approach to linking nature and technology, however, required an additional .... navy was anxious to secure any advantage
lournal /" Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes
Nature, Technology, and Nation Edward Jones-Imhotep This essay explores the early cold-war attempts of the Radio Physics Laboratory (RPL) to link shortwave radio disruptions to the unique geophysical phenomena of northern regions. Born out of prewar traditions of geophysical research and apphed to the communication demands of the Second World War, this approach placed the laboratory in the midst of wider post-war programs to assert territorial and cognitive sovereignty over the Canadian North as a way of empowering and defining the nation. The laboratory's approach to linking nature and technology, however, required an additional act of sovereignty—a reform of the practices of geophysical research on which those associations depended. The resulting arguments from the laboratory echoed with broader post-war understandings of how the North and technology were intertwined. Le present article examine les premieres tentatives du Laboratoire de radiophysiquc (RPL) pendant la guerre froide de relier les interruptions des radios en ondes courtes au phenomene g^ophysique unique des regions du Nord. Issue de traditions de recherches geophysiques precedant la guerre et appliquee aux demandes en matiere de communications de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, cette demarche pla^a le laboratoire au milieu de programmes plus vastes apros la guerre pour faire valoir la souverainete territorialc et cognitive sur le Nord canadicn afin d'habiliter et de definir la nation. La demarche du laboratoire visant a relier la nature avec la technologie necessita toutefois une mesure additionnelle de souverainete—unc reforme des pratiques dc recherche gcophysiquc dont ces associations dependaient. Les observations issues du laboratoire ont aide a mieux comprendre apres la guerre les rapports entre le Nord et la technologie.
I
n the closing days of November 1967, Glenn Gould^the renowned Canadian concert pianist turned radio producer and philosopher of technology—scrambled to pull together the first and most famous installment of his Solitude Trilogy, a sound documentary entitled Tiw Idea of North. The aim of the documentary was to explore views of the Canadian North (and of the solitude that Gould believed it imposed) through the experiences and perceptions of five "outsiders" who had confronted the region directly. For weeks, Gould had struggled to select only the most apt segments from hours of interview tape. Now desperate to fit his material into the hour-long format, he hit upon the idea of layering fragments of conversation simultaneously upon one another, fading them in and out, so that ideas, as well as sounds, might play
Volume 38 • No. 3 • (Automne 2004 Fall)
Edward jones-lmhotep
counterpoint.' Anxious that the format might prove unsettling to his listeners, Gould introduced two narrative devices: he asked his listenei s to imagine the competing and reinforcing voices as elements of scattered and overlapping conversations taking place on a railway car, travelling from Winnipeg to Churchill, 1,000 miles north, on the shores of Hudson's Bay; and he implored his audience to heed the words of his de facto narrator for the documentary, Wally Maclean— a retired surveyor who had travelled this very railway line for many years and whose experience would help guide listeners on how best to c^btain an "idea of North." Against the steady percussion of train wheels striking breaks in the rail, Maclean himself introduced an anonymous and seemingly incidental character around which to structure his own narrative: an imaginary, young, lone government researcher travelling north to Churchill, to study the northern lights. It is the world of this anonymous figure that interests me here. My motivation is historical: such people existed. Maclean's imaginary figure was drawn from life, imaginatively sketched from the steady stream of technicians and scientists who travelled to Churchill, often by train, in the opening years of the Cold War to study the aurorae. Where did they come from? What business did functionaries of the state have in the seemingly ethereal realms of auroral physics? How did their work figure in the broader attempts to refashiion the post-war nation? The scientists that underlay Maclean's narrative were, almost to a man (they were exclusively men), employees of the Canadian government's Radio Physics Laboratory (RPL), a small research laboratory on the outskirts of Ottawa with roots in wartime code-breaking, counter-intelligence and anti-submarine warfare. In the decade after the war, the laboratory's goal was to extend reliable shortwave radio transmissions to the vast, sparsely populated, and strategically crucial Canadian North. It souglit to carry out that task by linking the peculiar geophysical phenomena of high northern latitudes—auroral displays, magnetic storms, ionospheric disturbances—to the often severe high-freqtiency radio dismptions that plagued communication circuits throughout Canada. The aim of the laboratory, in short, was to link nature and technolog;/ with a view to securing the nation. For decades, scholars have treated the relations between nature and technology in Canada as oppositional. Nature (they have argued)—whether instantiated in muskeg or granite, in hostile climate or impossible terrain—has opposed technology; and technology, for its part—whether realized in railways or telegraphs, shortwave radios or communications satellites—has enabled the tentative conquests of a harsh, unforgiving, and expansive northern nature. In doing so, technology has provided the conditions for the possibility of the nation.^ Against this view of the conquest of nature through technology, others have argued for a different set of oppositions. The narratives of conquest are, in
Journal o/" Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes
this view, shot through with subjectivity. They are built upon a homogenized and mythologized understanding of northern nature as hostile, frigid, and barren; and as such, the argument continues, they do violence to the objective reality of isotherms, microclimates, and treelines captured by the systematic investigations of modern science.' Both of those views figure partly in this story. For the members of RPL, nature diti oppose reliable communications; and scientists and technicians at Churchill and elsewhere did struggle to lay out what they saw as an authentic (if circumscribed) natural order of the North. For all their force, however, each narrative misses a crucial point. Placing technology and nature in binary opposition overlooks the ways in which each of those categories has historically been used to define the other; and stressing the disjuncture between an imagined North and an objective reality threatens to overlook the ways in which the "ideas of North"—visions of a remote and isolated region like the ones at work in Gould's documentary—were in fact underwritten by the assertions of science.' The aim of the Radio Physics Laboratory was to link shortwave radio disruptions to the unique geophysical phenomena of northern regions. Bom out of prewar traditions of geophysical research and applied to the desperate communication demands of the Second World War, that approach placed the laboratory in the midst of wider post-war programs to assert territorial and cognitive sovereignty over the Canadian North as a way of empowering and defining the nation.'' To carry through its program, however, RPL had to assert an additional sovereignty—a reform of the practices of geophysical research that would allow nature and technology to be linked. Far from opposing one another, then, nature and technology were mutually constitutive in the work of RPL. The act of articulating their interconnections was not straightforward or inevitable, but contingent and problematic; and the relations that resulted did not oppose wider cultural associations, but rather buttressed them. Over the course of what follows, then, I would like to raise the members of RPL, their investigations, and their practices from the level of subtext to that of protagonists. I want to explore how the interrelations between communications, solitude, and the idea of North—the very core of Gould's project—rested crucially with them and with their work. 1 want to begin getting at how these workers helped articulate the relations presupposed by Gould's project and by so many others in post-war Canada. Finally, I want to understand how the act of articulation—the sum of the practices that helped establish those powerful symbolic relations—was itself a problematic site of tension over sovereignty and identity in the opening decade of the Cold War. In order to do that, we must begin with the conditions that motivated the future members of RPL to bring nature and technology together in the first place.
Edward Jones-lmhotep
Northern Communications Nature, Technology, and the North Atlantic The roots of the Radio Physics Laboratory lay in the technological demands of war. By the late spring of 1942, the Battle of the Atlantic had reached its most desperate phase yet. While British code-breakers at Bletchley Park scrambled to keep up with changes in the Enigma code—the cipher used to encrypt top-secret telecommunications of the Nazi command—"wolf packs" of German U-boats commenced their crippling attacks on Allied convoys in the North Atlantic. The expansion of the theatres of war following the entry of the United States in late 1941 threatened to stretch AUied maritime forces even thinner. The Royal Canadian Navy had scrambled to provide support where it could; having contributed escorts to shepherd convoys through the perilous "mid-Atlantic gap" early in the war, the navy began in early 1942 to focus its thin resources on a critical technical dimension of the conflict." Since 1939, military radio operators had reported severe disruptions, often complete blackouts, in the shortwave radio circuits that criss-crossed the North Atlantic. Known since the 1920s and documented throughout the 1930s, the disruptions now wreaked havoc on wartime radio and direction-finding circuits in the region, thwarting naval telecommunications and facilitating the work of German U-boat commanders. To help address the problem, the navy had assembled in 1941 a small research group at its Ottawa headquarters. Housed within Section 6 of the navy's Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC/6)—a unit concerned (like its British counterpart) with code-breaking, counter-intelligence and anti-submarine warfare—the group had been charged with intercepting German radio transmissions in the high-frequency range and with potentially identifying the location of enemy submarines in the process.' In early 1942, with the situation in the North Atlantic growing desperate, the navy was anxious to secure any advantage it could; it expanded OIC/6's activities to include all questions of radio propagation in the vicinity of the auroral zone." Under the direction of Frank Davies, a Welsh emigre attached to British intelligence early in the war and later seconded to the navy from the National Research Council, OIC/6 began tackling problems of communications, detection, and direction-finding in the North Atlantic by mounting the first systematic Canadian studies of the ionosphere—the ionized regions of the upper atmosphere that reflect high-frequency radio waves, making shortwave telecommunications possible. The path to reliable radio, Davies and his unit would argue, required a scientific excursion through the geophysics of high northern latitudes."
[ournal of Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes
Northern Communications and the Order of Nature Davies's background and interests in atmospheric phenomena are crucial to understanding his group's approach to the problems of reliable radio. Davies had come to ionospheric research through an abiding interest in meteorology.'" Educated as a physicist, his professional training in meteorology had taken place in a mode of natural investigation that harkened back to what Susan Faye Cannon has called "Humboldtian science"—the investigation of widespread interrelated natural phenomena through geographically dispersed precision measurements, synoptic studies, careful mapping, and a preference for field research over the "sterile accumulation of insulated facts" that characterized the laboratory (1978, 81). Fields like terrestrial magnetism, geology, meteorology, hydrology, oceanography, and solar investigation had provided the basis for this new form of professional science (so crucial to navigation, commerce, and empire in the first half of the nineteenth century) before ceding some of its professional and political status to the laboratory. Throughout the early twentieth century, however, this mode of science still held enormous appeal and provided a model for young scientists like Davies. In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, Davies served on a number of scientific expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic, aiding meteorologists and chief scientists in their investigations of ice-crevasse temperatures and crystal structure formations, and carrying out the magnetic, auroral, and ionospheric observations that fascinated him. Following a posting as director of the Carnegie Geophysical Observatory in Huancayo, Peru, in the late 1930s, he joined the National Research Council in the early years of the Second World War and was eventually attached to OIC/6 (Davies n.d.). What linked Davies's researches across three continents and two poles was an intense interest in the geophysics and meteorology of extreme environments. "Obscure and exceptional conditions," in Davies's words, fascinated him (Canadian Radio Wave Propagation Committee [CRWPC] 1947, 7). His interest in geophysical measurements and atmospheric observations would stay with him all his life. Long after his professional duties had turned administrative, careful meteorological notes on temperature, wind properties, and precipitation would find their way into his personal diaries. His commitment to geophysical investigations as a means of improving communications after the war would perplex and sometimes enrage his military overseers, who came to see the post-war Radio Physics Laboratory as an academic luxury—an organization engaged in basic research, and therefore a purely scientific establishment rather than a defensive unit." In the spring of 1942, however, with naval authorities desperate for any advantage against the U-boat threat, Davies was enlisted to
Edward |ones-lmhotep
turn his knowledge of aurora and geophysics towards the problem of fractured radio communications in North Atlantic waters. Using ionospheric investigations to improve wartime radio communications was by no means unique to OlC/6. Aircraft disasters in Europe early in the war had led to the creation of ionospheric laboratories in Britain and Australia; the Nazi Command had used alliances and early victories to set up a network of ionospheric stations providing long-, medium-, and short-range radio forecasts for its navy (Dellinger and Smith 1948, 258; Pestre 1997, 187). The approach of Davies and his group, however, emphasized the physical and the causal, rather than the statistical and the correlative. Whereas most investigations sought to correlate statistical data on the ionosphere with statistical data on radio reception conditions, OIC/6 aimed at "understanding the phenomena" by investigating more closely the geophysical processes responsible for ionospheric formation and dynamics (Meek 1969, 4). The thrust of i:he approach was captured in a secret document entitled "The Application of Ionospheric Measurements" and circulated confidentially within the Canadian military in late 1944. Written with all the urgency of the wartime context, the report gave military officials a general overview of the role of ionospheric data in reliable shortwave radio. In its structure and substance the document characterized the approach of Davies's group. Less than a third of the way through its 36 pages, following truncated discussions of wave motion and ionospheric propagation, the document presented its readers with a view of the atmosphere in cross-section (fig. 1). Starting at the earth's surface and moving up through the troposphere and stratosphere, the document sketched out tlie various ionospheric layers—the D, E, and F regions. In the midst of the electron plasma, Davies and his group situated two crucial geophysical phenomena: cosmic rays, represented as particles showering through the upper ionosphert:; and the aurora borealis, the northern lights, believed to be associated with (if n(3t responsible for) radio blackouts and shortwave disruptions throughout the northern hemisphere. Within the context of wartime ionospheric investigations, the OIC/6 illustration was not a generic translocal representation of atmospheric stnicture. Rather, it was part of a still-speculative and highly circumscribed natural order of high northern latitudes—a physical and conceptual ordering of geophysical phenomena that years of observations and geophysical studies had thought to be implicated in radio propagation near the auroral zone. Weaving back and forth between this speculative geophysics and its likely effects on radio propagation, Davies and his colleagues arrived at the communications order that resulted (fig. 2), the spatial ordering of shortwave radio disruptions that
10
journal y/" Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes
• • • • • •
• • • • • • * • • • • " % *
V—**
THE
RESIOW
op THE
Figure 1: The Regions of the Atmopshere (1944). The illustration shows the various regions of the ionosphere—D, E, Fl, F2—and locates cosmic rays (shown as the shower emanating from upper right) and the auroral tights (shown throughout the ionospheric regions). Source: Canadian Radio Wave Propagation Committee 1944. Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada.
11
Edward Jones-lmhotep
ftm fVoirtrioii w Nannat Hcnamtu — liujtrujm
Auiou - A«u(rnm Zmcs.
Figure 2: Rorfio wave absorption in the Northern Hemisphere (1943). The polar-proiection map itluatrates the spatial extent of shortwave radio disruptions. Note the extetisioti of the zone south into Canada. Source: Davies Papers. Courtesy of Communications Research Centre.
pointed to the cause of troubles in the North Atlantic, even as it implied that Canadian radio circuits would suffer these disruptions more frequently and more seriously than any other nation in the world. In 36 pages, Davies and his staff put forward a compelling argument for the link hetween reliability of northern radio communications and the geophysical peculiarity of northern regions, and thus for how and why nature and technology
12
Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes
came together so problematically for Allied ships and planes in the North Atlantic. In particular, the report emphasized two key points that Davies would place at the centre of his arguments for the creation and goal of the Radio Physics Laboratory after the war: first, that disruptions in radio phenomena in northern regions were linked to unique and characteristically northern geophysical phenomena (aurorae, magnetic storms, and ionospheric turbulence); and second; that because of its northern character (as defined by these geophysical phenomena), Canada was in a unique position to contribute to the investigation of northern geophysics and the solution of shortwave radio problems.'- In this way, the document pointed beyond the immediately crucial but narrow technical concerns of the North Atlantic to the national and International importance that Davies would claim for his research after the war; and it signalled a focus on the intersections of nature and technology that would characterize the work of his group for the next two decades. The Laboratory and the Nation Reclaiming the North—Radio, Science, and Sovereignty What carried OIC/6's research over into peacetime was the way it engaged two crucial sets of anxieties about the Canadian North in the mid-1940s. The first were a set of long-standing concerns over territorial control in the North and the place of science and technology in asserting that control. The technological focus of Davies's group—its emphasis on the improvement of radio in northern latitudes—and its scattered field stations made its research useful in establishing territorial sovereignty over the North. Its scientific focus—its emphasis on investigating the natural order of the northern regions—placed it at the centre of broader programs to control the North in cognitive, as well as territorial, terms." In doing so, its work became central in the efforts to use northern knowledge to refashion the post-war nation. It was one of the great ironies of the Second World War that the region so many identified with the prospects and identity of Canada was, in fact, filled with Americans. By June 1943, an estimated 43,000 US military personnel and civilians were in northern Canada, sent to help build much of the infrastructure of the northeast and northwest staging routes (Grant 1988, 125). Their efforts left the region dotted with airfields, weather stations, supply roads, and military bases, raising questions within the Canadian government about US intentions and Canadian impotence. The post-war situation looked similarly unpromising. With the looming threat of Soviet attacks across the pole and uncertainty about the future of US bases in Greenland, American intelligence reports asserted that
13
Edward |ones-lmhotep
the US would defend its interests in the North with or without Canadian consent, leading Prime Minister Mackenzie King to speculate that "the long range policy of the Americans is to absorb Canada" (Pickergill and Foster 1970, 219). The most comprehensive attempts to assert Canadian sovereignty in the North were mounted by a small but influential group of former academics (Mackenzie King called them "the intelUgentsia") (Owram 1986, 256). Centralist and interventionist in their outlook, heavily concentrated in the Department of External Affairs, the group responded to anxieties about the late-war North by attempting to weave US infrastructure projects into a vision of a "New North" that would underwrite Canada's post-war autonomy (Grant 1988, 52, 120-210). The leading figure in those efforts was the ubiquitous Hugh Keenleyside— wartime undersecretary of External Affairs, secretary of the Canadian section of the Permanent Joint Defence Board, and later deputy ministt^r of Mines and Resources.'^ Keenleyside shared Mackenzie King's concern that (Canada might be cutting its ties with Britain only to be absorbed by the United States. After all, he quipped, Canada had "not gained independence from London in order to relinquish it to Washington" (qtd. in Grant 1988, 191). Colleagues like Escott Reid stressed the cultural role of the North for the post-war nation, "the possible national interest to be served by making the development cif the North an inspiring and somewhat romantic national objective for the people of Canada" (qtd. in Grant 1988, 127). Keenleyside, however, placed the North at the heart of Canada's post-war political and economic independence from both Britain and the United States. Waxing historical, Keenleyside envisioned a new geopolitical epoch taking shape; "What the Aegean Sea was to classical antiquity, what the Mediterranean was to the Roman world, what the Atlantic Ocean was to the expanding Europe of Renaissance days, the Arctic Ocean is becoming to the world of aircraft and atomic power" (qtd. in Grant 1988, 210). In Keenleyside's plan, US infrastructure projects would be purchased after the war; expanded mining and petroleum operations would help underwrite Canadian economic expansion; and administrative, educational, and social reforms would bring the emerging welfare state to the northern regions and their residents while asserting Canada's administrative and political jurisdiction over the region (Grant 1988, 199-200). Because of its ability to transmit signals over enormous distances, the technology of shortwave radio was crucial to Keenleyside's visions. The shortwave station at Baker Eake, for example, transmitted streams of scientific data— weather reports, ionospheric observations, auroral data, and radio reception conditions—interspersed with Air Force radio traffic, communications for the RCMP, and commercial traffic for trappers, miners, and residents of the town
14
lournal o/" Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes
(Fraser 1949). The Inuit and other Native peoples would soon make the technology integral to their life and culture." What was more, the electromagnetic waves themselves soon took on a symholic force. Figure 3 illustrates the stakes in the mid-1950s. The map formed part of a doaiment submitted hy the Yukon territorial government to the Royal Commission on Broadcasting, which had been created primarily to draft policies that would govern the newly expanded CBC. The arrow5 sweeping into the Yukon and labeled USA and USSR did not depict invading military forces {though, in the minds of many, they just as well might have). Instead, exploiting military cartographic conventions in which the breadth of arrows represented the strength of troop deployments, the map illustrated the source and reception quality of shortwave radio broadcasts. The report explained, While the Yukon has been neglected by Canadian radio, it is not only the United States which has, unconsciously, stepped into the breach. The regular broadcasts of the Soviet North are widely heard if not appreciated. One need cast no refiection on the residents of the Yukon to note how interesting a target the Yukon can be for radio Moscow. Here is an area of 200,000 square miles with only one weekly newspaper, no adequate Canadian radio, a sense of isolation and hunger for news and entertainment. The operators of the Soviet service may well consider that residents of such an area are likely to tune in to Soviet programs of music, forgetting to switch off the set when less rewarding fare follows. They may also look upon the Yukon as an interesting battleground of Soviet and American ideologies through the medium of radio, while Canadian viewpoints are completely absent (CBC 1956, 4-5)
Within this context, the communications order that OlC/6 had fleshed out during the war took on new significance. The radio disruptions that had threatened wartime North Atlantic communications now threatened the nationalist post-war projects of Keenleyside and his allies. Just as it had during the war, the solution to those problems seemed to pass once more through OIC/6. In the fall of 1945, as units across the Canadian military began demobilizing, Davies and his staff were disbanded and reconstituted as the Scientific Staff of the Ionosphere Propagation Group (IPG). The IPG formed the technical core of the Canadian Radio Wave Propagation Committee (CRWPC), the organization that governed all scientific and regulatory aspects of radio propagation in Canada. While it conducted radio reception studies and frequency allocation programs for various groups, the IPG was principally charged with collecting ionospheric data from the Canadian ionospheric stations at Prince Rupert, Churchill, Clyde
15
Edward )ones-lmhotep
YUKON TERRITORY RADIO
SOURCES
•fh
Width of arrow indicates relative jency of reception populatian
Figure 3: Raii'to Reception in the Yukon (1956). Note the arrows marked "Canada" near the tower right corner. Source: F.H. Collins, 1956, 4-5. Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada.
16
lournal of Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes
Figure 4: Organizational links of the Ionospheric Research Group of the Canadian Radio Wave Propagation Committee (1945). The block marked "other companies" included the CBC. Source: Wylle, 1945. Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada.
River, Ottawa, and Torbay. The station data, called "daily signals," were then forwarded from Ottawa to Washington's Interservice Radio Propagation Laboratory (IRPL) or to England's Radio Research Station—the two laboratories responsible for generating global frequency predictions for the Western nations. Radio operators then used those frequency predictions for military and civilian communications throughout the globe. From the British and US laboratories, the prediction charts then made their way back through Davies's group, and through the distribution channels shown in figure 4, to the main functionaries of the Canadian state, the primary agents of Keenleyside's program—the army, the navy, the air force, the Department of Transport, and "other companies" including (crucially) the CBC. If the technology of radio helped underwrite projects for a "New North," the scientific approach that had characterized the work of OIC/6 also mattered critically for Keenleyside's ambitions. Alongside political and economic maneuverings, Keenleyside saw the logistical dimensions of scientific research, particularly geophysical investigations, as a key force in the struggles to control the North (Grant 1988, 199-200). As a student of history, he was keenly aware of the historical role that northern research, particularly magnetic and geophysical investigations, had played in early Canadian nationalism, and the links this research had forged with political patronage and military power." As a member of the Permanent Joint Defence Board, Keenleyside had witnessed first-hand the vast wartime network of US weather stations set up across northern Canada for the northeast and northwest staging routes. The creation and operation of those networks had raised deep concerns over American ambitions and Canadian sovereignty in the region.'^ 17
Edward jones-lmhotep
In April 1947, acting as chair of the Arctic Research Advisory Committee, Keenleyside presided over a meeting on magneto-ionospheric research in the Canadian Arctic. As secretary of the meeting and the head of Canadian ionospheric research, Frank Davies recorded Keenleyside's prescriptions for US involvement: "(1) That U.S. activities in the region should be limited to what was absolutely necessary. (2) We should find out from the U.S. what they want to know. (3) We should see if we have or can get this information, (4) If not, and if we consider further investigations are essential, then we might be prepared to accept U.S. participation" (Davies and Rowley 1947). Apart from the obvious territorial concerns at their core, Keenleyside's prescriptions provided a muted version of a broader political statement: that the producticn of knowledge about the Canadian North was a means for the nation to create power in the post-war world. What underlay Keenleyside's comments were deep anxieties over epistemic sovereignty—sovereignty over Northern knowledge and its production. Graham Rowley, Davies's colleague and co-secretary for the April meeting, would put the point more bluntly, asserting that it was "a good thing to establish the principle that information on Canada should come from Canada rather than Washington" (1953). More than just proprietary or territorial, Rowley's concerns recognized that knowledge about the North was a valuable political currency. Keenleyside's associate at the Arctic Institute of North America, the geophysicist and University of Toronto professor J. Tuzo Wilson, underscored this understanding of the politics of northern knowledge. Before the war, Wilson had served as an assistant geologist with the Geological Survey of Canada; he would later go on to make fundamental contributions to the theory of plate tectonics and continental drift; but in the intervening years, Wilson served overseas with the Royal Canadian Engineers and was eventually appointed Director of Operational Research at Canadian Army Headquarters in Ottawa, where he co-ordinated the mapping of glaciers in northern Canada. Through that experience, Wilson came to see northern scientific research as the key to Canadian political and military influence after the war. Canada's small population and industry, Wilson reasoned, gave it little hope of influencing the development of conventional weapons and warfare. "It is in new or unusual discoveries and research," Wilson surmised, "that we can exercise the most effect." Northern research, in Wilson's view, afforded Canada the greatest hope for power during the Cold War: "In no new field have we greater natural advantages than in Arctic and winter research. In no other field are our allies and particularly the United States more interested in our work.... !n no other way could we more effectively and powerfully play a part in the allied programme than by concentrating upon
18
Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d'etudes canadiennes
northern warfare and research.... It would be difficult for a small power to achieve this desideratum hy any other means" (1948, 1; my emphasis). Davies was immersed in these post-war debates about re-appropriating the North as an object of knowledge through his membership in the Arctic Institute of North America (where his colleagues included Keenleyside and Wilson), and through his involvement in the smaller Arctic Circle (a group primarily made up of government officials interested in exchanging information on the Arctic and sub-Arctic and discussing plans for future research). His commitment to geophysical investigations as the key to reliable radio helped make his group instrumental In broader attempts to reclaim the North, in both territorial and epistemic terms, for the benefit of the nation. Equal parts geophysics and radio engineering, the work of the IPG fit almost squarely within Keenleyside's vision of the "New North"; almost, that is, because of a rather serious problem with predictions. RPL and the Politics of Particularity The Radio Physics Laboratory was created out of combined territorial and epistemic concerns. The impetus for its creation came mainly out of worries over the British and American prediction systems that the IPG's research served. Under the demands of wartime communications, the frequency predictions had formed the basis for almost all long-distance fixed and mobile telecommunications for the Allies (Dellinger and Smith 1948, 264). Even during the war, however, Davies's group had begun noticing that the British and American prediction systems broke down for northern radio circuits. The two systems differed in important ways, but both divided the globe longitudinally (since ionospheric conditions largely follow diurnal variations), and superimposed on those divisions a taxonomy that carved the world into three communications zones: polar, temperate, and equatorial.'" Because they treated the world as a series of internally homogenous regions, the prediction systems suffered from oversimplification, Davies and his colleagues argued, particularly when applied to Canadian radio circuits.'" In a comment that linked his North Atlantic research with post-war domestic concerns, Davies explained to US colleagues in October 1945 that, "In some areas, mainly those associated with the auroral zones, we can not depend entirely on the general predictions and have to study individual ... circuits. This is particularly true for Canadian circuits.... This marks the great contrast between our communications area and most of the rest of the world" (46). His superiors at the CRWPC had sought to resolve these inaccuracies by simply providing the US laboratory with "more and better data" from Canadian locations (CRWPC 1944, 1). Davies's team, however, maintained that the problem rested with the prediction
19
Edward jones-lmhotep
systems, rather than with the data that went into them. The models simply did not take into account the peculiar geophysical conditions that affected highlatitude communications. In place of CRWPC's suggestions, Davies argued that Canada required its own, specially designed prediction system hased on the study of individual communication circuits: "We can not get away from that joh in Canada by any such easy method as depending upon very general regional predictions" {1945, 59). The system, Davies elaborated in 1946, would have to he base
