Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line

A series of radar installations, built in the Arctic Circle in the 1950s, that were meant to serve as a warning system and deterrent to a nuclear attack by the communist Soviet Union against the United States and Canada.

The DEW Line—DEW is an acronym for Distant Early Warning—was a series of 63 integrated radar and communications systems stretching 3,000 miles from the northwest Alaskan coast to the eastern shore of Baffin Island near Greenland. Built roughly along the 66th parallel, most DEW Line installations were about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, some 1,400 miles from the North Pole.

These sites, built on remote Arctic tundra, were manned around the clock to detect any approach by Russian bombers or intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The DEW Line was coordinated with several similar operations, such as the Pinetree Early Warning Line, the Mid-Canada Line, and the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific Barrier, as well as air and sea patrols and radar stations in Iceland, Great Britain, the Faeroe Islands in the North Atlantic, and Greenland.

The DEW Line and other early-warning installations were effective deterrents against Soviet aggression during the Cold War period. The Soviets were [Page 213]cognizant that any air strike launched by them would be detected early enough so that the United States could destroy most of their bombers or ICBMs. The Soviets were aware they would suffer considerable retaliation by the U.S. Strategic Air Command, whose airborne nuclear-armed bombers were coordinated with the Early Warning System and various strategic assigned targets within the Soviet Union.

The DEW Line grew out of a study in the early 1950s by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who found that the United States and Canada were vulnerable to a Soviet air attack from across the North Pole. The U.S. communications company AT&T was awarded the contract to build the line, an effort that involved more than 25,000 people to construct radar sites, roads, towers, airplane hangars, residences, and antennae in the most sparsely populated region of North America.

Construction began in December 1954 using military and civilian airlifts, sealifts, and rail to transport workers and material to build the radar installations as well as the permanent settlements adjacent to each of the main sites. Construction of all 63 installations and their communication network, known as White Alice, was completed on July 31, 1957, and the system was turned over to the U.S. Air Force. The main stations included self-contained communities, complete with electricity, water, heating facilities, houses, work buildings, recreation areas, roads, and airstrips.

By the mid-1980s, aging facilities, improved technologies (such as the Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS), and advanced detection systems, together with the diminished threat of Soviet aggression in the waning years of the Cold War, led to the demise of the older early-warning systems, such as the DEW Line. In 1985, the DEW Line system was replaced by the North Warning System, and many of the original DEW Line sites were abandoned. By 2008, the Canadian Department of the Interior is expected to complete a $250 million cleanup project of its former DEW Line sites with an eye toward recycling the material used to build the sites and developing Arctic tourism.

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