At the crossroads of Golf Street and Armed Forces Street, a large banana-shaped metal memorial on a pedestal gazes at the open sky in northern Canada. All but forgotten, its lower half blackened with time, it now stands forever still — or in repose, one might say.
In its glory days during the Cold War, the artifact — a radar — spun and bobbed with balletic grace, spat out bursts of waves and listened for echoes, as it continuously scanned the skies for Soviet bombers sneaking over the Arctic.
“It’s really crazy when you think about it, that this radar was the raison d’être of our whole town,” said Frédéric Maltais, who grew up in Chibougamau, a city in northern Quebec, on a military base that was shuttered at the end of the Cold War and became a golf course. “Imagine all the resources that went into managing one radar like that.”
And it was hardly the only one. It was linked to scores of similar radars at more than 40 stations across Canada, collectively called the Pinetree Line, because it ran east to west along the country’s vast boreal forests.
The Pinetree Line was also not alone. Two other strings of radars farther north cut across Canada and served as tripwires: the Mid-Canada and the Distant Early Warning, or DEW, Lines, whose outposts were based in Canada’s most isolated locations above the Arctic Circle and whose only local workers were Inuit.
These Pharaonic military projects, each stretching for more than 3,000 miles, reflected deep Cold War fears that the Arctic was the most vulnerable flank to a Soviet invasion.
Now, as geopolitical rivalry in the Arctic heats up, the region faces a new era of militarization.
President Trump has vowed to build a $175 billion “Golden Dome” defense shield to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles, including those that could fly over the Arctic from Russia, China or North Korea.
Because a shield would require installing equipment in Canada’s Far North, he is pressing Canada to join the project by paying $61 billion — or nothing if it agrees to become the 51st state.
Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada has said the country is in talks with the United States about the project, but has yet to make any commitment.
But in a sharp break from previous Canadian governments, Mr. Carney recently announced an enormous increase in the country’s military spending. Canada is expected to focus on protecting its part of the Arctic, where a warming climate has sharpened the interests of powers like Russia and China, not to mention a U.S. administration that has pushed to buy Greenland in addition to threatening to annex Canada.
For Mr. Carney, who has made it a priority to make Canada less dependent on the United States, joining the Golden Dome would leave Canada a junior partner, just as it was during the Cold War.
The United States led in designing, building and paying for the network of radars, especially on the Pinetree and DEW Lines, even though nearly all of the facilities were in Canada, with a few in Alaska, Greenland and elsewhere. U.S. military personnel were deployed to many stations in Canada.
Much of the Pinetree Line was already in operation when the radar station in Chibougamau opened in 1962 as part of a Royal Canadian Air Force base.
In Quebec’s popular imagination, the city of Chibougamau had long occupied a special place, symbolizing a mix of Timbuktu and Siberia. Though only 300 miles north of Montreal as the crow flies, it lay beyond impenetrable forests and was connected by road only in the late 1940s.
“A parent might tell a misbehaving child, ‘If you keep that up, I’ll send you to Chibougamau,’ meaning at the end of the world,” Mr. Maltais said. “Or people might say, ‘What? You’re going to Chibougamau?’ Meaning nowhere, a place that didn’t really exist.”
When Mr. Maltais moved to Montreal in the early 2000s and mentioned he was from Chibougamau, perplexed people sometimes asked him, “That place really exists?”
Not only did it exist, but Chibougamau experienced its own golden age during the Cold War with the military base and also a mining boom, said Marie-Claude Duchesne, the director of the James Bay Historical Society, a private organization based in Chibougamau.
“It was a different era, a different world,” Ms. Duchesne said.
The Pinetree radars were erected on top of a mountain just outside Chibougamau, encased in large white domes that seemed to pop out of a science fiction comic book.
Technically, they were “radomes,” though people just called them the “balls,” recalled Mr. Maltais, 44, whose parents were long employed as civilian workers on the base.
Life revolved around the oscillating radars. People said they were going not to the military base, but “to the radar,” said Mr. Maltais, who returned to live in Chibougamau during the coronavirus pandemic. His mother had kept Air Force china that the family referred to as “dinnerware from the radar.”
As he walked around the golf course, where the old military dining hall, bar and other buildings still stand, Mr. Maltais remembered visiting the radomes with his father in the 1980s. There was pool table at the site, as well as a fishing boat and snowmobiles, evidence to Mr. Maltais of the “easygoing” life of the military during the Cold War.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “my father would tell me, ‘Hey, the armed forces are a good career option.’”
Life, though, was far different up on the DEW Line, the northernmost radars and those closest to the Soviets. There, military personnel and civilians huddled and worked inside small mobile units on rotations lasting six months.
Brian Jeffrey served as a radar technician in the early 1960s at a DEW station in Hall Beach, now known as Sanirajak, about 150 miles above the Arctic Circle.
“There’s communication, there’s television, there’s satellite now that we didn’t have any of back then,” Mr. Jeffrey, 85, recalled in a phone interview from his home in Ottawa.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he remembers “sitting in a dark room, staring at a radar going round and round and round” — and wondering “whether there was going to be a south to go home to.”
Still, boredom was the dominant mood on the DEW Line, relieved by the first-run movies, like “Dr. No,” that were flown in and the copious amounts of food prepared by resident chefs, said Mr. Jeffrey, who maintains a website devoted to the line.
“If you wanted a couple of steaks, or two, three or four, they were quite happy to give them to you,” said Mr. Jeffrey, adding that he gained nearly 30 pounds his first year.
William Dillon, too, remembers the thick steaks at the DEW station on the Nicholson Peninsula, in the Western Arctic, where he spent his childhood in the 1950s.
His parents worked at the DEW station, one of the many Inuvialuit, or Inuit, families hired to carry out maintenance along the line.
Mr. Dillon’s father picked up photography, chronicling life on Nicholson and at other DEW stations where the family worked, though his archives were lost in a house fire. The family’s lifestyle — working for months at the DEW stations and then going on leave to Inuit villages for extended periods — changed them forever, said Mr. Dillon, who now lives in Tuktoyaktuk, a Western Arctic hamlet where he monitors the thawing permafrost.
“My parents lived in the white world as well as the Indigenous world where the other Inuvialuit lived,” Mr. Dillon said.
The DEW Line was shut down shortly after the end of the Cold War, though some of its stations were taken over by the North Warning System — automated radars whose technology is now widely considered outdated in the era of satellites.
In Chibougamau, the end came in 1988. Perhaps because people had expected the Pinetree station and the base to close, there “was a lack of interest by the region’s population” when they finally did, according to newspaper archives at the James Bay Historical Society.
One boy was not left indifferent, though.
Mr. Maltais, around 7 back then, recalls abruptly losing friends from the base.
“I remember knocking on the door of my friends and seeing them disappear, one after the other, without any notice,” he said. “It’s a funny thing to remember. My friend Pascal, he’s never coming back.”
Norimitsu Onishi reports on life, society and culture in Canada. He is based in Montreal.
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