The Cold, Cold War

Rear Admiral Richard Byrd, Antarctic Expeditions, and the Evolution of America’s Strategic Interest in the Polar Regions, 1945–1960

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 earth’s 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 Richard E. 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.

Published by The Arctic Institute on November 2, 2021. Read here.