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the cold war on
CANADIAN SOIL:
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
P. WHITNEY LACKENBAUER AND MATTHEW FARISH
ABSTRACT
Given the low standard of contact between environmental and military historians, it is unsurprising, if regrettable, that the relationship between military activity and natural landscapes in Canada has received minimal scholarly attention. This paper seeks to open space for such an environmental history of militarism and militarization. Focusing on the Cold War and its aftermath, the essay documents the history of military activity on Canadian soil, with an emphasis on the North, specifically examining a set of crucial projects and operations that redefined not only physical terrain but associated imaginative understandings of nature. The history of Cold War Canada is littered with suitable examples, from early military exercises and the construction of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) radar line to more recent missile tests and low-level training flights. While it is crucial that these are understood in environmental terms, a genealogy of military activity in the Canadian North reveals changing and at times contrasting approaches to the military-environment relationship. Equally, however, as northern nature was viewed through a series of shifting strategic perspectives, it remained a target of state-driven modernization linked consistently to military objectives.
It had not been any failure of weapons in the cold that had prevented winter warfare. It had been the inability to move, to supply and to live away from main roads and railways. These have always been the problems of civilian frontiers. Wartime progress in winter techniques in Canada has thus, by good fortune, had to be directed not to weapons but to logistics, so that the answers obtained can now, after the war, be directly applied to opening up the North. Winter training would, therefore, seem to be a natural and useful role for Canadian services in peacetime.
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J. Tuzo Wilson
Canadian Geographical Journal, 19461 |
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| ON FEBRUARY 15, 1946, the "Moving Force" of Exercise Musk-Ox left Fort Churchill, Manitoba, and over almost three months traced a 5,000 kilometer-long northern arc via Victoria Island and Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories to Edmonton, Alberta. Fort Churchill, later home to Canada's Defence Research Northern Laboratory, was by the end of the Second World War a site of significant research on military bodies, units, and technologies under adverse environmental conditions.2 Musk-Ox was an extraordinary extension of these research interests. It was less a routine test of endurance than a public spectacle held within a territory of new strategic interest, a demonstration of the Canadian military's ability to travel across, and thus command, a challenging landscape. Staged at the outset of the Cold War, Musk-Ox offered no significant human enemies for its participants, or for the audiences digesting reportage of the event. Rather, the chief opponent was nature itself.3 |
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The Cold War's first decade featured numerous northern exercises similar to Musk-Ox, part of a broader militarization of the North American Arctic capped by the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line radar project.4 With the end of the dominant historical narrative of the twentieth century's second half, scholars have begun to examine the geographic legacy of the Cold War—the ways in which it defined and transformed specific sites, from proxy conflicts in client states to the suburban streets of a superpower.5 This legacy is not just one of impact upon landscapes; it also reflects the broader Cold War interest—on the part of the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, their allies—in military environments on a global scale. The result of such interest, as signalled by the early example of Musk-Ox, was the systematic consolidation of nature as a military entity, but also an extension of the scope and terms of militarization to reflect the cautious longevity of the Cold War. |
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