Strategic Arctic science: national interests in building natural knowledge – interwar era through the Cold War

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2013.12.004

Journal of Historical Geography

Volume 44, April 2014, Pages 60-80

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.12.004 Get rights and content

Highlights

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First comparative analysis of 20th century making of Arctic natural and geographical knowledge.
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Based on archival sources in all relevant languages across the circumpolar north.
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Shows Arctic science in rapid transition with substantial growth and strong professionalization.
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Massive investments in Arctic science extended beyond 2 Polar Years.
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National variants were consistent, cumulative, and guided by economic and military interests.

Abstract

From the 1930s through the 1950s—the decades bracketing the second and third international polar years—research in the physical and biological environmental sciences of the Arctic increased dramatically. The heroic, expedition-based style of Arctic science, dominant in the first decades of the twentieth century, gave way to a systematic, long-term, strategic and largely statefunded model of research which increased both Arctic presence and the volume of research output. Factors that made this change possible were distinct for each of the five circumpolar nation-states considered here. For Soviet leaders, the Arctic was an untamed land containing vast economic resources, all within reach if its long-sought Northern Sea Route became reality; Soviet officials sought environmental knowledge of this region with a range of motivations from economic and strategic concerns to enhancing the prestige of socialism. In contrast, United States officials largely ignored the Arctic until the outbreak of World War II, when military commanders quickly grasped the strategic importance of this region. Anxious that the Arctic might become a literal battleground between East and West by 1947, as the Cold War began, Pentagon leaders funded vast northern research programs, including in strategically located Greenland. Canadian leaders—while appreciating the national security concerns of its powerful southern neighbor—were even more concerned with maintaining sovereignty over its northern territories and gaining knowledge to assist its northern economic ambitions. Norway and Sweden, as smaller states, faced distinct challenges. With strong claims to Arctic heritage but limited resources, leaders of these states sought to create independent research strategies while, especially in the case of Norway, protecting their geopolitical interests in relation to the Soviet Union and the U.S. This article provides the first internationally comparative study of the multiple economic, military, political, and strategic factors that motivated scientific activities and programs in the far north, from the interwar period through World War II and the Cold War, when carefully coordinated, station-based research programs were introduced. The production of knowledge about Arctic's physical environment—including its changing climate—had little resemblance either to ideas of science-based ‘progress,’ or responses to perceived environmental concerns. Instead, it demonstrates that strategic military, economic, geopolitical, and national security concerns influenced and shaped most science undertakings, including those of the International Polar Year of 1932–1933 and the following polar year, the International Geophysical Year of 1957–1958.

Section snippets

Making Arctic science modern: towards a circumpolar view

Before World War II shattered Europe, only the Soviet Union supported robust research programs focused on its far north: scientist-manned icebreakers were plowing the frozen Arctic Ocean by the mid-1930s, while well-manned research expeditions occupied ice islands in the high Arctic, sending back meteorological, oceanographic and ionospheric observations to well-supported institutions further south, including the Arctic Institute in Leningrad. By contrast, there was little systematic Arctic

The Soviet Union: natural resources and national narratives

U.S. Arctic experts who looked at the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War were unanimous on one matter: they worried that the USSR knew more about the Arctic than any other nation.¹⁶

The United States and Canada: military anxieties about the far north

Although ‘the north’ never loomed as large as ‘The West’ in the imagination of U.S. citizens in the late nineteenth century, it was far from ignored. The Jeannette Arctic Expedition (1879–1881), led by Naval Lieutenant Commander George Washington De Long (and sponsored by the New York Herald), was front-page news for months, though it never earned a permanent place in American cultural memory; the later-disputed claims of Robert Peary to have reached the North Pole by dogsled in 1909, like

Norway and Sweden: sovereignty, diplomacy, and science

Norway and Sweden played Arctic roles that were quite different from those of the United States and the Soviet Union, and each pursued a separate path. Leaders of these Scandinavian nations, with democratic and largely homogenous societies on the northern periphery of Europe, did not see the Arctic primarily in military terms. Instead, they viewed the polar region as a crucial space for the pursuit of national interests. In Norway, polar diplomacy provided ways to resolve contested claims of

Conclusion

Knowledge about the Arctic environment—including its shifting climate—increased dramatically in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It did so because nations bordering the Arctic generously invested state resources to make this possible, dispatching icebreakers, aircraft, ships, and teams of researchers with increasing frequency to the far north, while creating new institutions such as Glavsevmorput to safeguard and analyze burgeoning stores of data. The rise of these institutions

Acknowledgments

All authors wish to acknowledge support from the European Science Foundation's EUROCORES Programme ‘BOREAS: Histories from the North—environments, movements, narratives.’ For individual support, we are grateful for National Science Foundation grants 0922651 and SBR-9511867, and the Exploring Greenland: Science and Technology in Cold War Settings project, Aarhus University, Denmark (Doel); the Norwegian Research Council (Norsk polarhistorie), Mohn Research Fund of the University of Tromsø

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