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The DEW Line: Cold War Defense at the Top of the World

Photo courtesy U.S. Air Force
Photo courtesy U.S. Air Force

The DEW Line: Cold War Defense at the Top of the World

The Distant Early Warning Line demonstrated the importance of international partnerships, sharing technology and the collective effort to know the Earth.

By NGA’s Office of Corporate Communications

This article was originally published in NGA’s Pathfinder Magazine, September/October 2008.

At first glance, the image on this page seems to confirm the existence of the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001, A Space Odyssey.” That mysterious structure established a fictional link between human evolution and a higher intelligence in distant space. This monolith, looking out over an imposing arctic landscape, should also remind us of special links and fruitful relationships critical to geospatial intelligence, only forged closer to home, during NGA’s Cold War past.

Building 10, dome and dishes, looking northwest — POW-3 Distant Early Warning Line Station, Bullen Point, Prudhoe Bay, North Slope Borough, AK. (Photo via Library of Congress)
Building 10, dome and dishes, looking northwest — POW-3 Distant Early Warning Line Station, Bullen Point, Prudhoe Bay, North Slope Borough, AK. (Photo via Library of Congress)

This black structure, an ultra-high frequency directional antenna, and many others like it, formed part of the Distant Early Warning, or DEW, Line designed in 1954 at President Dwight Eisenhower’s direction. He wanted a means of detecting the possibility of Soviet bombers armed with nuclear weapons coming in over the North Pole. The construction of a series of stations starting in Alaska and stretching across all of northern Canada and then on to Greenland began shortly after both the president’s authorization and the decision of our Commonwealth partner, Canada, to collaborate.

With U.S. funding support, Canada accomplished all of the surveys, many in their largely uncharted and inhospitable northern territories. The Canadians also built the stations with contract assistance from the Federal Electric Corporation, then a division of ITT, and manned the facilities on their soil with personnel from both the Royal Canadian Air Force and the U.S. Air Force. The U.S. subsidiary of AT&T, Western Electric, took responsibility for the electronic systems used by the allied personnel, with Bell Laboratories designing the equipment and conducting the final acceptance tests. Raytheon designed and built the long-range radar systems, and Collins Radio, the U.S. company that supplied Rear Adm. Richard Byrd with the communication devices he took to the South Pole in 1933, supplied scatter radio systems attuned to the Arctic environment.

Arctic atmospheric and climate conditions made it difficult to use high-frequency radio waves effectively as the basic means of detection and transmission. Instead a combination of systems using high-powered transmitters, ultra-high frequencies, and multiple highly directional antennas worked together in a new way called scatter communications. This innovation made the DEW Line effective. The lowest layer of the atmosphere, called the troposphere, permitted refraction of radio signals due to moisture, sending refracted or “scattered” signals in predictable directions. Those angles determined the positioning of directional antennae clusters formed by two or three of the black monoliths. In addition, long-range radar provided the primary detection capability, and shorter-range radars, mounted on 300-foot towers, guarded against any Soviet attempt to fly under the coverage.

Buildings 7, 10, and dome, looking south — POW-3 Distant Early Warning Line Station, Bullen Point, Prudhoe Bay, North Slope Borough, AK. (Photo via the Library of Congress)
Buildings 7, 10, and dome, looking south — POW-3 Distant Early Warning Line Station, Bullen Point, Prudhoe Bay, North Slope Borough, AK. (Photo via the Library of Congress)

The creation of the DEW Line brought Canada and the United States together to defend the North American continent against the Soviet threat, leading to the creation of the North American Air Defense Command, NORAD, in 1958. By the time the Line went active, it consisted of 21 stations established along a transcontinental procession extending for 3,693 statute miles. It took as many as 25,000 people and all sorts of technical and construction skills to fashion the finished product.

In one way the DEW Line had a very short useful life, and in another it still lives and operates in a way we find essential. The effective life of the Line ended with the introduction of intercontinental ballistic missiles. This technology literally took off during 1957 and 1958 with the Soviet R-7, of Sputnik fame, and the American Atlas A. In 1960, the U.S. Navy also perfected the Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile with a range of 1,200 nautical miles. These missiles could fly far above the DEW Line warning net radars and travel at a rate no aircraft could attain. However, the determination displayed in coming together to survey, design, and build, in a very difficult environment, a defensive barrier against early Soviet nuclear capability demonstrated the vitality and flexibility of the Canadian-U.S. relationship. In this case the homeland became North America, and the threat served to bring us together as it did in World War II, as it would in later conflicts, and as it didin formulating GEOINT to support the war on terrorism.