To understand the blinkered thinking that is so often applied to the Arctic, you have only to look at Kenneth Rosen’s Polar War, a weird mix of literary-wannabe travelogue (‘The wind is a thief trafficking in breath’), political and geopolitical commentary, and oddly intimate self-exposure, with a terrifying appendix called ‘Reining in the Arctic’. Alastair Campbell blurbs it as ‘a proper piece of journalism’ – which says it all, since the book flatters security wonks without disturbing anyone’s received wisdom. It is meant to be a warning against the ambitions of Russia and China, trumpeting liberal American hegemony over the Arctic (the book is mildly critical of Trump even as it touts more US ‘engagement’ with Greenland). In his appendix, Rosen uses the hard-nosed and bullet-pointed language of Washington security think tanks to demand that the US ‘improve our defence framework’ by addressing ‘weaknesses in various defence infrastructures, such as NORAD and the Clear Space Force Station’, establishing an Arctic intelligence agency and funding geological surveys on rare earths to strengthen our ‘ties with allies in Europe and Greenland’.
Rosen mentions Soviet nuclear testing on its Arctic islands, but not the three underground nuclear tests conducted by the US in Alaska in the 1960s and 1970s, well described by Dean Kohlhoff in Amchitka and the Bomb (2002). Kohlhoff writes that on the eve of the final test, the Indigenous Auke tribe appealed to Nixon to stop the test, insisting that ‘their beloved islands, alive with spirit, were not mere rocks to be blasted and despoiled in dangerous experiments.’ The explosions caused massive rock falls, suffocated intertidal life, killed thousands of fish and sea otters; and – in a horrifying detail – jammed the legs of aquatic birds into their bellies, destroying their internal organs. Thousands of acres of land were denuded. Lakes were emptied, rivers filled with debris and a reservoir holding toxic mud from drilling broke and spilled its contents into the sea.
Alaska wasn’t the only casualty of nuclear contamination in the Arctic. In 1951, in concert with its Nato ally Denmark, the US expropriated and displaced the Inuit residents of Thule in northern Greenland in order to establish a Strategic Air Command base (it was renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2023). During the Cold War, it hosted ballistic missile early warning system radars and acted as a hub for aircraft armed with nuclear warheads criss-crossing the North Atlantic. In January 1968, a US B-52 bomber carrying four 1.1-megaton nuclear bombs caught fire over Thule. The crew ejected, but the plane crashed. Its 125,000 litres of jet fuel exploded on impact, setting off the conventional explosives in the warheads. Although the nuclear weapons didn’t detonate, radioactive debris covered the region.