The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [93]
In March 1942 the residents of Dawson Creek got the shock of their lives. The train arrived, but instead of bringing the expected dry goods and furniture, it was loaded with heavy equipment and work crews of the U.S. Army. They had come to carve a fifteen-hundred-mile-long emergency road through uncharted wilderness—through British Columbia and the Yukon, connecting Dawson Creek all the way to Fairbanks—in under a year.
Canada’s government watched from Ottawa as the U.S. Army opened up her western frontier. Forty thousand American soldiers and civilian contractors poured into a vast wilderness of forest and bog, a place with no roads and hardly any settlements. It was home to fewer than five thousand Canadians, mostly aboriginal hunter-gatherers.
Dawson Creek became the gateway of what would eventually be called the Alaska Highway. To ferry supplies, dozens of new airfields were cut into the wilderness to form the Northwest Staging Route, later used to shuttle some ten thousand American-built airplanes—painted with the Soviet red star—to Alaska, where they were handed over to Russian pilots.397 Another six-hundred-mile road and pipeline were built to bring crude oil south from fields at Norman Wells. Yet another road was built to link the new highway to the Alaskan port of Haines. The old gold rush town of Whitehorse had a new population explosion and sprouted pipelines running north and south. A telephone network was built, together with new shipping facilities along the Mackenzie River. Through immense manpower and treasure, the United States had opened up another country’s wilderness and connected Alaska by road to the rest of the continent.398
The same thing was going on elsewhere in the Northern Rim. A major airport and base were built in Keflavík, Iceland, and more than thirty thousand troops kept there during and after the war. That facility is now Iceland’s international airport. Another built at Sondre Stromfjord is now Greenland’s international airport; the American-built road there is now the longest in the country. Another airport in northern Greenland (Thule Air Base) is still retained by the U.S. military and is now the northernmost air base for the United States.
The close of World War II changed only the enemy, not the construction projects. Three chains of remote “distant early warning” (DEW) radar stations were strung through Alaska, Canada, and Greenland to deter Soviet bombers. A joint U.S.-Canada base was built at Fort Churchill, Manitoba, and another at Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit). More than sixty thousand troops were stationed in Alaskan bases that are maintained there to this day. By the end of the Cold War, the American military had built a first skeleton of roads, airports, and outposts throughout the northern high latitudes, leaving an indelible template still shaping the region today.
Stalin’s Gulag
America’s northern investments during World War II and the Cold War were purely military.399 But Joseph Stalin’s underlying purpose for building the Gulag ran far deeper. It was more than just a convenient way to punish criminals and silence political dissidents—it was a deliberate decision to industrialize the Soviet Union using the slave labor of his own people. It intended to advance certain socialist ideologies, like asserting man’s triumph over nature and Engels’ dictum—the notion that industry should be evenly distributed geographically across a country. It was nothing less than a forced settlement of his country’s barely habitable Siberian territories—then thinly occupied by aboriginals and a sprinkle of outposts—with ethnic Russians.
The use of prison camps in Russia dates to the tsars, but Stalin took it to a whole new level. By the 1930s he had established camps throughout all twelve Russian time zones. By the program’s peak in the early 1950s, the total camp population