The Incredible Real Life Bond Villain Secret Ice Lair

Ah, the ice lair! From Superman’s Fortress of Solitude to Ozymandias’s Antarctic headquarters in Watchmen to the Rebel Alliance’s Echo Base on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back, nothing quite exudes sophistication, rugged determination, or - pun intended - sheer cool than a hideout carved out of cold, hard snow and ice. But while certainly stylish and awesome, such sub-zero digs are surely the exclusive preserve of comic book heroes and villains, being too impractical to build in real life, right? Well, actually no! In the late 1950s, the United States Army actually attempted to build a supervillain ice lair of its own, carving an elaborate nuclear-powered base directly into the Greenland ice cap. While sold to the public as a peaceful research outpost, the facility actually had a far more sinister, secret purpose, which had it been completed would have further ratcheted up already high Cold War tensions. This is the forgotten and fascinating story of Project Iceworm. Our story begins in the early 1950s. For the first decade and a half of the Cold War, the primary means of delivering nuclear weapons to their targets was via manned strategic bombers like the American Boeing B-47 Stratojet and B-52 Stratofortress or the Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 Bear and Myasishchev M-4 Bison. However, such aircraft were relatively slow and the distances between the United States and Soviet Union vast, meaning each side enjoyed hours of warning of an incoming attack and were able to build elaborate networks of early-warning radars, interceptor aircraft, and surface-to-air missiles to defend their airspace. Medium Range Ballistic Missiles or MRBMs like the American PGM-19 Jupiter and PGM-17A Thor were also developed, but these needed to be sited close to their targets, with the United States Air Force deploying the Jupiter in Turkey and Italy and the Thor in the United Kingdom. Indeed, tensions over the siting of Soviet R-12 Dvina MRBMs in Cuba would later trigger the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. But such missiles were an imperfect deterrent. Sited in the open and needing several minutes to fuel before launching, they, like air bases for strategic bombers, were highly vulnerable to an enemy ‘counterforce' first strike. Later, several... This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout