The Lab and the Land: Overcoming the Arctic in Cold War Alaska

Abstract

The militarization of Alaska during and after World War II created an extraordinary set of new facilities. But it also reshaped the imaginative role of Alaska as a hostile environment, where an antagonistic form of nature could be defeated with the appropriate combination of technology and training. One of the crucial sites for this reformulation was the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, based at Ladd Air Force Base in Fairbanks. In the first two decades of the Cold War, its employees conducted numerous experiments on acclimatization and survival. The laboratory is now best known for an infamous set of tests involving the application of radioactive tracers to indigenous Alaskans--experiments publicized by post-Cold War panels established to evaluate the tragic history of atomic-era human subject research. But little else has been written about the laboratory's relationship with the populations and landscapes that it targeted for study. This essay presents the laboratory as critical to Alaska's history and the history of the Cold War sciences. A consideration of the laboratory's various projects also reveals a consistent fascination with race. Alaskan Natives were enrolled in experiments because their bodies were understood to hold clues to the mysteries of northern nature. A scientific solution would aid American military campaigns not only in Alaska, but in cold climates everywhere.

Extreme acts

“…When other selves were included, such as the use of Sherpa guides to test amphetamines or of Inuit peoples to study physiological adaptation using radioactive tracers, their inclusion was often on an unequal, and sometimes exploitative basis. 80 Women's bodies, identified as disruptive or inadequate to the task, were simply not studied; at the same time as adaptational physiology asserted the difference of women, it failed to recognise this difference as a potential source of research findings.…”

Blood, race and indigenous peoples in twentieth century extreme physiology

“…Although primarily focused on military intelligence, geopolitical strategy, and geophysical research, FIDS/BAS of necessity also involved research into physiological problems faced by temporary visitors to cold environments, from clothing to infectious diseases to rations. For North America the founding of the Arctic Research Laboratory by the US Navy at Point Barrow in 1947, seems to have been an important starting point for research into acclimatisation, although it mostly focused on fairly basic studies and animal physiology (Hagen 2017 ; Shelesnyak 1948 ); more sophisticated, and then controversial (particularly in the case of radiation experiments on indigenous populations) was the US Army’s Arctic Aeronautical Laboratory, which moved from an unlikely start in Texas to Fairbanks in August 1947 (Farish 2013 ). For Australia the key moment was the forming of Mawson Station—the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE) base—in 1954 (Kawaja 2013 ), while for many other nations it was the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–1958 which acted as the spur to their cold-weather, and specifically Polar, research programmes.…”

The art of parachuting: Embodied geopolitics, aerial aesthetics and dance‐based combat training at Ringway Aerodrome, 1940–1946

“…By this time only one twin‐engine Whitley aircraft and no parachutes had arrived . As little was known in Britain about the technique of dropping troops, coupled with the pressures of operational urgency, the development of this new art of movement progressed almost entirely according to “the trial error principle.” Ringway thus quickly adopted the air of an explorative aerial laboratory, with bodies themselves becoming legitimate sites for research and development (see Farish, ). This paper is interested in those masculine bodily cultures that emerged during the selection and ground training of paratroopers, and the encounters between bodies – often rendered airborne – and experimental syllabi designed to skill recruits in aerial combat.…”