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Article Excerpt
Introduction
The route they would take would bring them first to the Great Whale River, to visit one of the Mid-Canada stations. From there, they would hop to the great Thule air base in Greenland manned by the USAF, to a distant-early warning station at Frobisher Bay, on to another U.S. air base at Point Barrow, Alaska. One leg of the trip would bring them to the USAF-RCAF's guided missile range at Churchill, Manitoba, then to the Canadian Army's Arctic training grounds, also near Churchill. It promised to be an unusual journey (Holliday 1957, 26). (1)
In January 1949, Isaiah Bowman--the distinguished geographer, political advisor and President Emeritus of John Hopkins University (see Smith 2003)--delivered the opening address at the fifteenth annual meeting of the American Society of Photogrammetry. He spoke on what was surely a popular and pertinent topic, 'Geographical Objectives in the Polar Regions'. Although typically wide ranging, Bowman's speech repeatedly returned to the importance of the scientific comprehension of polar environments, particularly the North American Arctic. As Bowman put it, '[s]urvey, survey, and survey may be said to be the three basic requirements of present-day polar research, and we do not restrict the word to cartography'. Viewing and traversing the Arctic from multiple perspectives, he added, 'will give us better maps or maps where none exist', and the observations produced from this fieldwork would be 'an inexhaustible spring of inspiration for the mathematical, physical, and biological syntheses that are the foundations of scientific system and law, that is, constantly improving generalization' (Bowman 1949, 9).
Bowman was no Arctic expert, but his equation of fieldwork with the ability to generalize must have struck a powerful chord with the northern scholars in attendance, as well as with those generally familiar with the course of recent Arctic research. His speech arrived in the early stages of an extraordinarily intensive period of North American polar scholarship. This was a highly coordinated effort unprecedented not only in scope but also in geopolitical significance. As the text accompanying a new 1949 National Geographic map of the Arctic put it, 'the Northlands' were still 'gradually revealing their secrets to man' (1949a, 7). (2) The degree of strategic interest in the Arctic had increased rapidly during World War II, with Japanese attacks on the Aleutian Islands and the establishment of 'staging routes', cutting northwest and northeast across the Arctic, for transport of aircraft to Britain and Russia. Perhaps the most obvious indication of the shift in attention was the demand for maps oriented towards the North Pole, a pre-war, air-age cartographic style appropriated after 1945 to demonstrate the surprising proximity of the Soviet Union. North America was suddenly, in the parlance of the period, 'wide open at the top' and had to 'push out there for our defense' (1947, 7; Office of Armed Forces Information and Education 1958, 3). As the geographer Stephen Jones put it, '[a]ir power and atomic energy have thrown a spotlight on the Arctic regions' (1948, 1). Air Force General Hap Arnold was blunter: 'If there is a Third World War the strategic center of it will be the North Pole' (quoted in Stefansson 1950, 391). (3)
Just over a year after Bowman's speech, M.C. Shelesnyak of the ONR drafted a paper titled 'The Arctic as a Strategic Scientific Area'. (4) A seminar series on 'Problems of the Arctic' run jointly by the Arctic Institute of North America (AINA) and the Bowman School of Geography at Johns Hopkins University was the occasion for presentation. Shelesnyak's thesis was that 'the Arctic region allows for the conduct of scientific research in a manner which permits the securing of objects of a campaign (scientific research) for fuller understanding of natural and social phenomena'. He was fond of military imagery in his published descriptions of the ONR'S northern research initiatives, but this was a far more direct version. The Arctic, he stated, nurtured scientific research in three respects: it was a frontier lacking a 'systematic body of scientific data', a simple, homogeneous and contained space ideal for experimental design and a region of profound intellectual interdependency that did not allow for closed, disciplinary forms of knowledge to survive, (5) Shelesnyak never elaborated on the geopolitical implications of his title, but he did not need to, for they were latent in the paper's substance. Not only was he defining the Arctic as a strategic area but he was also turning geopolitics into science, effacing the military interests of the ONR.
The nearly concurrent visions of a northern space propounded by Bowman, a political geographer, and Shelesnyak, a natural scientist, were also convergent. This paper critically expands upon that synchronicity by considering the Arctic as a dual geopolitical and scientific frontier in the early years of the Cold War, when fears of a Soviet assault led to an alternate invasion of Arctic landscapes by research teams, administrators and troops, all pushing northwards to occupy and materialize a geographic region. This frontier was a boundary, to be sure, but it was more importantly a zone. In keeping with the emergent area studies' discourses of the period, Bowman, Shelesnyak and many others understood the Arctic as a unique space--if frighteningly understudied--whose very complexity required a synthetic approach that would then yield even more general outcomes: the 'laws' demanded, as Bowman suggested, in both the sciences and the social sciences after the Second World War. The Arctic, in other words, was an ideal laboratory for interdisciplinary intellectual practices whose results would not only be locally or regionally significant but global in implication. Precisely the same logic underwrote northern military exercises: the North was understood as vital to continental defence against a gathering external threat, but, particularly for the American armed forces, it also stood as part of a larger set of hostile environments which defined the new world-spanning presence of the United States and which represented different types of dangers.
Of course, military and scientific projects of the period were not just parallel in orientation; in many cases, they were inseparable. As historians of science have reminded us, this relationship can be found across the sites and streams of Cold War research (for influential examples, see Forman 1987; Leslie 1993). Much of the resulting discussion has dismissed the crude argument that military research determined scientific outcomes while continuing to question the types of science resulting from military support. In particular, as Ronald Doel (2003, 656) notes, we should consider the many ways in which 'military patrons sought to enlist scientists in efforts to control nature to further national security aims'. As I will show, military-scientific affiliations, the mandate of control and, indeed, the 'naturalness' of nature were all singularly prominent in Arctic study during the 1940s and 1950s. But this pre-eminence depended on the securing of a geographic object with that same name--a performative act which took place as much in boardrooms and lecture halls, as it did over specific northern terrain. And engineering is an exceedingly useful term capturing these multiple ways in which an 'Arctic frontier' (see MacDonald 1966) was fashioned and shaped, for it applies not only to selected landscapes and bodies (as sites for technical imposition, manipulation, and control) but also to more general principles of development, order and appropriation for scientific and military needs.
If we are to understand the North American Arctic as a space for certain forms of knowledge production during the early Cold War, we must consider it as an object of knowledge itself, a kind of flexible signifier invoked similarly across scales. It was not so much the fabrication of this spatial referent as the maintenance of its stability that presented a challenge. At the individual scales of experimental practice and moving, warring bodies, the Arctic, not surprisingly, became a difficult object to locate, understand and overcome. But we should not forget that debates over the significance and role of the north also raged in the schematic realm of strategy or that the increased complexity of the Cold War's many engineered systems also resulted in a heightened sensitivity, as their 'ever-ready' requirements made unreliability a paramount concern and a subject of dispute (Jones-Imhotep 2000). By travelling across and linking the constructed scales of the globe, region, continent and body, this paper considers the multiple geographies of the Cold War Arctic created at the confluence of strategy and science. As I indicate, the period's most characteristic northern institutions and initiatives, from the AINA and the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line to military simulations and survival schools, reflected and promoted this merger. The result is not a synthetic perspective approaching the aims of Bowman or Shelesnyak, or a casual survey of existing literature, but instead a spatial history of a specific 'place'. (6) By situating certain statements and projects as part of a series of spacings categorized as 'Arctic', I aim to show the deep affiliation between two forms of authority which lent such geographical articulations permanence and power (see Gregory 2004). Put generally, this paper confirms that the 'how' of the Cold War is inextricable from its 'where'.
Although working at the boundaries of the state is undoubtedly key to questions of identity, I am not directly concerned here with the significance of 'north' and a northern frontier in Canadian nationalist mythology, a subject of periodic significance to scholars of literature and history (for recent examples, see Grace 2001; Hulan 2002). Indeed, although some of the discussions to follow address Canadian locations, individuals and organizations, I will deliberately avoid a differential analysis along national lines. There is some peril to this, not least because of the extensive discussions of Arctic sovereignty which occurred during the 1940s (Grant 1988) and continue today in a slightly different register (Mandel-Campbell 2004). I largely avoid the dual themes of sovereignty and the mythical north of wilderness, with their abstract, discursive and, most importantly, national orientations, for three reasons. First, scrutiny of Canadian and American interests in the Arctic during this period reveals far more continuities than disparities because of consensus or a resigned, acquiescent Canadian proxy. Second, a historical-geographical consideration of the Arctic also reveals the importance of Michel Foucault's (2003) argument that the analysis of power should not proceed strictly from the perspective of traditional, legal sovereignty but might be more productively pursued through a strategic model premised on the practices of war and related modes of technical rationality. (7) Finally, at any scale and with a juxtaposition of multiple, entangled scales, it is clear that the northern geographies produced and perused in the period under consideration overwhelmingly ignored, crossed or blurred national boundaries. The very idea of the Arctic--and its complete comprehension-required no less.
Across the Top of the World
From the standpoint of national security, it is essential to know the intimate details of living conditions and of the natural conditions of our own territories. This last frontier of exploration presents an exciting field not alone in terms of the old geographical exploration but more in terms of the utilization of our finest and newest techniques in geophysical and biological science applied to a large and vast area of relatively unknown territory (Shelesnyak 1947a, 47).
Many Cold War strategists and scientists shared with Canada's 'northern nationalists' the perception that a uniform Arctic--the preferred term, precisely because of its perceived geographic meaning--was both a wilderness and a space of opportunity (Grant 1989, 53; Hulan 2002)....
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