The DEW Line

During the early years of the Cold War, American and Canadian leaders grew increasingly paranoid over the possibility of a Russian nuclear attack from atop the Arctic Circle, leading to the construction of the Distant Early Warning Line or DEW Line, which was a 3,000-mile-long radar and communication “tripwire” system that spanned from the west coast of Alaska to the east coast of Baffin Island. At the behest of the U.S. Air Force, a group of scientists convened at MIT in 1952, to evaluate the potential Russian threat to the national security of both Canada and the United States, resulting in groundbreaking new technologies designed to achieve the DEW Line’s lofty goals, including acquisition radar nearly twice as powerful than the existing state-of-the-art, and a communication network with near 100% reliability.

A Massive Undertaking

Under the command of Superintendent of Construction, Markham Cheever, in 1953, a project office was established in Hanger No. 1, Ladd AFB, Fairbanks Alaska. From there, Air Force C-124 cargo planes delivered heavy equipment to Barter Island Alaska, while a cat-train originating at Point Barrow delivered construction supplies to each proposed installation site, where workers undertook the construction of earthworks, airstrips, foundations, living quarters and fuel storage facilities—all in conditions of extreme cold and lack of sufficient topographical knowledge of most areas chosen for each installation point. Enduring 80-plus hour work weeks in frigid, isolated conditions, a total of 600 employees lived in canvas shelters heated by kerosene stoves, sharing a common wash house from early April, 1953, until the project finished ahead of schedule in mid-October of that same year.

Logistical Perfection

Of the more than 15,000 items shipped in for the project, only one was unaccounted for, until its discovery in late November. Built at a cost of more than half a billion dollars—roughly six billion in today’s currency—many redesigns and improvements would follow over the intervening years of the Cold War, until satellite-based surveillance systems and intercontinental ballistic missiles led to the DEW Line’s obsolescence. Decommissioned in 1985, another six years of geopolitical tension was to follow, until the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, making the DEW Line, a study in early innovation and collaboration during the darkest days of the Cold War.