Why the new Arctic 'Cold War' is a dangerous myth

• Main Author: Burke, Danita Catherine
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: The Conversation 2018
• Subjects: Cold War; Arctic; North; Security; Military; Military capabilities; Greenland; North Pole; Alaska
• Online Access: https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/da/publications/216fbe12-6b6b-48cb-8618-d75af8c784f0; https://theconversation.com/why-the-new-arctic-cold-war-is-a-dangerous-myth-108274

All too often the Arctic region is portrayed as an area on the cusp of military crisis. This is an easy narrative to sell; it harks back to the Cold War. Potent imagery persists of submarines trolling silently beneath the Arctic ice and nuclear ballistic missiles pointed across the North Pole. During the height of the standoff between NATO and the USSR, the world feared a barrage of nuclear warheads streaming in from the frozen north – and this experience has imprinted on the collective imagination and created distinct ideas about the region. This fear, for example, motivated from the 1950s the construction of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Lines, a system of radar stations across the northern US (Alaska), Canada, and Greenland. The DEW Lines were meant to give the US and its NATO allies an early warning of an incoming Soviet nuclear strike. The Cold War was a significant period in history. But catchy headlines playing off the parallels between the region and a new “cold” war are misleading. There have, of course, been increased tensions between the West and Russia since 2014 due to the conflict over Ukraine and Crimea. The 2018 Trident Juncture exercises in the Arctic, featuring “50,000 personnel from NATO Allies and partner countries”, are evidence of this. But the tension is not Arctic-specific and militaries are diverse actors in the region. This nuance, however, is often overlooked. Current military exercises and equipment acquisitions fuel old Cold War perceptions. And a certain militarisation is indeed occurring in the Arctic. Russia, for example, has recently invested heavily in updating its northern military infrastructure. So too have other Arctic states, such as Canada and Denmark. But military activity has, to varying degrees, occurred for decades in the north – it was just largely ignored by those not living there until recently.