The Cold, Cold War: Rear Admiral Richard Byrd, Antarctic Expeditions, and the Evolution of America’s Strategic Interest in the Polar Regions

Upon its return from a survey of South Pole waters, a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter lands on the icebreaker Northwind during Operation Highjump, a Navy Antarctic Expedition conducted during the Austral summer of 1946–47. In the distance are other ships of Task Force 68. Photo: Wikimedia

The earth’s polar regions have enjoyed a strategic resurgence over the past decade. In the Arctic, as ice caps recede and navigation through the Northwest passage facilitates the projection of commercial and military power, geopolitical confrontations loom on the horizon reminiscent of a bygone Cold War era.¹⁾Forsyth M (January–February 2018) Why Alaska and the Arctic are Critical to the National Security of the United States. Military Review 98(1):113–119; Zukunft P (2018) The Arctic of the Future: Strategic Pursuit or Great Power Miscalculation? Talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 9 May; Breitenbauch H, Kristensen K & Groesmeyer J (2019) Military and Environmental Challenges in the Arctic. Carnegie Europe, 28 November. Indeed, the amount at stake for the United States, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Russia, and now China at the earth’s northern pole has led to a steady escalation of force one pundit dubbed the new “Arctic great game.”²⁾Osborn A (2018) Putin’s Russia in Biggest Arctic Military Push Since Soviet Fall. Reuters, January 30; Seethi K (2021) Russia, the United States, and Churning Arctic Geopolitics. The Arctic Institute, 27 July; Tavenier R (2021) Russia and the Arctic Council in 2021: A New Security Dilemma. Global Risk Insights, February 17. Great power competition in Antarctica, too, is on the rise. There, strategic rivals increasingly assert territorial claims, contend for natural resources, and expand their scientific influence at earth’s southern extreme.³⁾Feiger L & Wilson M (2020) The Countries Taking Advantage of Antarctica During the Pandemic. The Atlantic, 15 May; Buchanan E & Burke R (2021) Strategy and Competition at the Ends of the Earth. Modern War Institute, 6 January; Bateman S (2012) Strategic Competition and Emerging Security Risks: Will Antarctica Remain Demilitarised? In Hemmings A, Rothwell D & Scott K (eds.), Antarctic Security in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge.

These multinational geostrategic operations—both in the Arctic and in Antarctica—are not historically unprecedented. From the time humans began pushing the boundaries of polar exploration in the early twentieth century, concerned nation-states have sought to translate polar presence into strategic advantage. Historically, the earth’s poles housed marine life harvested by the world’s great powers for pelts and oils that “helped grease the wheels that turned the Industrial Revolution.” More recently, scientists have utilized polar data to better understand the earth’s changing global climate. War, too, has been fought across subarctic islands. According to several historians, “World War II was waged partly in the Arctic⁴⁾The war fought through the Arctic during WWII was essentially a tactical “weather war” waged for control of high-latitude meteorological weather stations whose data could predict patterns “affect[ing] crucial operations in the theaters of war in central Europe. See Doel R, Friedman R, Lajus J, Sörlin S & Wråkberg U (2014) Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge—Interwar Era Through the Cold War. Journal of Historical Geography 44:62.…World War III, it was long assumed, would be.”⁵⁾Mulvaney K (2001) At the Ends of the Earth: A History of the Polar Regions. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 7–8.

Though this enduring assumption never materialized, the threat of global war did influence American polar strategic thinking in the early years of the Cold War. As the United States assumed an increasingly inimical posture towards the Soviet Union after World War II, polar experts like renowned naval pilot and polar explorer Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd made American policymakers aware of the pitfalls of ignoring Arctic and Antarctic interests in the nation’s long-term planning. To people like Byrd, “Cold War tensions made the Arctic a strategic region, particularly for national security.”⁶⁾Doel R, Friedman R, Lajus J, Sörlin S & Wråkberg U (2014) Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge—Interwar Era Through the Cold War. Journal of Historical Geography 44:63.

Indeed, the emergence of the United States as a global superpower in the aftermath of World War II and the looming threat of nuclear war with the USSR endowed the polar regions with immediate strategic significance. Though the successful tests of submarine-launched, nuclear-equipped Polaris missiles and development of intercontinental long-range ballistic missiles in the 1960s reduced fears of a Soviet invasion across the Arctic ice, for a brief period in the early Cold War, the U.S. Navy made a concerted effort to push the envelope of polar exploration and prepare itself for such military eventualities.

While most histories of the Cold War’s polar dimensions focus on Arctic developments, this article illustrates the concomitant and symbiotic relationship of American Antarctic expeditions that, it was hoped, would enhance American polar capabilities in the advent of war with the USSR. Spearheading the calls for government-sponsored polar initiatives during the early Cold War, Admiral Byrd’s arguments for developing the American presence in the polar regions—particularly Antarctica—grew more strident as US–Soviet tensions increased. From 1945 until his death in 1957, Byrd’s exhortations led to both successful and abortive government-sponsored Antarctic expeditions—ventures that not only underpinned a decade of American polar security policy, but also initiated a pattern of international scientific collaboration that guided all future civil-military polar initiatives while setting an oft-forgotten precedent for the multinational joint-operations that characterize NATO’s Arctic security policy today.

Richard Byrd and America’s Historical Involvement in the Polar Regions

Though the 1867 purchase of Alaskan territory from Russia jump-started the United States’ strategic interest in the Arctic, the earliest American expeditions north of Canada and Siberia never resulted in territorial claims. After the turn of the century, self-funded expeditions revived public and political fascination in the polar regions. Relying on dog sleds and Inuit expertise, these early explorers slowly pushed farther afield into the Arctic, mapping new territory, testing the limits of human endurance, and gathering scientific data. The earliest claims for reaching the North Pole—one in 1908 and another in 1909 by two different American explorers—were both highly controversial.⁷⁾Doel R, Friedman R, Lajus J, Sörlin S & Wråkberg U (2014) Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge—Interwar Era Through the Cold War. Journal of Historical Geography 44:68. On the other side of the world, British explorers Sir Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott as well as Norway’s Roald Amundsen became household names in the 1910s after leading famous excursions into Antarctica. Their collective success initiated two decades of intermittent research and exploratory expeditions at earth’s extremes.⁸⁾Shackleton was most famous for conducting a daring rescue of his shipmates after their vessel, The Endurance, became trapped in the ice. Scott was credited for first discovering that Antarctica was a continent, reaching the South Pole in January 1912, one month after Amundsen. For more information, see Larson E (2011) An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science. New Haven: Yale University Press; Huntington R (2010) Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

The Great Depression temporarily froze these self-funded polar ventures. However, one American trailblazer pushed the envelope of polar exploration in the interwar era. Having completed the first powered flight over the North Pole in 1926—a feat that earned him the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor—renowned naval aviator Richard E. Byrd channeled his public fame into financing the largest expedition to Antarctica ever attempted. In December 1927, Byrd articulated the significance of his prospective journey: “Man cannot claim mastery of the globe until he conquers the Antarctic continent. It is the last great challenge…down there lies the greatest adventure left in exploring and aviation.”⁹⁾Rose L (2008) The Life of Richard E. Byrd. Columbia: The University of Missouri Press, 215.

Funded by corporate magnates and public figureheads, Byrd conducted his first major Antarctic expedition between 1928 and 1930. The journey’s success reinforced his celebrity status as America’s most famous polar explorer, enabling him to return to the continent for a second expedition from 1933–1935.¹⁰⁾For Byrd’s own account of his second expedition, see Byrd R (1935) Discovery: The Story of the Second Byrd Antarctic Expedition. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. During these expeditions, Byrd established the first permanent American research base on the Ross Ice Shelf (dubbed Little America), became the first individual to fly over the South Pole, named a swath of Antarctic territory after his wife (Marie Byrd Land),¹¹⁾In an obituary prepared after Byrd’s death in 1957 by one of his children, they observed: “Incidentally, one of the [American Antarctic] bases is in the heart of Marie Byrd Land which my Dad discovered and named after his wife and which may be the largest land in the world named after a woman.” Untitled obituary draft (Undated) Box 207, Folder 7399, Admiral Richard E. Byrd Papers, Byrd Polar Research Center Archives, The Ohio State University [hereafter Byrd Papers]. and spent five months manning a remote weather station alone some 100 miles inland, enduring temperatures as low as –60º Fahrenheit as well as life-threatening carbon-monoxide poisoning before an inspired rescue saved his life.¹²⁾Speake J (ed.) (2004) Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia. London: Routledge, 1:153–155; for his own account of his experience manning the remote weather station, see Byrd R (1938) Alone. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Having ushered mechanical Antarctic exploration into the modern era, Byrd leveraged his position in the U.S. Navy and his myriad political connections to win the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who approved Byrd’s idea of using government sponsorship to bolster future expeditions. Byrd’s federal appointment as head of the newly organized United States Antarctic Service in 1938 represented a significant shift in the nation’s strategic valuation of the earth’s poles. With government resources at Byrd’s disposal, the polar regions became aspirational sites of global power-projection, technological, scientific, and military testing grounds, and realms of real and imagined claims of territorial sovereignty.¹³⁾Doel R, Friedman R, Lajus J, Sörlin S & Wråkberg U (2014) Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge—Interwar Era Through the Cold War. Journal of Historical Geography 44:69.

U.S. Navy Antarctic Development Project: Operation Highjump I, 1946–47

In the aftermath of World War II, American strategic planners oriented the nation’s hemispheric defense policy around the dictum that the shortest route to the USSR’s dense industrial and population centers lay over the North Pole. In 1946, the U.S. military initiated the Strategic Air Command (SAC), “whose bombers flew continuous missions along the northern borders of Alaska, Canada and Greenland as a deterrent against Soviet attack.” Greenland, considered by some strategists to be “the world’s ‘largest stationary aircraft carrier’,” housed Thule Air Force Base—a secret facility capable of projecting military power into the Arctic far easier than anywhere on the American mainland. Additional bases were constructed throughout U.S. and Canadian Arctic territory.¹⁴⁾Doel R, Friedman R, Lajus J, Sörlin S & Wråkberg U (2014) Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge—Interwar Era Through the Cold War. Journal of Historical Geography 44:68.

Despite the Arctic’s prominence in American defense planning, policymakers and planners justified America’s presence in Antarctica in similar economic, political, military, and scientific terms. Antarctic expeditions, they argued, could deny foreign use of Antarctic land for military purposes, be used to train naval, engineering, and aviation experts in polar techniques, and become a safe polar laboratory to test valuable minerals and resources. Foremost among these thinkers, Byrd reflected in 1945: “At the moment we do not feel that we need the resources of Antarctica. Tomorrow we may! Today we are not stating our rightful claims to this territory. Tomorrow we may be sorry. Today we could make our holding or rights to them secure at little cost. Tomorrow we might have to pay dearly for them.”¹⁵⁾See “Untitled” and “Rough Draft” (1945) 10 September, Box 206, Folder 7310, Byrd Papers

Washington took note. As the U.S. military expanded its Arctic deterrence efforts, members of the Navy and State Department met to discuss strategic aims for Antarctica. “The establishment of a very definite and aggressive policy of exploration and use in those areas,” they concluded, “[is] considered desirable…by the United States.”¹⁶⁾Rose L (2009) Assault on Eternity: Richard E. Byrd and the Exploration of America, 1946–47. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 41. With the approval of President Truman and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, the Navy began planning the Antarctic Development Project (codenamed Operation Highjump) to be completed between 1946 and 1947.¹⁷⁾Letter, Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd to Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson (1949) 30 August, Box 207, Folder 7345, Byrd Papers. Byrd was appointed to lead the operation.

On December 2, 1946, U.S. Naval Task Force 68—a fleet of three Naval Groups overseen by Admiral Byrd—departed Norfolk, Virginia. Planning to spend two continuous “months of discovery, training, and scientific investigation” in Antarctic territory, the Navy’s force of thirteen ships, twenty-three aircraft, several helicopters, and over four-thousand men constituted the largest Antarctic expedition in history. Moreover, it was the first Navy-led expedition to Antarctic waters in nearly a century.¹⁸⁾Rose (2008) Explorer, 427–30; (1947) Byrd Expedition Return—‘Operation Highjump’ Remarkable Record. The Evening Post, 7 March.

Despite terrible weather conditions that damaged Byrd’s support ships, the expedition succeeded in many of its intended objectives. The Navy successfully maneuvered a “modern fighting fleet in Antarctic waters,” reestablished Little America IV, and completed the jet-assisted (JATO) flight of six R4Ds (Naval C–47 Skytrains) from the deck of an aircraft carrier to an unprepared, snow-surface landing field. Additionally, despite early signs of altitude induced anoxia and temperatures of 40º below zero, Byrd led two epochal flights beyond the south pole into previously unexplored areas. Sixty additional flights produced thousands of hours of film and photography documenting Antarctica’s uncharted coastline, bays, and inland lakes. A battery of tests helped Naval personnel determine optimal cold weather gear, electronics, avionics, radio equipment, medicine, mechanized transport, food storage, cooking techniques, and polar sea and land survival techniques for future polar expeditions. Highly technical helicopter, submarine, carrier, and cruiser navigation through sea ice behind an icebreaker (a vessel Byrd accurately claimed “usher[ed] in a revolutionary period of polar operations”) added to the Highjump’s achievements—to say nothing of the specific weather, biologic, geologic, and topographic tests undertaken during the expedition.¹⁹⁾Rose L (2008) Explorer, 430; “Operation Highjump” (Undated) Box 207, Folder 7345, Byrd Papers.

The One that Got Away: Operation Highjump II, 1949

The success of Operation Highjump prompted strategic planners to earmark the years 1947 to 1950 for the twin goals of ensuring the continuation of “long range preparations for ‘continuity of effort in the Antarctic’” and using gained knowledge to improve the “usableness [sic] and logistic support of Greenland for military operations.”²⁰⁾“Operation Highjump” (Undated) Box 207, Folder 7345, Byrd Papers. It was not long before plans were in the works for another Antarctic Development Project—Operation Highjump II. With the approval of the Chief of Naval Operations, the expedition sought to emphasize polar survival techniques, assess cold-weather equipment, and build on progress made between 1946–47. It was scheduled to depart on October 1, 1949.

Seven months of intensive preparation and fundraising preceded the project’s official Naval review. In the summer of 1949, secretary of the Navy Louis Johnson argued that his peers, “faced with the urgent necessity for economy, agreed that regular fleet training and fleet operations should take precedence over special and less essential requirements.” Acknowledging the good achieved during previous Antarctic expeditions, Johnson remained aware of “the unique position of the Antarctic as a proving ground for cold weather military and naval techniques.”²¹⁾Letter, Admiral M.B. Gardner to Senator Walter F. George (1949) 6 October, Box 206, Folder 7328, Byrd Papers. Some news outlets reported President Truman’s rumored dislike of Admiral Byrd as a reason for Highjump II’s cancellation. See “Too Many Byrds” (1949) 25 August, Box 206, Folder 7330, Byrd Papers. However, the financial backing for Byrd’s second operation failed to materialize. On September 22, 1949—just before its intended departure—Highjump II was cancelled by civilian Undersecretary of the Navy Dan Kimball.²²⁾Letter, Admiral Richard E. Byrd to Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen T. Early (1949) 27 September, Box 206, Folder 7328, Byrd Papers; Rose L (2008) Explorer, 431–32.

Highjump II’s cancellation infuriated Byrd, prompting a barrage of telegrams, memos, and letters to Washington. Convinced civilian policymakers were failing to grasp the security implications of such an expedition, Russia’s successful detonation of its own atomic bomb during the prospective operation’s review only sharpened Byrd’s claim for the need of a more proactive polar national security policy.²³⁾Letter, Admiral Richard E. Byrd to Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen T. Early (1949) 27 September, Box 206, Folder 7328, Byrd Papers; Rose L (2008) Explorer, 431–32. Because a nuclear strike would come over the North Pole, Byrd argued that American strategists now had to consider polar preparedness as vital to national defense. Six of America’s battleships and three of its Essex-class carriers could not fit through the Panama Canal; in the event of a Russian strike on the canal itself, control of the waters between Cape Horn and Antarctica—areas traversed and explored by previous Antarctic expeditions—would be critical for operational maneuverability.²⁴⁾Chief of Naval Operations to Secretary of Defense, “Importance of Operation Highjump to our National Security (1949) 29 August, Box 206, Folder 7331, Byrd Papers.

Byrd believed the government’s cancellation of the Navy’s Antarctic initiatives would incur additional consequences. With over 6,000,000 square miles of land, Byrd claimed Antarctica was “probably the best [cold weather] proving grounds in the world for the testing of guided missiles.”²⁵⁾Letter, Admiral Richard E. Byrd to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Louis E. Denfield (1948) 7 August, Box 206, Folder 7328, Byrd Papers; “Importance of Operation Highjump to our National Security (1949) Byrd Papers. He argued the USSR would procure uranium deposits for their own weapons in the Antarctic.²⁶⁾Lawrence D (Undated) “Antarctica Expedition Cancellation Brings Flood of Rumors,” Box 206, Folder 7330, Byrd Papers. Conversely, he believed the poles could provide America with the coal and oil reserves necessary to fuel a long-term war without relying on foreign powers in the event of material shortages. Finally, he articulated that more efficient polar radar and weather stations would facilitate land, sea, and air warfare “over the top of the world.”²⁷⁾“Importance of Operation Highjump to our National Security (1949) Byrd Papers.

Byrd did not mince words in his defense of Highjump II. “As I see it,” he wrote to the Secretary of the Navy, “insofar as preparedness of our own forces is concerned, we have to assume that we may have war with Russia.” In the case Byrd’s presupposition came true, he argued there would be hundreds of detached units in the Arctic, each expected to possess the highly technical knowledge of polar travel both on foot and in mechanized vehicles.²⁸⁾Letter, Admiral Richard E. Byrd to Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews (1949) 20 September, Box 206, Folder 7328, Byrd Papers. Frustrated by parochial American strategic polar planning confined to the Alaskan theater of operations, he argued that with the technological inroads made during Highjump I, the use of Greenland’s ice cap for military and civil occupation was no longer a pipedream.

With research conducted during Highjump II, glacial highways could be developed for logistics support with improved surface transport equipment; extreme weather missions would simulate “war-time operations and conditions”; and pilots would learn to make forced landings in Arctic conditions. Testing military gear in controlled cold-weather conditions was not enough; long-term polar projects were necessary to develop the “ways and means of carrying out necessary operations in the Arctic.”²⁹⁾Draft, “Presentation to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the Value of Operation Highjump II to National Defense (Undated) Box 206, Folder 7331, Byrd Papers. “None of us wants to take a chance on unnecessarily losing thousands of lives,” Byrd warned, “I urge you in the strongest terms not to allow to be thrown away months of preparation and the large quantity of cold weather technical equipment that has been assembled.”³⁰⁾Letter, Admiral Richard E. Byrd to Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews (1949) 20 September, Box 206, Folder 7328, Byrd Papers. The Navy moved on.

By 1951, Byrd characterized the military’s stance toward polar preparedness as one of “wide scale abandonment as compared with the greatly increased activities of the Russians.” From a military standpoint, he wrote, it was “shocking.”³¹⁾Memorandum, Admiral Richard E. Byrd to Colonel McKinley (1951) 23 March, Box 207, Folder 7346, Byrd Papers. Still, the military’s departure from Antarctic Development Projects in the early 1950s did not represent a wholesale neglect of polar security; strands of Byrd’s thinking were adopted by the national security establishment in various ways—albeit mostly in the Arctic.

By the 1950s, the United States and Canada began collaborating in continental defense by sharing Arctic research and scientific data. Military-funded collegiate programs furnished solutions to challenges in transpolar Arctic warfare. Graduate students from these programs staffed the first American ice island research station built in 1952. The Navy continued precedents set by Operation Highjump I, monitoring polar sea ice conditions and conducting year-round polar weather forecasting. Experts began predicting ice-free Arctic summers—a harbinger of modern climate deterioration—and warned of future conditions that would fundamentally alter the “whole economic and strategic structure of the country.”³²⁾Doel R, Friedman R, Lajus J, Sörlin S & Wråkberg U (2014) Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge—Interwar Era Through the Cold War. Journal of Historical Geography 44:70. Highjump II was off the table, but the U.S. military maintained its polar presence.

Continuing Byrd’s “All-out Assault on Antarctica”

Byrd passed away in March 1957—ironically, a time when “the White House commitment to investigating the Arctic environment had reached an all-time high.”³³⁾Doel R, Friedman R, Lajus J, Sörlin S & Wråkberg U (2014) Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge—Interwar Era Through the Cold War. Journal of Historical Geography 44:70. In the wake of Stalin’s death in 1953, the resolution of the Korean War, the unification of Soviet-bloc countries in the Warsaw Pact, and West Germany’s admittance into NATO came to demand the attention of civilian and military officials. Lacking the economic means to prosecute a joint Arctic-Antarctic polar strategy on the level Byrd envisioned, polar affairs nevertheless remained a long-term, peripheral issue.

Military and civilian scientific collaboration characterized America’s polar initiatives in the 1950s. Worries about America’s northern frontier led to the implementation of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line in 1954, “the most advanced early warning network ever attempted, stretching from Alaska to Greenland.”³⁴⁾Doel R, Friedman R, Lajus J, Sörlin S & Wråkberg U (2014) Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge—Interwar Era Through the Cold War. Journal of Historical Geography 44:70–71. For more on Cold War projects in Alaska, see Farish M (March 2013) The Lab and the Land: Overcoming the Arctic in Cold War Alaska. Isis 104(1): 1–29. Concurrently, before his death, plans were devised for what became Admiral Byrd’s final act—the organization of Navy Task Force 43 to support international scientific efforts in preparation for the International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1955–1956.³⁵⁾“Chronology of Events During Operation Deep Freeze” (September 1954–April 1960) Box 207, Folder 7365, Byrd Papers. Departing for Antarctica one last time in December 1955 as part of “Operation Deep Freeze I,” Byrd and his men laid the groundwork for future naval support of American Antarctic scientific operations by constructing three permanent research bases and passing their polar knowledge on to a new generation of civilian scientists and Navy personnel.³⁶⁾Byrd R (1957) Antarctica: The Last Frontier: The Annual Report of the Officer in Charge, United States Antarctic Programs, Fiscal Year 1956. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, located in Box 207, Folder 7357, Byrd Papers.

The first International Geophysical Year ushered in a new age of collaborative multinational polar research that has continued unabated through the present day. This “All-out Assault on Antarctica,” as National Geographic called it, set in motion an annual tradition of collaborative polar scientific research.³⁷⁾Byrd R (August 1956) All-out Assault on Antarctica. National Geographic Magazine 110(2): 141–179. By the time IGY 1957–8 came around, the event had become a “‘scientific Olympics of sorts’, involving 60,000 scientists…from 67 countries in a worldwide enterprise of data collection, analysis, and exchange.”³⁸⁾Collis C & Dodds K (2008) Assault on the Unknown: The Historical and Political Geographies of International Geophysical Year (1957–8). Journal of Historical Geography 34: 555. Significantly, from the time Byrd reestablished American contact with Antarctica in 1955, there has been a continuous American presence on the continent ever since.

As geopolitical tensions throughout the earth’s polar regions continue to build, the strategic questions of Byrd’s day remain strikingly relevant. While military, economic, and political competition in the Arctic has grown dramatically in recent decades, the effects of climate change and the growing rivalry between the United States, China, and Russia has once more transformed Antarctica into a strategic frontier worthy of renewed attention. Recently, General Charles Q. Brown, commander of Pacific Air Forces, noted the need for additional polar icebreakers, equipment, and training as “Antarctic competition will soon resemble the United States’ Rivalry with China and Russia in the North Pole.”³⁹⁾Espach R & Samaranayake N (2020) Antarctica is the New Arctic: Security and Strategy in the Southern Ocean. CNA, 17 March. Were he alive today, Admiral Richard Byrd would certainly have agreed.

Today’s brewing tensions in the Arctic and Antarctica are nothing new. Rather, they are continuations of early Cold War dynamics—old frontiers invested with new strategic importance as geopolitical (and increasingly, climatological) realities change. As such, understanding our present polar security policy today hinges on a knowledge of its past; indeed, our modern focus on international scientific collaboration, multinational joint-readiness exercises, harnessing the polar region’s natural resources, and mastering its transportation routes all originated in Admiral Byrd’s postwar push for polar preparedness. His subsequent involvement in shaping Arctic security policy by advocating for government-sponsored Antarctic research expeditions attests to the interwoven nature of both poles. “We go South to learn how to conquer the north polar areas, militarily,” Byrd wrote, “and how to cope with the severe weather conditions of the long night.”⁴⁰⁾“Importance of Operation Highjump II to our National Security” (1949) Byrd Papers. His words serve as a timely reminder that strategic competition at one end of the earth is almost always intricately bound to the other.

Carson Teuscher is a Ph.D. Candidate specializing in Military History at Ohio State University and a 2020–21 Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow in Grand Strategy at Notre Dame’s International Security Center (NDISC).