The Coldest War: Imagining Geopolitics from the Bottom of the Earth

• Main Author: Leane, Elizabeth
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Article; Antarctic; Arctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7990656/; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_34

While the Arctic is frequently considered a highly charged location within Cold War geopolitics, the Antarctic is more often framed as a remote wilderness impervious to world events. The Antarctica that we now label a ‘continent for peace and science’ is, however, very much a product of the Cold War. With the USSR and the US refusing to recognise national claims to the continent, the 1959 Antarctic Treaty emerged as a truce that put all claims into a kind of indefinite suspension. Geopolitical tensions nonetheless permeate imaginative texts that engaged with the region throughout the later twentieth century. Ranging from lightweight romantic comedies through post-apocalyptic dystopias to adventure thrillers, Antarctic fiction provides an illuminating inverted perspective on the Cold War.