Incoherency Manifest: Concrete Shadows

We all have our practices of self care, drinking tea after a long day of studying, or for some of our more cisgendered male friends, punching holes in walls. For me personally, one of my most grounding exercises is going onto Wikipedia or Google Earth for a romp around the world, often both  at the same time. Over the last year, since my PC accidentally got its hard drive whipped and all of my Google Earth files erased, I have catalogued a number of my adventures of looking across the world, and more often than not these trips always end up squarely looking for one thing: cold war sites. This is a huge range of structures and locations, things like old parts of the Berlin Wall or other physical barriers, to radar sites in the far north to even slowly accumulating every single past and present nuclear missile silo in the continental United States. A combination of maps and organizing and cataloguing what I found is a deeply smoothing activity personally but also an oddly grounding exercise in nihilism, to see especially in turbulent times of the end of incumbent neoliberalism in the global north as we know it, to see just how terrible the ‘good old days’ of our recent past really were. I feel slightly more secure in my step with the knowledge that the US built 1300 nuclear missile silos up until the 1990s if you follow my train of thought. So follow along as I discuss some of my projects and the things I have found along the way and my own personal takeaways.

Likely my personal favourite series of Google-Earth-able locations that are within our own national borders are the former early warning radar sites that are littered across the entire county.

It should come as no surprise to most people that our southern brothers in the United States have always tried to use our land as a place to plant their own troops boots, back in the 40s and into the 50s at the start of the cold war, the US armed forces, primarily the air force, helped Canadians build a series of 3 radar detection lines across the bands of our country, increasingly further north over the years as previous sites became quickly antiquated. The first line, comprising 33 mainline stations and 6 smaller stations was named the Pinetree Line, running across Canada at about the 50th parallel (where roughly leafy deciduous trees stopped growing, hence the name). These stations were largely built at existing military locations across the country if it could be helped and were as simple as it gets, big old stationary radar that was all things considered not very accurate in the slightest. Because of just how useless these were, the Americans quickly pressed another series of sites into service in the mid 60s, the Mid-Canada Line. If it's not obvious from the name and visually on the map, the Mid-Canada Line is smack across the country, and was truly just a stop gap while construction was underway on more sites further north. The Mid-Canada Line itself was far less sophisticated than the Pinetree Line in terms of construction, without bass support or the like, instead being almost exclusively comprised of single, incredibly tall, antenna used to solely detect if they could hear soviet bombers on their way to knock the red white and blue menace, and not even capable of telling their direction or range. These antenna sites would be connected via a huge directed dish to another site along the line and eventually to a control site where some pants- shitting 18 year old would have to call their boss to say the world was about to end. You don’t again need to be an expert to see that for the time this system was woefully useless, not knowing where your enemy was even slightly until they reached south of you and would appear on the Pinetree line’s radar was a major concern, so before they even started the construction of Mid-Canada, the plans for the final and most fascinating series of installations in the early warning system were being drawn up, the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line.

While it's obvious that the stations were going further and further north, it is hard to understate how extremely remote these sites are now, even less so at the time. The DEW Line was constructed almost exclusively along high arctic cliffs in what was at the time the Yukon and the NWT (and a little in Labrador but they were boring) in Canada and across the top of Alaska, down the Aleutian islands and even on top of the Greenland ice caps (of which are the most fascinating looking, still half buried and abandoned in the ice like oil rigs on land). We barely had the ability to even get heavy construction up to this altitude at the time so large parts of the line are early examples of prefab metal structures especially in arctic areas. Half of the reason I find the early warning lines so fascinating is just the idea that these logistics alone are enough to make my head hurt. But you can’t talk about the DEW Line especially without examining the human factor, these lands despite what the governments might have wanted you to think, were not uninhabited fields of ice perfect to slap a military presence on, but were at the time and still are the traditional and legal lands of the Inuit. The creation of these outposts in the far north has forever changed and imprinted in Inuit cultures, as someone who has worked alongside a good amount of Inuit, especially those who grew up north in settlements (small towns or villages that are self administrative), everyone has a relation to the DEW Line. Some of the biggest cities in the north, especially outside of the Yukon and the western NWT are built around old DEW sites, places like Cambridge Bay, one of the largest towns is still one of the very few places to host an active modern version of a DEW site and as such the local economy is noticeably stronger, more resilient and more “southern” that similar nearby settlements, for god’s sake Cambridge Bay is one of 2 places in all of Nunavut that has a Timmies because of the military that are still up there. The imagery of the north and these monoliths are beautiful, but now the land is toxic. While we have “brought industrialization” to the north, as said by an American general decades ago, we’ve also completely changed northern life forever, very possibly for the worse.

If you want something even more sinister to examine on google earth, you need not go further than to concrete dots that litter almost every state in America, and even in Canada and abroad.

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) was a major military command that was responsible in every way for 2 arms of the American nuclear triad (death by land, sea and air). Dead now thank god since 1992, the SAC was impossibly large, to the point where people who don't know much about it often think it is inflated for a degree of ‘scariness’. The image you can see of single points as well as big clusters is a combination of 3 types of concrete scars, air force bases (primarily runways and bomber commands), surface to air missile (SAM) sites and missile silos with the last having the majority of locations by a mile. The closest to us geographically here in Ottawa were actually Canadian staffed SAM sites, one in North by and one oddly in Mont Tremblant.

If you’ve ever gone skiing at Mont Tremblant, here's a fun fact for you, you were less than probably 20 km away from what was one of the largest nuclear weapon sites in Canada! Thankfully these sites are abandoned now, but back in the day Canada used to operate these SAM BOMARC missiles to intercept soviet bombers on their way to the capital and east coast of the US. You can actually see one of these missiles in person at the back of the air and space museum in the city, but they were a part of what I affectionately refer to as the “explode somewhere up there and pray” doctrine that we as Canadians used to operate under. Thankfully both Canadian sites are relatively without note, being retired in the 90s and actually cleaned up and just now forgotten and rotting bunkers, but this is a pretty uncommon story when you're like me and looking at these sites. In New Jersey, one of these missiles exploded on the ground and polluted a huge region of woodland with weapons grade plutonium, not even being cleaned properly until the 2000s despite the original incident occurring in 1960.

The ruins are not always sitting idle, or even sitting idle and polluting everything around them, some are actively still killing or injuring people despite being deactivated decades ago. In the Denver, Colorado area, the US created a series of 6 sites for Titan I missiles in the 50s but due to their rushed construction in the face of the cold war, they were built shoddily and quickly abandoned in the late 60s. Abandoned so quickly that the air force barely even locked the gate behind them. As a result for decades, teenagers from around Denver, and now youtubers from across the world flock to these early missile fields and explore the silos which are now dangerously decaying and unstable to enter. As a result several people have died over the decades in these sites, and most recently a teenager fell down the rocket exhaust tunnel, 30 feet vertically and sustained some serious injuries. These cold war sites are not just scars to the land but to the living still.

The last visual I really want to leave you with is the “missile fields” of the past. Above, you can see the old missile fields in western Nebraska which I can happily tell you are now deactivated and destroyed. This region alone is only about 150 silos of the previously mentioned roughly 1300 built over the cold war, and all of these and so many more have been wiped away. Every single one of these sites now is nothing more than an oddly coloured patch of corn field. While things are tough and the world is bleak, don’t forget that we as a species are capable of moving past our instruments of war and leaving them in the past. And while sometimes the past will hurt us, and scar us, it’s only a remnant of what it used to be.

Thanks for reading my article! If you enjoyed it, feel free to take a look at some of my other writing at https://incoherencymanifest.beehiiv.com and subscribe if you enjoy it! While not often, sometimes I’ll upload some of my daily(ish) writings there.