Dr Freezelove

Two years​ after the end of the Civil War, William Seward, the US secretary of state, negotiated the purchase of ‘Russian America’ – Alaska – for $7.2 million, equivalent to $165 million today. The New York Times noted that the acquisition

includes the strip four hundred miles long, which extends down the coast, thus excluding a large part of British America from the ocean … more than doubles the United States coast on the Pacific … includes a great number of islands, and is of the highest importance as a naval depot and for strategic purposes. It is a valuable fur country, and embraces a vast section of territory, the possession of which will influence in our favour the vast trade of the Pacific.

Seward had anticipated this expansion twenty years earlier, when he declared that ‘our population is destined to roll its resistless waves to the icy barriers of the north, and to encounter Oriental civilisation on the shores of the Pacific.’

The 1867 Treaty of Cession with Russia promised expanded trade routes and access to natural resources, but it also was strategic: it hemmed in the British, who had ostensibly been neutral in the Civil War, but had tacitly encouraged private enterprise to support the Confederacy. Seward wanted to emulate Britain’s transoceanic empire, with its ‘vast web of ocean steam navigation, based on postage and commerce’ connecting ‘all the European ports … all the ports in the West Indies, all the ports of Asia and Oceania, with her great commercial capital’. In addition to Alaska, Seward sought insular acquisitions in the Atlantic and considered the purchase of Cuba from Spain, the isthmus of Panama from Colombia, and Samaná Bay from the Dominican Republic. Some in Congress even suggested annexing Canada.

Seward also negotiated a treaty with Denmark to acquire the islands of St Thomas and St John, two of its possessions in the Caribbean. A State Department report of 1868, produced for Seward by the former Mississippi senator and ardent expansionist Robert J. Walker, suggested ‘the propriety of obtaining from the same power Greenland, and probably Iceland also’. Walker extolled Iceland’s mild climate, many rivers, wealth of fisheries and agriculture, as well as its obsidian, lignite and sulphur mines – ‘very rich and extensive, easily worked and of immense value’. Even more significant was its strategic location as a landing point for marine telegraph cables.

Greenland, whose northern reaches were as yet unmapped by white settlers or explorers, was surrounded by vast whaling grounds, and rich in coal and other minerals, including cryolite, an aluminium ore found nowhere else in such large quantities. Walker spent some paragraphs discussing this new, light and flexible metal. He also noted that ‘from the best of these northern harbours of Greenland there is believed to be practicable summer ocean steam navigation 1500 miles to Alaska, extending, also, through Bering’s straits to China or Japan, or southward to Sitka, Puget sound, the Oregon river, San Francisco &c.’

Russia had ceded Alaska because, in the wake of the Crimean War, its logistical control over the colony was brittle. Withdrawal from Alaska allowed it to consolidate its hold over Siberia, build friendly relations with the US and concentrate on its rivalry with Britain in East Asia. The Russian-American Company, which had run Alaska from St Petersburg for sixty years, had developed little in the way of infrastructure other than the port of Novo-Arkhangelsk (what is now Sitka) along with a handful of far-flung furring outposts and whaling stations. The discovery of large gold deposits near Juneau and elsewhere in the 1880s led to military trails and railways being built, but the primary means of reaching the vast expanse of the Alaskan territories remained by water – and its rivers were iced in and closed to navigation for nine months of the year. Only after the start of the Second World War and the destruction of the US Pacific Fleet in Hawaii did the United States scramble to construct major roads to tighten its hold on Alaska and provide defences against Japanese air and naval power.

Russia’s control of its Arctic regions ran into similar logistical problems. As Scientific American argued in 1904, ‘the problem of keeping open the ice-bound ports of the Baltic and of the Siberian Pacific coast is somewhat more difficult than the task that confronts the American engineer … Russian ice is thicker; it lasts longer; and the longer it lasts, the more difficult it is to penetrate.’ To address this problem, a celebrated vice admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy, Stepan Osipovich Makarov, commissioned a new kind of icebreaker. Makarov had lived in Russia’s Far East as a child, served in the Baltic Sea in his twenties and visited the Ob and Yenisei rivers in Siberia to assess their navigability in his thirties. The icebreaker SS Yermak was built by the shipyard of Sir W.G. Armstrong, Whitworth and Co. in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1899. Thirty years earlier the same company had built an icebreaker ‘to clear a passage through the Baltic ice fields’, but Arctic pack ice was denser, deeper and tougher.

The Yermak was a beast. Its hull was pot-bellied and sturdy: it looked a little like cartoon renderings of Noah’s Ark, but made of steel. The Strand Magazine described it as the ‘heaviest and strongest steamer yet constructed’. At nearly 100 metres long, with three propellers at the back and one at the front, it could carry 3000 tonnes of coal and move through five feet of ice at one or two knots. The rotation of the screw at the front created a vacuum underneath the ice pack, causing the ice to collapse in on itself. A pump at the centre of the ship pushed hot water from the engine to ‘warm the skin of the ship, melting the very surface which touches it’.

In a speech given in 1899 to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Makarov explained that securing funding for the project had been difficult. He had lobbied the Russian government on the need for such a ship in the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea, which were icebound throughout the winter, obstructing access to St Petersburg. He insisted that a new vessel was also needed to deliver supplies to settlements in Siberia and to make exploitation of its resources commercially viable. This was Makarov’s trump card:

if it becomes possible to make navigation to the Siberian rivers sure during three or three and a half months a year, then it will be business-like and the tariff will go down, so that it will be possible to export our cheap goods, such as wheat and wood, which are found in Siberia in great quantities, and at a cheap price.

The Yermak’s first voyage was to the port of Kronstadt just outside St Petersburg in deepest winter, and its first mission was to rescue twelve ships frozen in near Tallinn (it freed nine of them). It was a winter workhorse of the Russian and later the Soviet navy, and was scrapped only after more than six decades of service.

Trade routes and natural resources have been at the heart of the contest for the Arctic. From the 16th century onwards, as European powers feverishly colonised the world, the possibility of a Northern Sea Route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Scandinavia to the Bering Strait, tantalised the Dutch and the British as an alternative to the southern routes to Asia and the Americas, which were dominated by Portugal and Spain. But as a collective of Norwegian, Dutch and Russian historians showed in the richly detailed From Northeast Passage to Northern Sea Route (2022), the route only became a reality in the Soviet era, after investments in scientific, economic, industrial and military infrastructure in Siberia. From the 1930s on it was used for shipping grain and timber. During the Second World War warships traversed the route eastwards; after the 1960s it was used to carry oil westwards. The Soviet state established military bases and meteorological stations along the northern coast of Siberia, connecting its Arctic ports to one another and to western Russia.

The big-bellied icebreakers were augmented with nuclear engines. The maiden voyage of the Lenin in 1960 was two weeks quicker than previous journeys along the route. There was even talk of nuclear submarines carrying oil all year round underneath the ice. Sovietologists in the US were alarmed by the technological advances that made the route navigable, but as it turned out there were few further developments: when the Soviet Union disintegrated state investment in Siberia collapsed and the Northern Sea Route fell into disuse for almost two decades.

It was only in 2008 that the Russian government under Dmitry Medvedev proposed to construct new transportation and communication infrastructure in the Arctic. In 2012, Russia passed legislation that aimed to establish its territorial claim to parts of the Arctic Ocean. A year later, traffic on the Northern Sea Route reached its largest ever volume, with 71 ships, including 25 flagged to countries other than Russia, passing close to the Siberian coast in both directions. Soon afterwards, China, India, Japan, South Korea and Singapore all gained permanent seats as ‘observers’ on the Arctic Council. In 2015, Russia applied to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to extend its exclusive economic zone in the Arctic to 2o0 nautical miles, and in 2023 the commission agreed that much of the subsea topography claimed by Russia – the Alpha-Mendeleev Rise, the Podvodnikov Basin and the Lomonosov Ridge – could be classed as natural continuations of its continental shelf. But it disputed Russia’s claim to the Gakkel Ridge, a frozen thalassic mountain that runs from the mid-coast of Siberia across the North Pole to the top of Greenland.

All this set in motion a frenzy of activity on the other side of the Arctic. The forgotten region was suddenly all the rage in the US and Canada, with councils, transnational organisations, think tanks and NGOs conducting research and issuing report after report. New journals about the Arctic began publishing in multiple languages, new academic disciplines for the study of the Arctic were established, and Nato’s Nordic Response military exercises hosted by Norway (first held in 2006 and named Cold Response until 2023) were ramped up. Crucially, the Arctic is another battlespace in what the US calls its ‘pivot to Asia’. A report on the region in 2010 by the Congressional Research Service mentioned China 13 times and Greenland 26 times (in relation to the US air force base there) and mostly concerned US economic interests; the 2025 report is forty pages longer, cites China and Greenland 256 and 218 times respectively and is far more interested in geopolitics.

The biggest factor in the new contest over the Arctic is climate change. In the 127 years since the Yermak’s first journey, ice cover in the Baltic has contracted dramatically – in some estimates by almost 50 per cent. Across the Arctic it has shrunk by around 12 per cent a decade, and the ice that remains year-round is thinner and more brittle. A report issued in 2024 by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warns that thicker ice which is more than four years old now forms only about 5 per cent of the total. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank responsible for Project 2025, argued in that initiative that the NOAA’s work was ‘harmful to US prosperity’; last year, hundreds of its scientists were fired and the agency’s climate change reporting was terminated.

There has been a dramatic reduction in a phenomenon called the albedo (‘whiteness’) effect. In Icebreaker: A Voyage Far North (2017), Horatio Clare describes the effect as ‘the snow throwing the light outward and skyward’ in ‘a shattering silver glare’. Snow reflects 85 per cent of the sunlight that hits it, exposed water only 7 per cent, so warming forms a vicious spiral. In the 1970s Soviet icebreakers made things worse by sprinkling coal dust on the hard ice of Siberian estuaries. The opening of the sea route accelerated the process: the more ships travel across the ice, the more they burn fossil fuels that deposit still more black carbon dust on the ice and snow, darkening and melting the ice. The early 16th-century colonial fantasies of reaching the East through the Arctic are now a reality.

One of the more striking things about the accounts of 19th-century Arctic expeditions is how similar they are to contemporaneous accounts from the deserts of North Africa and West Asia: icy immensities in one case, arid expanses in the other. Both sets of explorers imagined these spaces as terrae nullius to be possessed, exploited, improved and turned into property. When they weren’t considered savages to be civilised, the Indigenous peoples of these spaces were exoticised. After its acquisition of Alaska, the US gave the remaining Russians the option to become citizens. But the military district governor was instructed

to impress upon the tribal and uncivilised inhabitants … and especially upon their chiefs, that our government will regard them as subjects to its law and entitled to its protection. [If] any member of a tribe maltreat a citizen of the United States, the whole tribe, and especially its chief, will be held responsible for the offence or crime committed by one of its members.

The Indigenous communities of Alaska and Canada were policed, surveilled and subjected to state and settler violence; lands were expropriated and people were displaced. Children were kidnapped and sent to ‘Indian Schools’, where many were disappeared; mass graves on the sites of these schools are still regularly discovered. After the Russian Revolution, Siberia’s Indigenous communities were forced into sedentary lives and, under the banner of modernisation and industrialisation, their reindeer herds and hunting dogs were confiscated, leading to a 30 per cent reduction in the population of reindeer between 1929 and 1932. Sámi communities across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia were coercively brought under national control, and imposed borders divided their communities; across the Arctic, Indigenous languages and culture were suppressed.

The discovery of large-scale deposits of oil in Alaska and Siberia in the 1960s, and of tar sands in Canada in the 1950s, transformed the Arctic. The coming of oil had contradictory effects on its communities. Indigenous nations in unceded territories in Canada have regularly contested pipelines crossing their lands. Political mobilisation by the Alaska Federation of Natives led to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which discharged all Indigenous land claims in return for $963 million and 44 million acres, paving the way for the exploitation of Alaska’s oil resources. The Act created twelve regional and more than two hundred village corporations to manage the land and the money.

As Willie Hensley, one of the leaders who negotiated the settlement, explained in an interview with PBS, agreeing to it, and to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, gave them some leverage. The corporations that were set up vary in what they do, Hensley said. ‘Some are billion-dollar corporations that are doing business constantly in all aspects of Alaska business life. Some of them are very huge in the oil field services arena that covers the whole spectrum: mining, construction, hotels, tourism, telecommunications and engineering.’ The corporations entrench communal and geographic fissures and raise the financial stakes of any differences. Some people are co-opted into the extractive industries and are handsomely rewarded; others are impoverished. Any financial rewards tend to benefit the middle classes.

Successive Alaskan and Albertan administrations have ardently supported extraction. In 2024, the governor of Alaska awarded an Indigenous faction that supported drilling a million-dollar ‘cultural’ grant. The advantages of oil money, touted by pro-extraction Indigenous communities, have been hotly contested by those who emphasise its environmentally detrimental effects. Pipelines and infrastructure have disrupted the seasonal movement of reindeer and caribou herds, distressed bird and polar bear populations, and polluted the water, air and soil of the region.

To understand​ the blinkered thinking that is so often applied to the Arctic, you have only to look at Kenneth Rosen’s Polar War, a weird mix of literary-wannabe travelogue (‘The wind is a thief trafficking in breath’), political and geopolitical commentary, and oddly intimate self-exposure, with a terrifying appendix called ‘Reining in the Arctic’. Alastair Campbell blurbs it as ‘a proper piece of journalism’ – which says it all, since the book flatters security wonks without disturbing anyone’s received wisdom. It is meant to be a warning against the ambitions of Russia and China, trumpeting liberal American hegemony over the Arctic (the book is mildly critical of Trump even as it touts more US ‘engagement’ with Greenland). In his appendix, Rosen uses the hard-nosed and bullet-pointed language of Washington security think tanks to demand that the US ‘improve our defence framework’ by addressing ‘weaknesses in various defence infrastructures, such as NORAD and the Clear Space Force Station’, establishing an Arctic intelligence agency and funding geological surveys on rare earths to strengthen our ‘ties with allies in Europe and Greenland’.

Rosen mentions Soviet nuclear testing on its Arctic islands, but not the three underground nuclear tests conducted by the US in Alaska in the 1960s and 1970s, well described by Dean Kohlhoff in Amchitka and the Bomb (2002). Kohlhoff writes that on the eve of the final test, the Indigenous Auke tribe appealed to Nixon to stop the test, insisting that ‘their beloved islands, alive with spirit, were not mere rocks to be blasted and despoiled in dangerous experiments.’ The explosions caused massive rock falls, suffocated intertidal life, killed thousands of fish and sea otters; and – in a horrifying detail – jammed the legs of aquatic birds into their bellies, destroying their internal organs. Thousands of acres of land were denuded. Lakes were emptied, rivers filled with debris and a reservoir holding toxic mud from drilling broke and spilled its contents into the sea.

Alaska wasn’t the only casualty of nuclear contamination in the Arctic. In 1951, in concert with its Nato ally Denmark, the US expropriated and displaced the Inuit residents of Thule in northern Greenland in order to establish a Strategic Air Command base (it was renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2023). During the Cold War, it hosted ballistic missile early warning system radars and acted as a hub for aircraft armed with nuclear warheads criss-crossing the North Atlantic. In January 1968, a US B-52 bomber carrying four 1.1-megaton nuclear bombs caught fire over Thule. The crew ejected, but the plane crashed. Its 125,000 litres of jet fuel exploded on impact, setting off the conventional explosives in the warheads. Although the nuclear weapons didn’t detonate, radioactive debris covered the region.

The USAF clean-up team arrived on dogsleds driven by Inuit peoples. As a subsequent report phlegmatically explained, ‘weather prevented any activity at the site on 24 January 1968. Radiological Division personnel used this period to locate and monitor Indigenous personnel who had entered the contaminated area.’ The official name of the clean-up project was Crested Ice, but in Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons since 1940 (1998), Stephen Schwartz writes that it was nicknamed Dr Freezelove. The work entailed digging up the polluted ice to find the wreckage of the plane, storing the radioactive snow in tanks and shipping the plane parts from Greenland to the US for disposal.

The clean-up crew – seven hundred of them, both US servicemen and Danish civilians – worked without protective gear in punishingly cold temperatures and under great time pressure, attempting to beat the spring thaw which would wash the contaminated snow into the sea. There have been contradictory reports about the long-term effects on the crew of the exposure to radioactivity. According to Schwartz, a study in 1987 found ‘a 40 per cent greater cancer diagnosis than [in] a cohort of 3000 Thule workers who were at the base before and after the accident and did not take part in the clean-up’. Nearly forty years later, Danish scientists recorded high levels of plutonium in the area. The security advice to US policymakers in Rosen’s appendix includes the recommendation that ‘Arctic assets’, especially ‘fifth-generation fighters’, should be moved to the Pituffik Space Base.