The DEW Line at 65: Future unclear for the North's aging radar sites

Strictly speaking, the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line — a 4,800-kilometre-long radar network stretching across Canada's Northern territories and Alaska — is now but a distant early memory of Cold War anxiety.

Many of the 60-plus radar sites, built on the northern tundra in the 1950s, have long since gone the way of so many other Cold War relics around the world, abandoned and dismantled. Others were rebuilt to form parts of the successor North Warning System.

This July will mark 65 years since the first phase of the DEW Line became operational. The concept behind it was straightforward — it would detect bombers if Soviet Russia were to launch a nuclear attack on North America via the shortest route, over the Arctic. It was to act as a deterrent.

Within a few years it was largely obsolete. Some of the radar sites were upgraded in the 1980s to be part of the North Warning System, now jointly operated by the U.S. and Canada.

But that system is aging too. And with renewed anxiety over Russian aggression, and North America's security and surveillance, there are questions about whether a string of decades-old radar sites have much to offer anymore.

Is the DEW Line — or what's left of it —  finally done?

"I think the North Warning System as it exists today will be replaced rather than renovated," said Adam Lajeunnesse, an Arctic security analyst at St. Francis Xavier University. 

"And what it will be replaced by is the big question."

The federal government has promised some major investments to modernize NORAD but has not offered any specifics yet. Defence Minister Anita Anand recently told CBC's The House that a plan was in the works to increase defence capabilities in the Arctic and North America.

Asked about an Ottawa Citizen report saying Canada would spend $1 billion on a new radar system in Southern Canada, Anand did not confirm it. 

"Canada is doing its part in terms of modernizing NORAD," she said. "I will have more to say on this very soon."

Construction of the DEW Line, conceived by the U.S. Air Force as a series of manned radar stations scattered in a line "twisting across arctic wastes" (in the language of the U.S. military documents) began in 1954 with the agreement of Canada. The U.S. paid for most of it, while Canada took pains to publicize it as a joint effort.   

Building it was no picnic, but considering the harsh climate and remoteness of the chosen sites along the 68th parallel, it was done within a remarkably short period of time. 

It was similar in that way to the Alaska Highway, another feat of military engineering from a decade earlier. And like the Alaska Highway, the DEW Line permanently altered the culture of the North as much as the landscape.