Defending the North American Continent: Why the Physical Environmental Sciences Mattered in Cold War Greenland

Abstract

Ronald E. Doel describes how understanding the natural environment of Greenland was critical to US government and military leaders who were using this massive island not only as a stationary aircraft carrier, but as the location for a wide range of geoscience-related research programs directly related to America's national security. He argues that North American Continental Defense was a technological system that required a great deal of new knowledge about the physical environment for these weapons systems to work. Among the unanticipated results of these efforts to understand regularities in Arctic natural phenomena were new insights suggesting the Earth's climate was warming---long before this trend became a chief environmental concern by the late twentieth century.