The military doesn't always pick prime real estate for its bases. Often it prefers strange, far-flung and obscure parts of the world — particularly when it comes to its geekiest endeavors. Some are out-of-the-way test sites for the latest military and space technology. Others are far-flung spots of particular interest to scientists, in areas few could survive unshielded from the elements. Some are obscure because the Pentagon doesn't like to advertise what they do.
Others face a predicament. Some bases built during the Cold War have found their original reason for existing suddenly disappear. But instead of closing them down, the Pentagon has found new reasons to justify their existence. Others now exist only on life support. There are also the bases built as a consequence of Cold War nuclear paranoia, now acting as a shelter for paranoia over terrorism and global pandemics.
Aside from their obscurity, these bases are monuments to the military's faith in technology. Implicit in their location is the idea that no matter how extreme or odd or isolated a location, the military can build a place to track intercontinental ballistic missiles, launch secretive drones, or hook up an array of antennas that can study the ionosphere. From the deserts of Utah to the islands of the Arctic Circle and the Pacific, here are seven such bases.
Above:
Thule Air Base
Along the frigid northwestern coast of Greenland lies one of the U.S. military's most isolated bases, and home to one of the Pentagon's primary tools for keeping an eye out for intercontinental ballistic missile launches: a giant phased array radar. Called the
Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) at Thule Air Base, the radar works by blasting a
constant beam of radio waves off the ionosphere, instantly detecting any object flying over the North Pole once it crosses the horizon.
But since the end of the Cold War, BMEWS at Thule has seen its mission recede in importance, a kind of post-1980s job security crisis for missile-tracking radars. The dangers of a nuclear missile attack on the United States of the kind the Pentagon feared in the 1970s and 1980s — and which would necessitate immovable radars in the Arctic — is now largely unthinkable. The good news is that the radar has found another job monitoring satellites and
scanning for space debris.
Though it's a bit tricky keeping everything functioning up in Thule. The temperatures regularly drop to negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, with storms that can lead to frostbite on exposed skin in less than a minute. Four months of every year are without sunlight, and sea access is blocked by ice for nine months. (These extreme conditions hampered clean-up during one of the "
worst "Broken Arrow" nuclear accidents in U.S. history.) Oh, and there's unexploded ordinance left over from Cold War missile tests around the site, and arctic "
wormholes" (.pdf) of frozen ice that can collapse when you step on them.
Photo: NATO
