![]() ![]() Due to the Doppler effect, if an object is approaching, the frequency of the radio waves it returns to the emitting instrument increases.Īs the Soviet Union transformed from ally into enemy at the dawn of the Cold War, the U.S. Radar can also tell if an object is moving. It bounces back off of objects, especially metallic ones, making it possible to detect aircraft, ships, or missiles. Radar works by emitting radio waves through the atmosphere. Radar, as you see, had been invented in World War II to spot enemy aircraft from afar. But unlike the American and European whalers, these white men from afar did not seek the bounties of the sea. There were lots of people there, which meant local resources and knowledge. The Inupiat settlements attracted them, much as they had whalers in the previous century. On that fateful day in December 1954, American contractors working on behalf of the U.S. A file photo of men hauling sections of whale skin and blubber, known as muktuk, near Utqiagvik, Alaska.(Gregory Bull/The Associated Press) A short ways inland from the coast, the Inupiaq set trapping lines to catch fur-bearing mammals, like Arctic foxes and hares, as they dart across the tundra. The people of these “collector and storage based economies” keep the muscle and blubber borrowed from the ocean for consumption throughout the year in ice cellars: chilly, sometimes multi-chamber structures dug deep into the permafrost, which remain frozen year round – or at least they did, prior to climate change. In their kayaks and umiaks, Inupiat hunt for marine mammals like whales and ringed seals. They have leveraged these outcroppings of land to launch their skin boats, made of sealskin stitched together with threads made out of reindeer intestines, into the frigid but plentiful seas. They keep bringing up the bodies of dead people.” When radar came to Point Barrowįor over 1500 years, along the rocky promontories jutting out into the Arctic Ocean off the north coast of Alaska, Indigenous cultures have gathered and settled. One Inupiaq whaler, Joash Tukle, testified that when the military arrived in the middle of the dark, polar night in December 1954, “They had lights on the heavy equipment that were working on the point, on the sand. Their industrial hardware turned the soft, snowy, fur-lined tundra inside out. These sensations of life and death collide in Alaska, where, at the beginning of the Cold War, the US military established a radar station near an Inupiaq trapping site in Utqiagvik (Barrow). The other is to locate the thing which might destroy it. One is to locate the thing which might nourish a community. These are two different ways of sensing the environment. When scouting for a fighter jet, a soldier sits inside a radar station on the tundra and stares at a black and green screen, waiting to spot the flashes on the display possibly signaling that the enemy is near. When scouting for a whale, an Inupiaq hunter leans over the edge of the ice and sticks his wooden paddle into the frigid Arctic waters, waiting to hear the low reverberations possibly signaling that a bowhead is near. The surveillance technology doesn’t just scan distant horizons: it upends local lands, too. (Canadian Armed Forces)įrom Alaska to the Faroes, radar is making a comeback in the Arctic. The veterans of this northern experience, whose narratives have been collected by the author, reveal all about their sentinel role in that tense time half a century ago when they dedicated their lives to helping to prevent nuclear war.A chain of unstaffed radar sites, such as this one in Nunavut shown in a file photo, make up the Canada-U.S. There are, however, also tales of fun, practical jokes, camaraderie, and human kindness that boosted the morale of those stationed in the far north. The stories of the DEW Liners reveal real danger here – not from Soviet bombers but from close encounters with polar bears, job-related accidents, and airplane crashes, such as the one that claimed the author’s father. Survival was a daily preoccupation in a land where outdoor temperatures can dip to minus 50 degrees with winds exceeding one hundred miles an hour while blinding snowfall whiteouts make vision impossible. This book tells the stories of those DEW Liners who worked in the hostile, remote climate of the North. The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, as the mammoth radar fence was known, was spawned from American fear that Soviet bomber aircraft might penetrate the Canadian Arctic airspace and drop nuclear weapons on American cities and military bases. Yet in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, thousands of young men from various countries were recruited to build and operate a complex radar system across the Arctic Circle from Alaska to Greenland. The North Pole seems an unlikely theatre of war.
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