Camp Century was built in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War and was officially listed as a military research station but in reality the base, powered by the world’s first mobile nuclear reactor, was designed to launch missiles against Soviet Union targets in the event of war.

The missiles were to be stored in a labyrinthine network of deep tunnels but engineering problems and objections by Greenland’s Danish administration led to the base’s closure in 1966.

US military officials were confident the base would gradually be buried under the ice cap but a Danish scientists now fear ”climate change has cast doubt on that theory” because Greenland’s ice is melting much faster than the historical average.

They said the base had drifted hundreds of metres towards the edge of the ice cap.

Danish scientist Nanna Karlsson said: “Camp Century is still 62 miles from the edge, so it will take many, many years before it reaches a critical point.”

The Danish and Greenland governments set up a climate monitoring programme in 2017 to track the remains of Camp Century, and the latest report by Dr Karlsson and her colleagues at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) uses radar data to detail how far the base has moved since 1959.

Dr Karlsson said the data showed the raised conical shapes on the tunnel roofs at a depth of 50 metres – and 232 metres further west by southwest than their original location.

The researchers also found the base and its estimated 9,200 tonnes of scrap and environmentally-hazardous oil and diesel waste, along with radioactive residue from the nuclear reactor, were sinking deeper into the melting ice.

The GEUS scientists said the downward momentum “may have an impact on the time it takes for the base eventually to emerge from the ice”.

Questions are being asked about who will clean up the waste because the base was built under a US-Danish agreement without the people of Greenland having any say at the time.

Greenland’s Finance Minister Vittus Qujaukitsoq said: “The agreement allowed Camp Century to sink into the ice with everything it contained, including pollutants.”

He indicated Greenland expected Denmark and the US to be ready to play their part when the base eventually emerges into the daylight.

Climate and glacier scientist William Colgan warned uncertainty about responsibility for the the disposal of Cold War relics could create “an entirely new form of political dispute resulting from climate change”.

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Relations between the US, Greenland and Denmark were strained last summer when Donald Trump confirmed he was considering an attempt to buy Greenland for strategic reasons.

The US president’s interest was greeted internationally with widespread hilarity but with indignation in Greenland and Denmark.

The government of the semi-autonomous Danish territory insisted it was not for sale.

The Danish prime minister called any discussion of a sale “absurd”.

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