Introduction

Sovereignty disputes, resource-extraction opportunities, and ecological crises have recently directed substantial Canadian and international attention to the region north of the 66^th parallel.  This fascination with Arctic landscapes, however, is not novel.  During and after the Second World War, the Canadian and American governments focused on the North as a zone of strategic value.  The wartime construction of the Alaska Highway and the creation of ‘staging routes’ for the transit of planes and supplies to distant battlefronts launched an era of extraordinary activity in the Arctic, much of it bearing the distinctive stamp of military funding and supervision.  New cartographic projections oriented over the geographic North Pole revealed the surprising proximity of the Soviet Union, a perception that acquired additional profundity with the dawn of the Cold War.  As the American armed forces maintained bastions around the globe, Canadian politicians and pundits looked northward to an apparently undefended frontier.

Of the numerous Arctic initiatives resulting from the bipolarity of the Cold War, none was more significant than the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line.  A triumph of scientific design and logistical planning completed in the late 1950s, the DEW Line was also a speculative project – a string of radars, ultimately stretching from Alaska to Greenland, that conscripted the high Arctic into service for continental defence.  Alongside the secondary Mid-Canada Line and the tertiary Pinetree Line, the DEW Line marked the edge of an electronic grid controlled by the new SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) computer system and ultimately centred on the Colorado command hub of NORAD.  The construction of the DEW Line was made possible by an alliance between the American Department of Defense and the Bell ‘system’ of companies, representing a significant manifestation of the military-industrial complex identified by President Eisenhower in 1961.  The planning and implementation of the DEW Line also attracted significant media and academic attention. From Fortune and Maclean’s to technical journals, it was dissected and debated within the larger Cold War cultural sphere.

Given the significance of the DEW Line to Canada, it is surprising that no comprehensive history traces its intellectual origins, planning, construction, and use, in various manifestations, through four decades of superpower stalemate.  It is our goal to produce this history.  From the early proposals and discussions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Ottawa and in Washington, to the presence of missile-defence bastions in the Arctic today, the DEW Line possesses a fascinating genealogy.  Its history bears not only on Cold War scholarship and the study of twentieth-century Canada, but also on Aboriginal studies, the history and sociology of science, and environmental studies.

The interdisciplinary nature of a DEW Line history, based not only in field sites but also in diverse archival repositories, is well suited to a collaboration between a historian and a geographer – one thoroughly versed in the military, aboriginal, and political history of Canada, the other with research experience in geopolitics, Cold War culture, and military geography.  Both participants have already completed major SSHRC-funded projects on other dimensions of Cold War security, science and indigenous peoples, and have combined resources to create an extensive DEW Line bibliography for the Arctic Institute of North America.  This proposed research program will make important contributions to Canadian and American history, the history of the Cold War, the history of the Circumpolar North, and Aboriginal studies.  The dissemination of this research will also increase awareness of the impact that military activities have on Northern peoples and delicate ecosystems – a subject of particular interest in the North, and one where systematic research will lead to wider social benefits.