EP 112 Frozen Frontlines: Alaska’s Cold War Legacy

I think it goes back to Billy Mitchell, who was founder of the American Air Force.

He said, basically, he who holds control of Alaska controls the world or certainly controls North America. The best way to get a weapon or a bomber into North America is across the Arctic, and that's from all parts of Eurasia as well as some other spots in the Middle East. And so you have always seen an air defense here. You've always seen concern about submarines in the Arctic.

You've seen concerns now about hypersonic missiles and, you know, when the Russians have bare bombers come close to our defense zone, they're carrying cruise missiles. And so it's very, very important for the security of our country to understand the capabilities of what might be an enemy and their intentions and their planned tactics. And so we've had quite a bit of an intelligence community in Alaska for some time.

That was Meade Treadwell. He's a former lieutenant governor of Alaska and a longtime advocate for Arctic policy and security. As former chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission and a key figure in Arctic governance, he has engaged with issues rooted in Cold War era infrastructure and its modern strategic legacy. The idea that Alaska might be invaded by an army, it's real.

You have to deter for it. The capability is there of places, especially small groups coming in to maybe take out our missile defense or our radars. And so you have to have equipment that works and people who are trained for it. Oh, oh, oh, oh. The Cold War lasted from 1947 to 1991. It was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union.

It never escalated into direct warfare between the two superpowers, but it manifested in a series of proxy wars, nuclear arms races, covert espionage operations, and a relentless battle for ideological and political influence across the globe. From Southeast Asia to Central America and deep into the Arctic, nations became battlegrounds for competing visions of power, governance, and global order.

The effects of this silent conflict were far-reaching, reshaping borders, alliances, and even daily life in places like Alaska. World War II set the stage for Alaska's strategic role in the Cold War. While most associate World War II combat with Europe and the Pacific, the only North American theater of war was in the Aleutian Islands, where Japanese forces invaded Attu and Kiska in 1942. This incursion sent a powerful message to U.S. military leaders.

Even the remote edges of American territory were not immune to attack. Here's historian Ian Hartman. His research focuses on the social and political development of Alaska within the broader national and global contexts. I think most historians now will look at that as a fairly credible attempt to the Japanese to actually seize this really geopolitically strategic place.

And it wasn't just merely a diversionary tactic. I mean, there was some of that, but it was also, I think, an actual concerted plan that the Japanese had to maybe, you know, come in through the top. Think of it that way. Well, if Japan was capable of that sort of treachery, let's say, from the American perspective, right, certainly the Soviet Union could be capable of something similar.

Russia is very close to Alaska, and certainly military planners coming through World War II and then ramping up the Cold War recognized the vulnerability. In this episode, we explore the lingering impact of the Cold War on Alaska, a state that stood on the front lines of a global standoff. Music.

Through perspectives rooted in art, journalism, history, and geopolitics, we trace how Cold War-era decisions reshaped Alaska's communities, economy, environment, and sense of identity, and how it continues to influence Alaska's security policies and relationship with the rest of the world. Welcome to Chatter Marks, a podcast of the Anchorage Museum, dedicated to exploring Alaska and the circumpolar north through the creative and critical thinking of ideas. past, present, and future.

My name is Cody Liska, and I'll be your host.

I read that one major fear during the Cold War was a bolt out of the blue, which is a surprise nuclear attack. How did that fear shape military strategy in Alaska? So the question of how could an enemy deliver a nuclear bomb or more than one to the United States? In the beginning, when Russia got the bomb, the delivery system was the same thing that the United States used in Japan. It was bombers. And so the expectation was that you might find big fleets of bombers coming toward North America.

And many strategic spots in North America had the missile system, the Nike missile system, which you can still visit relics of up near Arctic Valley, north of Anchorage, between Anchorage and Eagle River. And those were nuclear-tipped surface-to-air missiles that didn't have to hit an airplane. They just had to explode maybe in the middle of a fleet of airplanes and knock them all down. And that was probably the first big visible response that Alaskans had during the Cold War.

A second one was obviously the construction of the dew line, which meant hundreds of people coming through Alaska's major cities to build these radars and to operate and staff them. And that also was aimed at bombers. That's Meade Treadwell again. And throughout his life, his work has focused on the intersection of geopolitics, security, and environmental research in the North, giving him a firsthand understanding of how Cold War era decisions shaped Alaska.

Then as submarine and ballistic missile capability developed, I mean, rockets were, you know, developed by the Germans in wartime and World War II. The U.S. and Russia recruited as many of the German scientists as they could after the war. We had famous people like Wernher von Braun who helped design our missile program and our space program. And the response to those missiles was we didn't have a missile defense. We kind of developed this doctrine as a country of something called mutually

assured destruction. They'd have enough missiles to wipe us out. We'd have enough missiles to wipe them out. And as long as we could hide missiles from being, you know, hurt in a first strike situation, the mutually assured destruction was seen as one way to prevent nuclear war. And so it was very important for the United States to understand Russia's missile capability. And it turned out that the Russians would be firing test missiles from the stands toward Kamchatka.

So our listening base in Shemya not only was trying to collect audio information, and we had other audio collection bases across Alaska and other parts. Iran at the time, we had a listening base. Japan, we had a listening base.

But we also had that long-term radar. And we had a regular flight that was part of Cobra Dane, Cobra Ball, and if we got word that the Russians were launching a missile, this aircraft, which was a 707, would be up in the air immediately to track that missile from at high altitudes. And so that's what we did for missiles at that point. We also installed big radars in clear and upgraded the radars toward the end of and after the Cold War in Shemya.

And then finally, for submarines and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, which are the easiest missiles to hide. You don't know where the missile-carrying submarine is at any given time. And the United States and its allies deployed a large set of listening devices that were based out of the Navy base in ADAC.

We also had a Navy base in Iceland, and Iceland covered what was called the GI-UK gap, that gap where the Russians would be sending submarines out of northern Russia to go into the Atlantic. We had sub-chaser aircraft in Iceland, sub-chaser aircraft in Alaska, based in ADAC. But first off, what you're trying to do is you're trying to prevent that bolt out of the blue, that horrible surprise attack.

The second thing is that if the balloon did go up and we had a global thermonuclear war, the objective first and foremost would be to destroy every one of the enemy's capabilities that could fire more nukes at you. And so our intelligence collection is trying to figure out what's going on at the ground-based missile systems, what's going on with the bombers, with the cruise missiles and drones, and what's going on with the submarines.

Treadwell remembers a conversation he once had with Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union during some of the tensest moments of the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the height of the nuclear arms race. Khrushchev's son actually became an American, was a professor at Brown University, and came up and spoke to a full auditorium 11 or 12 years ago now at the University of Alaska. And I took a train trip with him down to Seward.

And he was talking about his father, but he said, we had these big May Day celebrations, and we'd be standing in the reviewing stand. In Red Square and the, The bombers kept flying this big circle, so it looked like we had hundreds of bombers, but it was really just a limited number that were just flying in a circle to look like more were coming and more were coming.

And he said, a large part of my father's perceived belligerence at the time was making up for the fact that they didn't have the capability the rest of the world thought they had. And he told a story of Khrushchev being at the fireplace with Anthony Eden in England and saying to the Prime Minister of Britain, do you know how many nuclear bombs it would take to totally dismantle Britain? And Eden says no, and he says something like six.

And, you know, a few years later, some interval later, came the Suez crisis and the ambassador from Britain was called into the Kremlin. And Khrushchev said, just go remind Anthony Eden about that conversation in the fireplace. It was a threat that people used real. It was an Armageddon that none of us ever want to see. And, you know, we have to, one, be able to respond to be able to prevent this, but we need a very extensive intelligence system and response system to keep it from happening.

With its strategic proximity to the Soviet Union, Alaska became a crucial military outpost, home to radar stations, missile sites, and sprawling Air Force bases. Well, the Dew Line is a series of radars across Alaska. You'll find them in places like Kaktovik and Barrow and Nome, Kotsubus, Sparvant, and so forth. And what they were, at the time they were built, is these centers might have had 200 or 300 people living there. They had theaters. They had cafeterias.

They had gymnasiums. They were a remote place to be posted. And the whole purpose of the radar was to see if enemy aircraft were coming essentially at the United States, at NORAD region, which is the U.S. and Canada. Thank you. These dewline stations, built of concrete and metal, with radar domes, fuel storage tanks, living quarters, and operational buildings, extended from Alaska to northern Canada and Greenland.

At the height of the Cold War, there were 63 of them, located in some of the most remote and harsh environments. Each station housed 15 to 20 personnel. That included radar technicians, maintenance workers, communication staff, cooks, and the occasional military personnel who oversaw operations. It was one of the most ambitious U.S. government projects of the 1950s. In military circles, Alaska was referred to as the top cover for America, or the Guardian of the North.

During the Cold War, information about these sites, their locations, their technology, was secret. It had to be. Otherwise, the Soviet Union could have used that information against the U.S. But as time went on, the information became public. The veil of secrecy lifted, and what was once classified is now archived, mapped, and photographed. In 2015, Alaska journalist Zachariah Hughes became interested in the legacy of the dew line.

I don't know how I first heard. I think when I first heard about them, and I don't know how it was, I just thought that was, it was so crazy, you know, that there's these super remote sites. They're spread all over the state and people go there for three months at a time, two, three, four, sometimes six months.

Uh it seemed to me to be a really to be kind of like slope workers um you know these guys that um have a work rhythm where they're up for two weeks down for one something like that and it seemed like these were super slope workers you know folks that go out to really remote places and are largely on their own and just working and i think that was more so than the military profile. I think the human experience was what drew me to them.

The Dew Line was phased out in the early 90s because its technology became outdated, and its sites were modernized and incorporated into what is now the North Warning System, a radar collaboration between the U.S. and Canada. Many of these stations are still in operation today, no longer maintained by the military, but by public contractors.

They're still keeping an eye on potential threats, but they're also assisting the Federal Aviation Administration by providing air traffic surveillance across remote parts of Alaska and the Arctic.

In 2016, Hughes got the chance to visit a few stations in Alaska.

Romanz off has the the living areas are like these two giant domes um it's so it they look really weird they look like sort of like um blade i don't know like um what's the what's the arnold schwarzenegger movie on mars total recall yeah yeah it's kind of like this total recall aesthetic of like industrial spacey um and um like so that was the living sites one of them is one of them was like where people slept and ate and then the other was um

kind of where equipment was stored in a storeroom and um like the sites really aren't history like they're still they've been reincorporated and redeveloped but they're still doing essentially the same thing that they were like in a in a different configuration but like vermont's off tin city sparavan like all these places like they're kind of doing exactly what they were built to do in like 1953, 54, 55, around then. Like they are apartment complexes with a radar attached.

Charles Stonkevich, an artist and a professor at the University of Toronto, also spent time at these dewline stations. In Canada, he's done several trips to Barter Island 3, commonly referred to as Bar 3, just outside Tuktoyaktuk Northwest Territories. It's remote, reachable only by driving for several days along an ice road. Well, the Bar One site is really interesting because it was an early site and it was chosen partly because it was on the border between Alaska and the Yukon.

And so to test out not just the technical aspects of building in this landscape, but the political and logistical aspects of building it, the bar one site and the bar site, because bar one is a satellite. So bar one would have been the main site. And then the numbers after that are the substations that connect to the original hub within that kind of spoke network system.

And so building the bar on the Bar One site then became a prototype for looking at how to have a collegial, cooperative relation between Canada and America in building the infrastructure. Music. I think those presence in these things are pretty eerie. I mean, let's be really honest. If you wanted to imagine how it is, I can imagine it's like an alien spaceship landing in, right? It's like, and they literally were if you watch the archives of these things being built, right?

There are these massive planes flying in and landing in this landscape and suddenly setting up a remote outpost. And we're all familiar of watching, let's say, aliens, watching science fiction movies where suddenly this military industrial kind of complex drops in and sets up camp. And local people are like, what just came out of the sky? Why are you here? Why do you need to be here?

And that's a complicated story, I think, on all levels of people that are tasked with that duty and are on the other side having to interface with that. Music.

If the dew line was the early alarm bell, scanning the skies for signs of attack, then the Nike missile sites were the last line of defense. There were short-range, surface-to-air defense systems designed to intercept Soviet bombers that slipped past the radar line. Anchorage had three Nike missile sites, strategically placed to protect Elmendorf Air Force Base and the city itself.

Fairbanks had five Nike missile sites, defending key military installations like Eilson Air Force Base and Fort Wainwright. These sites were manned 24-7 and equipped with Nike-Hercules missiles, some capable of carrying nuclear warheads. The presence of nuclear weapons in Alaska during the Cold War was long suspected, But it was officially confirmed in 2014, when the U.S. Government declassified documents revealing their storage at multiple sites across the state.

Jim Renkert and Mark Rice are with Friends of Nike Site Summit, a non-profit dedicated to preserving Site Summit, located in the Chugach Mountains above Arctic Valley, just east of Anchorage. Site Summit itself is quite obvious. It's on top of a mountain. It gives you a wide field of view, gives the radars long ranges that might not be capable at other sites.

The communication systems the computer systems that were in use at the time are obviously were considerably slower than what we are used to now and so the sites actually had to be set up in such a way that the the radar systems the computer systems at the base could communicate with the missiles properly, um, to, to control them and, and direct them.

And I think we'd like to think that the, the, the ring of Nike sites was here to protect Anchorage and it was the five in Fairbanks were there to protect the people of Fairbanks, but really they were there to protect Elmendorf Air Force Base and Fort Richardson and Fort Wainwright and Niles said, it wasn't necessarily for the civilian population. It was to protect our forward bases in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. Was there a piece of information, something that you learned that,

I don't know, maybe floored you, maybe really surprised you? Yes. Yes, there was. Okay. So very early on, before we were, oh, this probably was in 2007 or 2008, we were in discussions with Fort Richardson, before it became Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, on the future of the site. The site is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Um and a report had come out the nike site summit task force came out in 2021 with a list of findings and recommendations about the site uh one of them was that it was it was worthy of uh preservation uh but that it could still be used for military training which was you know uh first the first and foremost the most important thing it would be a good um preserving it and doing tours of the site would be good, um, be as good public relationship for the army.

So we kind of took that and, you know, we're negotiating with the, with the army on, on how to preserve the site and what to do. Uh, but, um. So we're in those discussions and we're up on site one time with a very young, just out of college historian that was working for Fort Richardson. And we were walking around the site with her and she said, yeah, so the missiles were, these missiles were surface to air missiles that had a range of about 75 to 90 miles.

But she said they also had instructions that if we were being overrun by the Soviets, they were to fire down on the port of Anchorage, target the port of Anchorage and the bridges, the bridge coming into Eagle River. And I went and say, what? I just thought, okay, you know, that would have ruined my childhood. So, yeah. So that was something that just floored me.

And, um, yeah, and then at, in 2014, we had a national cold war, uh, reunion, Nike reunion and the, um, last battery commander for a site summit, a gentleman by the name of John Meniere was here. And he was, he was, um, a wealth of information. Uh, but one of the things he said, he was in charge of the entire battery at site summit.

He said he was looking through some of the coordinates they had and he said, oh, this coordinate for this shot would be from here down on to the battery at Kinkade Park. Hmm. Okay. Yeah. So their instructions were also to take out the other sites. Wow. Yeah, and the troops were making those firings probably did not know that. It probably would have only been the battery commander.

Rice recalls how the 1964 Good Friday earthquake, the most powerful in U.S. History, shook the Nike missile sites around Anchorage. Site Summit wasn't affected much. But Site Point, located lower down in what is now Kincaid Park, was shaken hard. Some of the missiles that were in storage fell off of their storage racks and broke apart. And these are nuclear missiles. And, you know, fairly delicate, you know, they're well built, but they are fairly delicate.

And there was no danger of a nuclear explosion. That requires a much more precise set of circumstances. But there was certainly a danger of the fuel exploding, the other explosives around exploding, and taking all that nuclear material and depositing it onto Anchorage and surroundings, what we today call a dirty bomb. And so the soldiers had to go into the storage areas, which had no electricity, so they had to do everything by flashlight.

And essentially disassemble the missiles in a proper way so that there was no danger of any explosions, of any fuel dangers. And it took them about 72 hours of working straight through to get everything back to a safe situation. They were given a special commendation for that, a unit commendation, but it was a secret commendation because there could be no acknowledgement that there were nuclear missiles on this or nuclear weapons on this site.

So it was in 2014 at that reunion that it was formally and publicly acknowledged that they had done this and received this accommodation. Site Summit, the one Renkert and Rice work with, was decommissioned in 1979, but has since been preserved by friends of Nike Site Summit. Today, it serves as a historic landmark, offering guided tours and public education about Alaska's role in Cold War missile defense.

Here's Renkert. We'd like to think of site summits as a symbol of both victory and peace and of hope. It was victory. The United States and its allies won the Cold War. But the cool part about it is the Soviet Union and the Russians, they didn't lose because the weapons were never used.

Also is a symbol of peace because Arctic Valley, Site Summit is the home of the Arctic Valley star that we light up on September 11th and through the holiday season and through the winter, the star on the mountain. And that was put in place by the soldiers who were stationed up there. And it's now Anchorage's favorite icon.

And it's kind of a kind of a neat little juxtaposition that the soviet union ended on, christmas day 1991 that was when the the hammer and sickles lowered for the last time and the russian flag went up it could say we're in a second cold war now but the first cold war ended ended then and then it was pointed out to us by some people here you know this nuclear missile site can also be considered a symbol of hope, which seems kind of, you know, a nuclear missile, site, symbol of hope.

But we had this big military buildup and we were on guard and on edge and it didn't happen because of all the vigilance and diplomacy and the humanitarian side won out. Uh, and then we like to think of Kincaid as, you know, we, we traded, um, uh, Nike Hercules missiles out there for mountain bikes, skis, and soccer balls. How cool is that? Music.

Starting in the late 1950s and ending in the early 1960s, Project Chariot was a proposed plan to use a series of nuclear explosions to carve out an artificial harbor near Cape Thompson, on the northwest coast of Alaska. It never came to fruition. However, in the early 1990s, it came to light that the radioactive soil from nuclear tests conducted elsewhere had been quietly buried at the site. The communities nearby, mostly Inupiat, were never told.

Years later, the government removed the contaminated material. And then, on November 6, 1971, the United States detonated a 5-megaton underground nuclear bomb on Amchitka Island. It was called Project Kanakin, and it was the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated on American soil. Historian Ian Hartman, the guy we heard from in the beginning of the episode, says these projects, along with the broader military buildup, left a lasting imprint on the landscape and its people.

One that includes abandoned infrastructure and long-term environmental consequences. You know, during the Cold War, of course, there was nuclear testing. And so if you think of the, this is now, we're skipping ahead into the 1960s, the underground test sites, most prominently the Project Kanakin, it was known, which was the largest underground nuclear explosion, also occurring way out in Western Alaska and the Aleutians.

That this is an area that, that, left behind all kinds of environmental destruction and wreckage and you know waters and lands would have been polluted there was uh there was the famous project chariot in the early 1960s well kind of planned through the 1950s culminating in in this idea to uh to detonate these thermonuclear weapons in uh in cape thompson near point hope and uh ultimately that never happened but there was some planning and there is some nuclear material out there that has been

unaccounted for and has likely left pollution. And you do, in fact, find elevated cancer rates in some of these communities. And so, you know, that's a direct impact of the Cold War. But, you know, the military generally, you know, we celebrate the military's, most people, I think, in Alaska to celebrate the military's presence. And, you know, again, it's created this pillar of economic stability, if you want to think of it in those terms.

But, you know, I mean, these military sites, another way to think of them, they're like industrial sites. And when you have industrial sites and you've got this, you know, you're building missile sites and you're building this fairly extensive infrastructure, there will be environmental impacts. And those impacts are almost always going to affect the people who live in the immediate area and sometimes not even the immediate areas.

Like if you have a site that's adjacent to a waterway or whether it's the ocean, whether it's a river, whether it's a stream, whether it's just sort of very sensitive tundra Even, you know, those those effects can spill over into communities that are maybe fairly far away. And so, you know, that's something that we're still really grappling with is how. You know, whose responsibility is it, right? You know, whose responsibility is it to clean up these sites?

I mean, unfortunately, the military has not always been proactive in remediating and cleaning up sites. It's, you know, I think the military is very good, very efficient at building bases and, you know, shoring up Alaska's defense. But then when those sites are no longer viewed as maybe strategic, the military is quite good at just packing up and leaving. The best example of this is ADAC. So you can go to ADAC today and it's completely abandoned.

You can see there's a McDonald's there that was, I don't know, abandoned over 25 years ago, 30 years ago now, where the drive-thru basically has the same menu that it had in the late 90s, early 2000s. You know, a Big Mac for two or three bucks. Yeah. It's an example to give you an idea of what we're talking about.

So, you know, I mean, those those impacts, I think, are really can be really damaging to those communities that were obviously there before the military came and that are, of course, going to be there after the military leaves. The military infrastructure that was left behind also serves as inspiration for art. Radar stations, missile sites, and military compounds now evoke questions about memory, power, and the human imprint on remote landscapes.

Ever since this landscape was, you know, imprinted upon by these military sites, there has been a constant public relations battle, right? Whether it's the cover of Life magazine and the idea of these heroes on the dew line to exhibitions that are talking about the complicated nature of occupying, let's say, an indigenous territory. The debate for how these things operate, what they're doing, even where they are and that they exist themselves, are important cultural conversations.

And art plays a role in making that visible. Art, hopefully, if it's good art, is taking that and complicating it beyond, let's say, a public relations stunt or some propaganda from a government. Hopefully, art asks the difficult questions, the ones that are really important for us to think through as conscientious citizens trying to understand what are the pros, what are the cons, what's the messiness of the situation.

Stonkiewicz again. And he created the Do Project. a multimedia art installation that transformed a former Cold War radar station into a remote Arctic art installation. A geodesic dome that broadcasts underwater and environmental recordings. Through sound, architecture, and location, the piece explores the lingering psychological and geopolitical presence of the dew line in the far north. It's located at Bar 1 in Dawson City in the Yukon Territory, Canada, just east of the Yukon-Alaska boundary.

My distant early warning project, using the same namesake as this early military infrastructure, was about looking not just about the Cold War, but what could we learn from the Cold War to talk about something that I call the Warm War, which is this conflict that's currently arising throughout the world based upon the threat to sovereignty as a result of global warming. So I'm really interested, again, to look at these metaphorical aspects. And we've always used that.

Code names for the military use these metaphors. The first computer that ran this was called the whirlwind computer. You know, we use these metaphors of weather. And these stations were all top secret classified weather stations originally. No one wants to advertise that these places were military installations. The idea was they were weather stations so that no one was suspicious of what was going on with these places.

And as weather stations they reported back so the use of weather and metaphors for weather were always important in talking about these sites so whether it was whirlwind ibm computer whether it was dewline right so distant early warnings an acronym being the dew right of this idea of kind of a weather phenomenon is important and the idea of cold war again i wanted to use that and extrapolate that into the future to talk about the warm war the coming warm war or ideas of the Northwest Passage,

ideas of Arctic sovereignty, a resurgent of conflict, whether it's Chinese shipping lanes or Russian encroachment, or let's be honest, between the two allies of Canada and America that don't agree on geographical borders and areas in this region. Particularly what we're talking about in the Beaufort Sea, depending on how the border is drawn, that's actually not even agreed upon between Canada and America. So these issues are really going to become hotter and hotter topics.

And so the Cold War, I think, is morphing into the warm war, particularly in this region.

The Cold War also played a pivotal role in shaping Alaska's political identity and relationship with the federal government. As military installations multiplied and defense spending increased, Alaska became a strategic asset and a symbol of national security. These pressures fostered a complex dynamic between state and federal interests, fueling debates over sovereignty, resource control, and infrastructure investment.

I would say that without the Cold War, Alaska's statehood looks, the movement looks very different. It probably isn't as powerful. And Alaska may well gain statehood, but probably not in 1959. Hartman again.

And I guess I would say that because Alaska becomes so bound up in the Cold War and in this kind of rhetoric of a defensive posture and ensuring that the United States has the necessary territorial investment in this place that is going to become such a flashpoint in the Cold War that the people in Alaska, particularly the business community, mostly in Anchorage, to some extent in Fairbanks, less so along the coasts, like the smaller fishing communities actually tend

to be quite opposed to statehood because they fear, not without reason, that statehood is going to bring greater regulation to fisheries. But what I think the Cold War does is that it provides.

Statehood boosters a very clear rationale for why it's necessary for Alaska to become a state, which is simply that here you have this place that you've got this big military presence, you've got this sort of emerging business community that has interests in equal representation, certainly, you know, congressional representation, and, And so you just sort of have more people. You have more people. You've got people who are coming out of World War II. You've got GIs who are coming from states.

Statehood is kind of the default position, right? They're coming from wherever in the lower 48. And so it just becomes a lot easier to envision Alaska as a modern state. You know, the 1950s, the state grows, and it grows because of federal investment and the Cold War, right? So, I mean, in other words, the federal investment that's occurring in the 1950s isn't just arbitrary. It's occurring because of the Cold War.

You know, you kind of can't separate one from the other. And so, I would really suggest that the 1950s does become this pivot point. Now, what's somewhat interesting about all of this is that there's a serious question among lawmakers and President Eisenhower about what precisely Alaska's role will be in the broader sort of national context. And let me explain what I mean by that. The, you know, Eisenhower, for example, is not a proponent of statehood.

He, you know, I mean, he'll eventually come around to it somewhat reluctantly. But, you know, there's actually a theory that maybe the best way to proceed with Alaska is to reserve it effectively as as a territory for the purposes of the military. And so there's the famous line that bisects Alaska in the 1950s, the proposal I should say, that would have reserved the southern half of Alaska basically from Fairbanks down and then to the east.

For a population center, but then kind of north and west of that would have been a military territory. And so the state of Alaska, if it would have gotten through. Would have actually looked very different. It would have been just a fraction of what we know today as Alaska. The rest of it being strictly reserved for the military and as a territory, which I find to be a fascinating corollary to the whole discussion.

Um so that's kind of one possibility then the other possibility coming out of all this is that while a lot nobody's disputing the value of alaska and the strategic um the strategic value of alaska i should say there there's a big discussion around politics and so when you when you include a state you are effectively agreeing to at a minimum give them of course one representative in the house and two senators and so you think about the era of the 1950s this is like

the this is the civil rights movement and so there are a lot of of southerners who who are trying to figure out okay well if alaska and of course hawaii hawaii has to be be paired in this conversation if if we bring these two states into the union what effect is this going to have on congress and at the time the theory was that uh that alaska would be a democratic state but a northern democratic state not not necessarily like a like a southern democratic state you know because the

a lot of the opposition to the civil rights movement was coming from southern democrats and so southern democrats were were quite uh worried that alaska would kind of upset the balance of their power coming into the union. And this was partly because a lot of the politicians coming out of Alaska in the 1930s and 40s, these were Roosevelt appointees. They were fairly liberal.

And the general consensus was that if Alaska becomes a state, this could basically throw a wrench into the Southern delegation's ability to kind of hold the line on civil rights. And so, you know, these debates really played out and represented a real stumbling block to Alaska statehood. So I would definitely say that the Cold War creates the sort of economic cultural conditions for proponents of Alaska statehood to effectively make the case.

And then it's the oil boom that then kind of solidifies Anchorage's economy to make statehood actually a viable proposition.

From federal oversight and geopolitical strategy, to artistic interpretation and historic preservation, echoes of the Cold War era continue to shape Alaska's landscape and sense of place. Its strategic importance laid the foundation for its statehood, and its central role in today's Arctic policy and climate geopolitics. As global powers once again turn their attention north, this time amid renewed tensions with Russia and China, lessons from the Cold War offer a crucial perspective.

Its past as a military frontier now informs its future as a crossroads of security, sovereignty, and environmental change. Here's Hartman. if the arctic was strategic in the 1950s and 60s it's even more strategic now uh why climate change right so right now the arctic looks very different than than it did even 30 or 40 years ago let alone 50 60 years 100 years etc um.

As the Arctic becomes an increasingly important location, whether that's for trade, whether that's for the military, whether that's for any number of reasons, economic reasons, social reasons, military reasons, there's good reason to believe that the Arctic is only going to grow in its significance.

Um the the arctic has become a flashpoint again it's it's it's also a way to kind of get places much more quickly right rather than rather than than the navigating around uh the equatorial regions or north or south of the equatorial regions the arctic is is a really really convenient efficient way to move goods to move people to move move maybe weapons of mass destruction And so that was the broad recognition going back to the Cold War,

but it's an even more acute recognition in the 21st century and in the 2020s, 30s, and 40s, and likely beyond. I think the other point I would make is that after the Soviet Union fell, really between 1989 and 1991, the 1990s were seen as sometimes the era known as the quote-unquote peace dividend.

Meaning that there is this really huge optimism around the world that the Soviet Union had collapsed and that the position of American hegemony, meaning this idea of a liberal democracy that is guided by the government. Principles of free market capitalism, that that model would basically be in ascendance around the world and that the world would become more democratic, more open to trade, more free. Let's put it that way, more free. Well, speed ahead to 2020s.

I think that almost looks like a delusion, right? What has happened over the last few years is that the world has actually become less free. That, as it turns out, you know, liberal, small d democratic, liberal democratic principles have not necessarily been enduring since the 1990s. In fact, we see a rise in authoritarianism, a rise in nations that are sort of more willing to turn back on the principles of free trade and democracy.

And so where do we see that specifically? Well, I mean, the obvious case studies of this would be Putin's Russia and Xi Jinping's China. And as long as we have, from the United States military's perspective, and of course, many others in the United States, that these two adversaries in Russia and China. Alaska is once again in the crosshairs of a presumptive geopolitical strategy.

And so I think where we're at right now is a recognition that the Pacific, East Asia, the Russian Far East and the Arctic are now, you know, arguably the most volatile regions in the entire world, right? I mean, obviously, the Middle East is volatile, we know that. But if we think about the, you know, where global hotspots are these days, we're likely to have to consider really quite seriously the future of the Arctic and the future of the North Pacific and the Russian Far East.

And here's Stonkiewicz. It was already in 2007 that the Pentagon acknowledged that climate issues will be a defense issue. So this region has a long history of navigating a temperate or let's say interesting war that's not a direct conflict, at least at the moment. And while we call it cold in the past, I think it's something warm in the future. And I wanted to look at that extension. So the idea of silence plays into this in a big way.

What is the call? What are the concerns? What are the alarms that we should be concerned about today in these regions? Yes, it's still a geopolitical military region. Sovereignty is an issue that is growing more and more as kind of the global powers heat up again in our conflicts. We're all aware of what's going on. And it's a triangulation now instead of a duality between China, Russia, and America on the territory of Canada.

And I think these issues play a role in that. But also, what are the environmental issues that are going on? You know, do we need an early warning system just for ballistic weapons and missiles, right? Or do we need an early warning system for the melting of ice on these issues of extreme climate change that are playing out there? To me, those issues are no longer separate. They're actually entwined with each other. And I think silence plays a part into that.

Are we listening to that? And what is the alarm that needs to be risen when we're concerned about these issues? Music.

We see the Arctic both as this place of pure fantasy, it's the Fortress of Solitude of Superman. It is the Garden of Eden from medieval texts with flowing rivers where all of this life and bounty is from. It's also the place of brute reality. It's where the military bases are. It's where colonial occupation occurred. It's where resource extraction of oil fields and diamond mining and rare earth minerals are. And so for me, the Arctic holds those two extremes.

As a extreme geography, it holds the extremes of our fantasies and the extremes of brute reality. Music. This episode was written and produced by me, Cody Lisko. With help from Ian Hartman, Aaron Leggett, and Julie Decker. Music was produced by Keys Open Doors and Alcota Beach. Music.