WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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The shortest route between Russia and the
United States is over the north pole.

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So if the Cold War had ever become Hot, the bombs
would have been going straight over here.

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This is Tuktoyaktuk, on the Arctic Ocean,
in the Canadian Northwest Territories.

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And that behind me with the domes

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was once the military's DEW Line:
the Distant Early Warning Line.

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Or at least, part of it.

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The DEW Line was built in the 1950s:

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57 radar bases ranging all the way
from the Aleutian Islands to Greenland.

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They looked to the sky around the clock,

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and if any aircraft showed up on radar
that weren't supposed to be there:

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well, there was a chance that those were
Soviet bombers carrying nuclear weapons

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to North American targets,

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and the governments would have somewhere
between an hour and four hours

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to scramble some sort of response.

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Construction of the DEW Line was
an enormous operation.

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Thousands and thousands of people
had to be transported to the Arctic,

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provided with food and housing and
the hundreds of thousands of tons of

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equipment and supplies that they'd need
to build the Line.

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But the military is good at logistics,

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or at least, the vast number of
civilian contractors they hired were.

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All the bases were completed in
just two and a half years,

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and North America was prepared
for Soviet attack,

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at the cost of around half a billion
dollars from the two governments.

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There were other costs too, less financial:

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for a lot of the folks that lived
near the DEW Line sites,

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the sudden influx of people and equipment
destroyed their way of life;

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although that's a story that
I am not qualified to tell.

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The construction also contaminated
a lot of the local environment:

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standards then weren't
what they are now,

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and the cleanup is still going on.

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And for all that, the DEW Line lasted about
five years until it was obsolete.

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Because shortly after it was completed, both
the Soviet Union and the United States

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started to put their nuclear warheads not on aircraft,
but on intercontinental ballistic missiles.

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They didn't eight or nine hours
of flight over the pole, instead

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the first wave of attack would come from rockets
that would take half an hour

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and go literally over the top
of the DEW Line.

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Half of these stations were shut down 
a few years later.

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The rest of the Line,
including this station here,

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well, they played a role in air defense.

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If they weren't here, then the Soviet Union could have
theoretically still sent bombers over the pole.

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But they weren't the shield that
North America hoped that they would be.

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US President Eisenhower, in his memoirs,

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said that military technology... well,
"if it works, it's obsolete".

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The DEW Line kept running, though,
at least until the 90s,

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when a more modern system was constructed.

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Now, this site is part of the
North Warning System,

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part of a modern radar defence around
the whole continent

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that can detect basically
anything inbound at any altitude.

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Which is why I'm not allowed near it.

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Governments on this side of the pole want
to be sure: the Cold War might be over,

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but just in case,
they'd better keep watching.