Ice And Snow In The Cold War

The history of the Cold War has focused overwhelmingly on statecraft and military power, an approach that has naturally placed Moscow and Washington center stage. Meanwhile, regions such as Alaska, the polar landscapes, and the cold areas of the Soviet periphery have received little attention. However, such environments were of no small importance during the Cold War: in addition to their symbolic significance, they also had direct implications for everything from military strategy to natural resource management. Through histories of these extremely cold environments, this volume makes a novel intervention in Cold War historiography, one whose global and transnational approach undermines the simple opposition of “East” and “West.”

Using newly declassified documents, this book explores why U.S. military leaders after World War II sought to monitor the far north and understand the physical environment of Greenland, a crucial territory of Denmark. It reveals a fascinating yet little-known realm of Cold War intrigue and a delicate diplomatic duet between a smaller state and a superpower amid a time of intense global pressures. Written by scholars in Denmark and the United States, this book explores many compelling topics. What led to the creation of the U.S. Thule Air Base in Greenland, one of the world’s largest, and why did the U.S. build a nuclear-powered city under Greenland’s ice cap? How did Danish concern about sovereignty shape scientific research programs in Greenland? Also explored here: why did Denmark’s most famous scientist, Inge Lehmann, became involved in research in Greenland, and what international reverberations resulted from the crash of a U.S. B-52 bomber carrying four nuclear weapons near Thule in January 1968?

It is the black ice spy Reiner Paul Fülle, about whom part of his life story is told in this novel. Born in Zwickau and came to the West as a child, Fülle was recruited by the State Security as a young man while visiting his relatives in Thuringia. A spy at the MfS since 1964, he supplied information from the Karlsruhe nuclear research facility to the GDR for adventure and money. On January 19, 1979, Reiner Paul Fülle was arrested by the BKA. He escaped and was brought to the GDR in a wooden box a few days later by the Soviet military mission. Because the BKA officials slipped on black ice during the persecution, abundance was referred to in the German media as black ice spy. Not least because he was very reluctant to be spanked or prescribed, and because his wife persistently refused to move to the GDR, he made his return to the Federal Republic of Germany. Filled with false papers, Fülle returned in late 1981.

The first book to address the vast diversity of Northern circumpolar cinemas from a transnational perspective, Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic presents the region as one of great and previously overlooked cinematic diversity.

At the height of the Korean War in 1952, a budding young historian was drafted into the U.S. Army just as the Pentagon was organizing a top-secret, scientific expeditionary unit, the Transportation Arctic Group (TRARG). Consisting of 275 military members and a cluster of civilian scientists from the United States and other countries, TRARG was sent to Thule Air Force Base, located on the west coast of northern Greenland. Its ostensible purpose was to map the terrain and test complex equipment at the edges of the Ice Cap. The covert objective, however, was to determine the feasibility of constructing yet another air base on the other side of Greenland, one that would be much closer to the enemy. As the sole historian of the unit, Corporal Boskin was responsible for compiling and transmitting weekly progress reports to the Pentagon and, at the conclusion of the mission, for assisting in the final assessment. The multivolume report was itself technically worthy, yet it possessed barely a hint of the personal story: the outsized characters, the dark comedy and real tragedy, the frustrations and waste, and the ongoing tug’of’war between the company commander and his corporal historian over the status of the report’s basic contents. Here Boskin tells that story, a keenly observed narrative that delivers both the absurd and the sublime in equal measure.

Freshly presents world history through its oceans and seas in uniquely wide-ranging, original chapters by leading experts in their fields.

This book examines the impact of the Cold War in a global context and focuses on city-scale reactions to the atomic warfare. It explores urbanism as a weapon to combat the dangers of the communist intrusion into the American territories and promote living standards for the urban poor in the US cities. The Cold War saw the birth of ‘atomic urbanisation’, central to which were planning, politics and cultural practices of the newly emerged cities. This book examines cities in the Arctic, Europe, Asia and Australasia in detail to reveal how military, political, resistance and cultural practices impacted on the spaces of everyday life. It probes questions of city planning and development, such as: How did the threat of nuclear war affect planning at a range of geographic scales? What were the patterns of the built environment, architectural forms and material aesthetics of atomic urbanism in difference places? And, how did the ‘Bomb’ manifest itself in civic governance, popular media, arts and academia? Understanding the age of atomic urbanism can help meet the contemporary challenges that cities are facing. The book delivers a new dimension to the existing debates of the ideologically opposed superpowers and their allies, their hemispherical geopolitical struggles, and helps to understand decades of growth post-Second World War by foregrounding the Cold War.