuteman would be?

Can we just assume taking a complete stage out or would the two remainig stages be a differnet size to that of a standard Minuteman?

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In 1956, Colliers, a weekly magazine once read by millions of Americans, published an article titled “Subways Under the Icecap.” It was a sensationalized report of Army activities in Greenland and opened with a photograph of an enlisted soldier holding a pick. Behind him, a 250-foot tunnel, mostly excavated by hand and lit only by lanterns, probed the Greenland ice sheet. Colliers included a simple map and a stylistic cut-away showing an imaginary rail line slicing across northwestern Greenland. But the Army’s ice tunnels ended only about a thousand feet from where they started—doomed by the fragility of their icy walls, which crept inward up to several feet each year, closing the tunnels like a healing wound. The subway never happened.

That didn’t stop the Army from proposing Project Iceworm—a top-secret plan that might represent peak weirdness. A network of tunnels would crisscross northern Greenland over an area about the size of Alabama. Hundreds of missiles, topped with nuclear warheads, would roll through the tunnels on trains, pop up at firing points and, if needed, respond to Soviet aggression by many annihilating many Eastern Bloc targets. Greenland was much closer to Europe than North America, allowing a prompt strategic response, and the snow provided cover and blast protection. Iceworm would be a giant under-snow shell game of sorts, which the Army would power using portable nuclear reactors.

Except it wasn’t a game. The Army hired the Spur and Siding Constructors Company of Detroit to scope out and price the rail project. A 1965 report, complete with maps of stations and sidings where trains would sit when not in use, concluded that contractors could build a railroad stretching 22 miles over land and 138 miles inside the ice sheet for a mere $47 million (or roughly $470 million today). The company suggested studying nuclear-powered locomotives because they reduced the risk of heat from diesel engines melting the frozen tunnels. Never mind that no one had ever built a nuclear locomotive or run rails through tunnels crossing constantly shifting crevasses.

But in the end, Iceworm amounted only to a single railcar, 1,300 feet of track and an abandoned military truck on railroad wheels.

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The Army’s most ambitious Arctic dream actually came true. In 1959, engineers began building Camp Century, known by many as the City Under the Ice. A 138-mile ice road led to the camp that was about 100 miles inland from the edge of the ice sheet. Almost a vertical mile of ice separated the camp from the rock and soil below.

Camp Century contained several dozen massive trenches, one more than a thousand feet long, all carved into the ice sheet by giant snowplows and then covered with metal arches and more snow. Inside were heated bunkrooms for several hundred men, a mess hall and a portable nuclear power plant. The first of its kind, the reactor provided unlimited hot showers and plenty of electrical power.

The camp was ephemeral. In less than a decade, flowing ice crushed Century—but not before scientists and engineers drilled the first deep ice core that eventually penetrated the full thickness of Greenland’s ice sheet. In 1966, the last season the Army occupied Camp Century, drillers recovered more than 11 feet of frozen soil from beneath the ice—another first.

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