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. Meanwhile, proposals have been made to preserve at least one DEW Line station as a museum.A chain of unstaffed radar sites, such as this one in Nunavut shown in a file photo, make up the Canada-U.S. Finally, an agreement was reached in 1996, with the United States contributing $100 million toward the cleanup. or Canada was responsible for the cleanup and dismantling of the stations. and Canada began to transform the line into a highly automated version called the North Warning System.Ī legacy of the DEW Line, that surfaced after the handover of stations to Canada, was the question of almost forty years of buried waste, PCBs, and other toxic chemicals seeping into the Arctic environment.įor a time, controversy raged over whether the U.S. An unending topic of conversation at a DEW Line station was what would happen if the Russians really came.īy 1985 with technological advances, the United States decided to bring down the curtain on the DEW Line - almost. The goal was to provide warning of nuclear attack, and then to think about how to dig the world out from under the ash heap of nuclear Armageddon. If there was a front line to the Cold War, the DEW Line was it. It was common for an employee to be paid $3000 a month, a huge sum in the fifties and sixties. DEW Liners enjoyed well-stocked libraries, current magazines and newspapers, first-run Hollywood movies and, of course, outstanding pay. There were three DEW Line stations in the northern Yukon: Shingle Point, Komakuk Beach and Stokes Point.ĭespite the isolation, life at a DEW Line station was fairly comfortable, with private rooms, excellent food, modern indoor plumbing, and lots of spare time. The cost of the DEW Line, excluding equipment, transportation and construction of the DEW East Section, exceeded $750 Million. Scores of commercial pilots, flying everything from bush planes to four-engine aircraft, worked in one of one of the greatest airlift operations in history.Įach main DEW station has its own airstrip, service buildings, garages, connecting roads, storage tanks, warehouses and, in some cases, an aircraft hangar. ![]() ![]() In all, more than 7,000 tradesmen from the U.S. More than 25,000 people were involved in construction. During the three years of construction, some 120 ships brought 42,000 tons of steel, millions of gallons of fuel, and many other supplies. The delivery of supplies and personnel amounted to the largest commercial airlift ever assembled. It would be a chain of sixty-three integrated radar and communication systems, stretching 3,000 miles from the northwest coast of Alaska, across the northern Yukon coast to the eastern shore of Baffin Island at the 70th parallel. In December 1954, Western Electric got the contract to build, and complete, the DEW line by July 31, 1957. Truman approved the idea of an early warning system as one of his last acts in office. First nuclear strike was the biggest fear. and Russia could deliver nuclear warheads to each other’s major cities. To understand the Distant Early Warning line, you first have to understand the dawn of the nuclear age and the phrase "mutually assured destruction." In the early fifties, both the U.S.
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