Denmark as part of our ultimate national security. The 
pathetic struggle of the late great General Mitchell to open 
the eyes of his colleagues to the importance of Alaska is a 
story too well known to need reiteration here. And of 
course Stefansson, perhaps the greatest and most persistent 
of all Arctic prophets, has been trying for nearly half a 
century to educate us to an awareness of the impending 
importance of the Arctic. 
The Soviet Union was first to recognize the strategic im- 
portance of the Arctic in our air age and first to attempt to 
do something about it on a large scale, her extensive ex- 
plorations and settlements being dominated primarily by 
a sense of military strategy. But even the great Russian 
trans-Arctic flights of 1947 failed to impress us. Not until 
World War II was fairly upon us did either Canada or the 
United States begin to take serious thought and action con- 
cerning the Arctic regions. To secure the best coordinated 
effort, the Permanent Joint Board on Defense was created 
in August, 1940, to “consider in the broad sense the defense 
of the northern half of the Western Hemisphere.” 
Under the agreement each country is responsible for 
bases in its own land except for United States bases in New- 
foundland. The Board now involves strategic planning at 
the highest levels in both countries, armament programs 
with standardized specifications, joint weather programs, 
and joint network of radar and other communication sys- 
tems. Ihe most notable is the most recently completed 
DEW (Distant Early Warning) line, which stretches from 
Point Barrow, Alaska, three thousand miles eastward to 
Baffin Island. It has been completed at a cost of six hundred 
million dollars. Does not this sum suggest to you some- 
thing of our official concept of the strategic importance of 
9 
