Making Sense of the Arctic: U.S.-Canadian Foreign and Defense Relations and the Establishment of JAWS and the DEW Line, 1944-1957

• Main Author: Woitkowitz, John
• Other Authors: Randall, Stephen J., Huebert, Robert N., Dolata, Petra, Towers, Frank, Ferris, John Robert, Lackenbauer, P. Whitney, Keeley, James F.
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Arts 2018
• Subjects: Arctic; JAWS; DEW Line; Sovereignty; Security; Cold War; Second World War; Northern history; Anthropology > Cultural; Canadian Studies; Economics > History; History > Modern; History > Canadian; History > United States; Military Studies; Political Science > International Law and Relations; Canada
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1880/106511; https://doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/31798

This dissertation examines the diplomatic history of U.S.-Canadian foreign and defense relations in the Arctic from 1944 to 1957. World War II and the emerging Cold War transformed the Northern and Arctic regions of North America from a peripheral region of international politics to a frontline of military planning. The Cold War confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, the advent of the nuclear age, and the advancements in the field of long-range aviation fixed foreign policy and continental defense planners’ attention on Northern and Arctic Canada, devising plans for the establishment of the Joint Arctic Weather Stations (JAWS) in 1947 and the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line in 1955. This study analyzes the origins, negotiations, and the construction of these Northern defense projects at the intersection of an emerging Cold War security crisis, an evolving legal landscape for Arctic sovereignty, and conceptions of the Arctic as a symbolic marker in the construction of Northern nationalisms. Existing studies of the JAWS and DEW Line talks by historians Shelagh Grant, Whitney Lackenbauer, Alexander Herd, and Peter Kikkert discuss these defense projects within the framework of sovereignty and security. More recent studies have adopted epistemological perspectives, exploring the construction of Arctic knowledge. This dissertation builds on this literature and contributes an analysis of the ideas and perceptions that guided key decision makers in Ottawa and Washington during the bilateral talks. By exploring unpublished personal papers and re-examining the ministerial records of Canada and the United States with a new research focus, this thesis explores how global and national conceptions of Arctic defense interacted with bureaucratic cultures within the Canadian and American foreign and defense establishments. Moreover, this study sheds new light on the relationship between non-governmental actors such as explorers, artists, novelists, and scientists and the realm of diplomacy and foreign ...