The DEW Line Years: Voices from the Coldest Cold War

By Frances Jewel Dickson

Nonfiction: The Arctic, Canadian History
214 pages, Includes Photographs
$19.95, 6"x9" Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-895900-87-3
ISBN-10: 1-895900-87-5
(Available in April 2007)

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The Arctic seems an unlikely theatre of war. Yet in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, thousands of young men from various countries were recruited to build and operate a complex radar system across the Arctic Circle from Alaska across Canada to Greenland.

The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, as the mammoth radar fence was known, was spawned from American fear that Soviet bomber aircraft might penetrate Canadian Arctic airspace and drop nuclear weapons on American cities and military bases.

This books tells the stories of those DEW Liners who worked in the hostile, remote climate of the North. Survival was a daily preoccupation in a land where outdoor temperatures can dip to minus 50 degrees with winds exceeding one hundred miles an hour while blinding snowfall whiteouts make vision impossible.

The stories of the DEW Liners reveal real danger here - not from Soviet bombers but from close encounters with polar bears, job-related accidents and airplane crashes, such as the one that claimed the author's father. There are, however, also tales of fun, practical jokes, comradery and human kindness that boosted the morale of those stationed in the far north.

The veterans of this northern experience, whose narratives have been collected by the author, reveal all about their sentinel role in that tense time half a century ago when they dedicated their lives to helping to prevent nuclear war.



Frances Jewel Dickson, born in St. Hyacinthe, Quebec, has worked for the federal government, writing human resources policy for the Speaker of the House of Commons. She has lived and worked in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax. She now lives in East LaHave, Nova Scotia, where she has been researching this, her first book.