Canada under the DEWline

Abstract

The Distant Early Warning Line (DEWline) marks the intersection of military-­technological and cultural discourses. It was both a radar system and a conceptual way-station in the fraught history of Canada’s Arctic, a punctuation point between the utopian socialism of F.R. Scott’s “Laurentian Shield, the “near-future warnings” of Marshall McLuhan, and the ecological anxiety of our contemporary North. Further, the DEWline exists at the intersection of national, civilian space—it is, after all, designed for defence—and the totalities of the Cold War. As such, the DEWline is productive, challenging, and elusive. It is a measure of both weaponized information and nuclear anxiety, as well as a literal contact zone between what Rachel Woodward calls militarism’s “moral order” and the cultural work of a critic like McLuhan or a poet like Scott. It is also one way in which civilians can understand how militarism’s discourses and ­epistemologies construct landscapes and subjects far beyond the range of its radar.