Historiographical Prelude – the Arctic in the History of Science

While Nordic involvement with the Circumpolar North is longstanding and has been a key feature of Scandinavian science since at least the Linnaean student Anton Rolandsson Martin hit the shores of Spitsbergen in 1754 (Rolandsson Martin [Reference Rolandsson Martin and Nordström1881] 2007), the history of polar science in the Nordic countries is a far more recent phenomenon. This history was for a long time written by its own protagonists. Just as in-house histories of laboratories, industries, and medical clinics were penned by professors, doctors and engineers, and even academicians – at least since Thomas Sprat's history of the newly formed Royal Society in 1665 – some of the early chronicles of polar history were compiled by polar travellers and scientists, in the conspicuous absence of professional historians. The quintessential example is Fridtjof Nansen, who had barely embarked upon his heroic journeys in Norway, Greenland, and in the Polar Sea, when he started collecting northern paraphernalia and old texts and maps and also published widely on the subject, especially the comprehensive records of polar travel, In Northern Mists (Nansen [1910] Reference Nansen1911; see also Brögger and Rolfsen Reference Brøgger and Rolfson1896). In Denmark Knud Rasmussen, the Danish explorer-hero, published Polarforskningens Saga [The Saga of Polar Exploration] as volume six of “The Conquering of the World” book series in 1932 (Rasmussen Reference Rasmussen1932). In Sweden Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld did the same. He collected books, manuscripts, and maps and then wrote himself into the great tradition. His facsimile-atlas to the early history of cartography with reproductions of the most important maps printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was translated by his polar explorer colleague Clements Markham (Nordenskiöld [1889] Reference Nordenskiöld and Ekelöf1973; Nordenskiöld Reference Nordenskiöld and Bather1897).

The history of exploration by now makes up a library of something that is almost a genre of its own (e.g. Kirwan Reference Kirwan1960; Rey et al. Reference Rey1984; Bruemmer and Taylor Reference Bruemmer and Taylor1987; Fleming Reference Fleming1998 and 2002; Officer and Page Reference Officer and Page2001). Add to this the travelogues and the memoirs, and polar self-chronicling easily outstrips that of scientists in general, chiefly because of the conditions of the book market, where polar books became collector's items already in the seventeenth century and were a major trade in the nineteenth. This is not to say that the historiography of the polar was done exclusively by the travelers themselves. There was both journalism and some attempts by official historiography in the polar nations and empires, such as Denmark, Norway, Great Britain, to draw the Arctic regions into their national narratives. But history written by professional historians and based on research in primary sources is very hard to come by before the Second World War.

The timescales are surprisingly short. When Herbert Butterfield wrote in the late 1940s about The Origins of Modern Science, having written two decades earlier about The Whig Interpretation of History, we may say that we are entering into the period of modern historiography of science. At about the same time Joseph Needham labored on the first of his volumes about Science and Civilization in China, and A. C. Crombie was busy with From Augustine to Galileo. This formative postwar period in the modern historiography of science, with its emphasis on the broad picture, “evolutionary” history of science – and we could add: history of ideas, in the Butterfield-Crombie-Koyré style – did not include much interest in the poles. They were not the places where central scientific discoveries, of the kind that interested historians of science in this period, had taken place, nor were they the home or the stage of major philosophical ideas. At most they would seem to serve as a peripheral backdrop, as hazy as “Africa” (by the same Eurocentric token), or the dark, mythical place where Frankenstein's monster appeared before the eyes of bewildered explorers in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel.

During the 1950s and 1960s there was therefore nothing really in polar science history that would come close to the progress in the History and Philosophy of Science in the same period. This would imply at least two things. Firstly, that polar history remained entrenched in myopic nationalism, and we may add that a history of polar peoples did not occur either. Polar inhabitants were still considered as anthropological objects of study and would remain for some time among the “people without history” (Wolf Reference Wolf1982). Secondly, it meant that historians of science did not take polar science seriously. There were few if any attempts to write, apart from tangentially, about polar science history before John Cawoods’ “Terrestrial Magnetism and the Development of International Collaboration in the Early Nineteenth Century,” published in the Annals of Science in 1977. Even when Trevor Levere published Science and the Canadian Arctic in 1993 it was a rare example of a study in book format on a squarely Arctic topic by a professional historian of science (Levere Reference Levere1993). By that time, however, there had started to appear a certain quantity of work on political, economic, and strategic aspects of polar history, not least on the Soviet Union with its comprehensive research including the mammoth ice-floe-stations program from the 1930s until the end of the Cold War (e.g. Armstrong Reference Armstrong1952 and [Reference Armstrong1958] 1972; Treshnikov Reference Treshnikov1977; McCannon Reference McCannon1998), although more major synthetic and pan-arctic approaches have not appeared until recently (McCannon Reference McCannon2012; Doel et al. 2014). In the absence of the historians of science important groundwork was also done by historical geographers (an eminent example is Wright Reference Wright1953), interested in the growth of Arctic knowledge and ideas, and by bibliographers and librarians who collected the sources. One of the early contributions in that genre was for a long time assembled in the Scott Polar Research Institute Library, the Stefansson Collection at Dartmouth College, and other libraries and archives by Alan Cooke and Clive Holland, published after many years of toil as The Exploration of Northern Canada, 500–1920 (Cooke and Holland Reference Cooke and Holland1978).

Inspirational New Approaches

In choosing new approaches for polar historiography there were some antecedents to draw from. One came from Science and Technology Studies, STS, for example through Aant Elzinga's work in the late 1980s and early 1990s on Antarctica, “A Continent by and for Science” (Elzinga Reference Elzinga, Crawford, Shinn and Sörlin1993; see also Lewis Reference Lewis1965), as it was called in a contribution that Elzinga, drawing on the spirit of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, did for a Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook entitled Denationalizing Science (Crawford, Shinn and Sörlin Reference Crawford, Shinn and Sörlin1993, esp. 95). In his paper Elzinga discusses rhetorical internationalism as against the Realpolitik of land claims in Antarctica and how the diplomatic and political ambitions played out during the Cold War. There is a political science/sociology profile of Elzinga's paper and the references are not in any sense privileged towards the history of science; Elzinga also refers back to his earlier article in the natural science journal Ambio (Elzinga and Bohlin Reference Elzinga and Bohlin1989), co-authored with Ingemar Bohlin.

Another influence that came in the 1990s was the “spatial turn” in the history of science (e.g. Carter Reference Carter1988; Livingstone Reference Livingstone1992 and Reference Livingstone1995). The spatial turn moved focus even further away from the Butterfield-Crombie-Koyré progressivist style of history of science. Behind David Livingstone and other spatial-turn practitioners was a theoretical revolution in Human Geography, which had been one of the theoretically least responsive social science disciplines in the 1970s and early 1980s. Towards the late 1980s and the 1990s the scene had totally shifted with influential thinkers such as Edward Soja, doing urban geography at UCLA, David Harvey, the Marxist theorist, and several other British geographers such as Nigel Thrift (e.g. Thrift and Dewsbury Reference Thrift and Dewsbury2000).

There were also some publications by Edward Said in the background, and David Arnold (Reference Arnold1996) at the School of Oriental and African studies in London wrote on “Tropicality” as a counterpart to Orientalism (Said Reference Said1978). It was not long after that “Arcticality” was articulated by Icelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálsson (Pálsson Reference Pálsson, Bravo and Sörlin2002). Pálsson's argument was followed up in a full length biography of his main protagonist, anthropologist and polar visionary Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an American of Icelandic heritage. Soon Arctic anthropologists, such as Stefansson and the more well known Franz Boas, invented the Arctic through their constructs of peoples and life forms in the North (Pálsson [2003] Reference Pálsson and Kunz2005). Something similar can be argued for the sciences; they too were inseparable from polar geopolitics, that in and of itself represented a special case of a wider imperial science (e.g. Driver Reference Driver2001). The approach of Bruno Latour, and his notion of “centers of calculation” (Latour Reference Latour1987), underscored for example a more realistic, interactive way of looking at how science in the Arctic actually happened (Bravo and Sörlin Reference Bravo, Sörlin, Bravo and Sörlin2002b).

Extending historiography to the circumpolar north also implied a new set of epistemic and ethical challenges for the historian. It was not simply a matter of expanding the geographical realm of the history of science but also questioning its cognitive, theoretical, and perhaps even political boundaries:

Although there have been rich and numerous contributions to the historiography of science in the Arctic in the last decade, including new amalgamations of history of science with other fields such as the anthropology of knowledge (e.g. Cruikshank Reference Cruikshank2005), much of this program still remains to be fulfilled. In the present paper it is my ambition to outline some features of polar science in the Scandinavia that existed in the decades before, during, and after World War II, as seen through the lens of this new historiography, and with a special focus on science's geopolitical aspects. “Scandinavian” in this case will be defined as belonging to the Scandinavian peninsula, i.e. Norway and Sweden, leaving the other three Nordic states (Denmark, Finland, and Iceland) largely outside the story, with the exception of a few reflections on Denmark with Greenland. The broader geopolitical entity of “Norden” will thus appear as one of the contexts in which the “Scandinavian” polar science is performed. My cases are chosen to demonstrate that there is a strong divergence between polar research in Norway and Sweden and thus that it is not the properties of the field or the internal problems of the science that alone determine their scientific practices. Far more important were the politics of science. The ambition is thus to let the polar history of science of two small northern nations shed light on a thematic – the geopolitics of field science – of much wider historical significance.

How has this shifting geopolitics affected science? Were there any “Nordic” or Scandinavian counter forces that cooled the heating patriotic agendas? How was the science of the small Scandinavian countries influenced by the presence of big powers and global geopolitics in the critical period from after the First World War and the Svalbard Treaty, signed in 1920, up to and beyond the International Geophysical Year, IGY, 1957–58?

Field Science and Geopolitics

The Swedish style of polar research underwent a profound transformation in the 1920s and 1930s. It turned, one might say, from economic expansionism focused on geological resources to a distinctly non-interventionist, cautious style based on support and loyalty to Nordic political collaboration. In the second half of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century Sweden had a very active, state supported science activity in the Arctic and for a long time seemed willing to also take a long term geopolitical role, in particular in the region surrounding Spitsbergen. Swedish geoscientists such as Otto Torell and A. E. Nordenskiöld prospected for minerals and even started private companies. Science and the use of resources were considered “effective occupations” and were common parts of the strategy to claim sovereignty over a territory. Norway used this principle in the conflict with Denmark over East Greenland: “The Land of Eirik the Red” during the 1920s and 1930s under the motto flagg, fangst og forskning – “flag, fish, and research” (Blom Reference Blom1973; Drivenes Reference Drivenes2004, esp. 215–249, quotation on 223; Wråkberg Reference Wråkberg, Bravo and Sörlin2002).

In the 1920s when coal prices dropped drastically, the Spitsbergen mines became less commercially interesting. New foreign policy issues rose on the Swedish agenda while Norway after the dissolution of its union with Sweden in 1905 made nordområdene (literally “the northern areas”) – the more homely ringing Norwegian word for their “part” of the Arctic – her chief foreign policy issue.Footnote ¹ In a similar way Denmark had turned the western North Atlantic, with Greenland (a Danish mission since the 1720s and officially a part of Denmark since 1814), Iceland (fully independent only in 1944), and the Faroe islands into her (sub-)Arctic domain. Denmark and Norway stayed as Arctic and North Atlantic big powers, roles that they have managed to maintain and still do in the context of latter day competition for natural resources and political sovereignty on the Arctic rim. Sweden left the stage almost altogether.

In this state of geopolitical division of labor Sweden declined to take an active role and ceded the entire region to her Nordic neighbors. Sweden's focus on climate-related field science and its scant involvement in the resource-related exploration of the Arctic after 1926, when the last Swedish coal mine in Spitsbergen was abandoned and later sold to Norway, marked the entry point to a much more detached Swedish relationship not only to Arctic affairs but also to Arctic science (Wråkberg Reference Wråkberg1995; Avango Reference Avango2005). This pattern was reinforced by Sweden's de facto non-participation in the IPY 1932–1933 and her subsequent marginalization in the IGY of 1957–1958 (Elzinga Reference Elzinga, Lüdecke and Polar- und Meeresforschung2007 and Reference Elzinga2009; Sörlin Reference Sörlin, Sörlin and Rosqvist2009a; Barr and Lüdecke Reference Barr and Lüdecke2010). All in all, these developments could be cited as the main trajectory of Swedish circumpolar Arctic science during a very long period, from the 1920s and throughout the twentieth century: favoring pure science and striving to decouple science from nationalist geopolitics, thus allowing indirectly for greatest possible access for Swedish scientists and also access for Swedish technology and industry, should the opportunity occur.

The Ahlmann Era – One-Man Geopolitics

However, this image would, albeit superficially true, conceal some very important characteristics of the politics of Swedish Arctic science. In order to see this pattern we must move focus away from the more simplified and nationally framed version of science in the support of geopolitics. An ideal looking glass with which to catch this more finely detailed image is the chief architect of Swedish polar science in the mid- and early postwar period, Hans Ahlmann. The Stockholm geographer and glaciologist dominated and to a large extent personally controlled Swedish polar science over a period of three decades, from the mid- to late 1920s until the end of his service as ambassador in Oslo in 1956. Ahlmann's research had a strong focus on climate fluctuations as evidenced by the behavior of glaciers – growth: colder, recess: warmer climate – but he also entertained high ambitions to forge a Scandinavian, even a Nordic, understanding of polar science and their related politics in which he situated Sweden. He had a decidedly pan-Nordic career, born in Sweden in a Danish family, married to a Norwegian, and later assuming the position as Swedish ambassador to Norway from 1950 to 1956.

Ahlmann's preferred path as a scientist was to emulate the laboratory and the exact sciences. Like so many of the leading polar scientists he was eager to use the latest equipment, and introduced automatic instruments and applied statistical methods whenever he could. Ahlmann gained recognition as a particularly meticulous and innovative field glaciologist. In a review brimming with praise of “the Scandinavian workers,” British geographer Gordon Manley described at length the sophisticated and ingenious field methods developed by Ahlmann and his students and concluded that in understanding climate variations we can “Particularly. . .admire the steady, lively, coherent and fruitful series of investigations initiated by Ahlmann,” following old traditions among “the men of the north” in “art, skill, craftsmanship and science” (Manley Reference Manley1944, 218).

Ahlmann himself consistently contrasted his work with that of his less rigorous colleagues. He may not have been the first polar glaciologist (Sörlin Reference Sörlin1988; Hevly Reference Hevly, Kuklick and Kohler1996) – and he was certainly not the first polar field scientist – but he was very aware of the precarious fate of some of his disbelieved polyhistoric predecessors. Instead, he was convinced that field endeavors would only be relevant if the polar scientists pursued specialized science that would yield universally valid knowledge. “With the increased demands of precision and thoroughness that are nowadays raised on natural science” a polar expedition must not be a comprehensive undertaking of all possible subjects. It can only study “a certain group of phenomena,” he spelled out in a broad programmatic article, timed for the second International Polar Year 1932–33 (Ahlmann Reference Ahlmann1932, 198). His methodological gospel drew heavily on his experience from chairing a public enquiry into the failed attempt by fellow Swede S. A. Andrée to reach the North Pole by balloon in 1897 (Andrée et al. Reference Andrée, Strindberg, Fraenkel and Adams-Ray1931). Andrée had been an intrepid engineer but at heart an adventurer, Ahlmann thought. He cited more recent examples of mishaps, like Umberto Nobile's expedition of 1928, which claimed the life of Norwegian hero Roald Amundsen during the rescue, or Hubert Wilkins’ aborted adventure with the submarine Nautilus in 1931 designated to reach the North Pole under the ice (Ahlmann Reference Ahlmann1932, 198; Nasht Reference Nasht2005). Conspicuous and flamboyant research styles were to be avoided, he argued, despite his principal enthusiasm for advanced field methods and increasingly out of touch with maturing aviation technologies in both the Soviet and the North American Arctic (Horensma Reference Horensma1991, esp. chaps. 2 and 4; Cronin Reference Cronin, Jörgensen and Sörlin2013).

In the last of his series of East Greenland reports he described the “Devik ablatograph” – a device to measure glacier mass balance invented by polar geophysicist Olaf Devik, one of Ahlmann's many Norwegian friends – “which functioned irreproachably” (Ahlmann Reference Ahlmann1936). He went on at length about field details: time intervals between observations, and the design of the punching drill. He gave time, place, names, material, frequencies, statistics, tables to enhance trust and credibility, and as if he needed to persuade the reader: “The ablation values obtained in this manner at 4-hour intervals on ice of a specific gravity of 0.9 are quite reliable” (Ahlmann Reference Ahlmann1942, 4). Emphasis on laboratory-like precision in the field is to be expected from someone trying to argue from few and scattered observations of very large and complex phenomena, but in Ahlmann it became a field research style (Sörlin Reference Sörlin2009b). This tendency became even more pronounced in the 1930s, when he sensed he was on the cusp of the issue of “climate fluctuation” which since the early 1920s was a major issue in the Scandinavian countries and the North Atlantic region.

Ahlmann also pursued another, less obvious strategy: to work with local people as field assistants. So, not only were his field campaigns always international and Nordic, they were also multi-class, multi-cultural, and they were multi-national: Lapland Sami, Greenland Inuit, Norwegian trappers and hunters, and Icelandic farmers were citizens of different Scandinavian countries but belonged in the same scientific enterprise. He was able to utilize local skills and technologies in securing field data through what was in essence a field-based co-production of climate change knowledge. This was obviously nothing new to natural history, including the geological sciences, where local informants and assistants had for a long time played a role in the field (Camerini Reference Camerini, Kuklick and Kohler1996), nor even to Artic exploration, where Sami and Inuit had been enrolled as competent field guides and holders of local expertise in anything from dogsledding to skiing, such as Nansen's two Sami skiers Balto and Ravna in the crossing of the Greenland ice cap in 1888 (Nansen Reference Nansen1890; Balto Reference Balto1980).

However, for Ahlmann the close collaboration with local people was also a way of reaching out to non-elite collaborators to secure a popular and democratic dimension of the scientific enterprise. He regarded the field enterprise not only as a hit and run data collecting bonanza, but as more of a long term involvement in a region and its people. By pursuing this strategy across the circumpolar Arctic he indirectly also made a statement about the non-exclusive geography of the Scandinavian Arctic – as a Swede he considered the entire Scandinavian Arctic, including Greenland, as his legitimate realm of research. Consequently he was greatly disappointed when the Danes opted out of his attempt to organize a Nordic collaborative glaciological project on Greenland (Sörlin Reference Sörlin2009b). His field practice was thus also carrying a message of a principal Nordic unity: the essence of the North Atlantic and the Scandinavian Arctic was that it should not be a geopolitically contested space among Nordic nations but a common ground with peaceful collaboration.

His ideal of field science practice was developed over a long period and in tandem with his wider outlooks on science and politics. Ahlmann had experiences from the Jotunheimen mountains where he was given essential assistance by local scientists from Bergen and their young Norwegian students and field workers. This made him prone to see the advantages of cooperation for success in the field. His expeditions to Svalbard in 1931 and 1934 were different, with, by definition, no native population or knowledge sensu stricto at hand. Still he used local knowledge from Scandinavia for transport, logistics, and housing. He contrasted this style of polar field work with amateurish British methods – man-hauled sledges, no dogs, no sense of glacier seasonality – as embodied by the inexperienced Oxford expedition to Svarlbard's North East Land in 1924 which had, as a consequence, failed to reach any significant scientific results (Ahlmann and Malmberg Reference Ahlmann and Malmberg1931, 105). The Scandinavian field expertise that he claimed repeated of course the famous contrasts between Roald Amundsen (dogs, skis, fur clothes like Arctic peoples) and Robert Scott (misplaced machinery, snow shoes, wool and cotton British garments), a line of heritage that Ahlmann silently but certainly knowingly adhered to. He always maintained, in full congruence both with his anti-heroic program and with his personal Angst, that suffering in the pursuit of science was not a virtue, precisely the opposite of the “sacrifice for science” which had been so prevalent among previous Anglo-American Arctic explorers, from John Franklin to Robert E. Peary and Frederick A. Cook (Herzig Reference Herzig2005, 64–84).

On his Svalbard expeditions Ahlmann continued his refinement of the field as laboratory with high quality sleds, exquisitely crafted field tents including a “daily office” tent, precision measurements, large quantities of data collected, and stupendous documentation (Friedman Reference Friedman1994). Traditional techniques and domestic animals were always favored, along with the latest hi-tech research equipment. On the Isachsen plateau in 1934 he worked with Norwegian oceanographer Harald Ulrik Sverdrup, who would stay a life-long brother in arms on the Arctic diplomatic front, first in Norway, then as Director of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, from 1937 to 1948, and then back again in Norway as the first Director of the new Norsk Polarinstitutt (Norwegian Polar Institute). Ahlmann and Sverdrup were visited on the Svalbard glacier by Helge Ingstad, lawyer and polar scholar, who arrived in style, commanding a large sled and dog party. Affinities between the men ran high and two years later Ingstad, then in Bergen, provided dogs for Ahlmann's Iceland expedition (Ahlmann [1936] Reference Ahlmann and Lewes1938, chap. 2). The Svalbard field campaigns were labor intensive operations and although he put pressure on his field teams, he always took on a great deal of the work himself, making a point of keeping a principle of equality. He consciously used the credentials he had built as a member of Swedish and Norwegian elites, working contacts and funding opportunities in both countries. He was also in essence harvesting trust from his earlier cooperation with Sverdrup on the Andrée commission and from many years of exchange with Norway, the home country of his wife Erika Harloff, daughter in a well-to-do Bergen shipping family.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, climate science had not reached the consensus on anthropogenic climate change that became characteristic of its last two decades. On the contrary, the few propositions that were made in that direction (notably Callendar Reference Callendar1938) were met with utmost skepticism, even by those who, like Ahlmann, were preoccupied with monitoring climate change through natural indicators like glaciers. Even when the evidence started to turn in favor of the CO2-hypothesis, i.e. anthropogenic climate change, from the mid-1950s and increasingly during the following decades, the field science tradition of which Ahlmann was a leader, remained skeptical for a much longer period than for example scientists working in a computer-based geophysical tradition (Sörlin Reference Sörlin, Warde and Sörlin2009c). This highlights the importance of disciplinary cognitive structures – the connections between research practices and paradigmatic interpretations – to explain attitudes among scientists to climate change. I have argued elsewhere (Sörlin Reference Sörlin2009b and Reference Sörlin, Warde and Sörlin2009c) that there are longue durées of disciplinary ideas and that these ideas are stronger when they are bound to field experiences, that is when the knowledge is institutionalized into field sites and practices, that is when it is of what we may call a bodily nature. The field scientist has, somehow, physically appropriated the reality that he is at the same time claiming. The field is a strong and powerful carrier of the data and experiences of research, furthermore often turned into narrative and lore. The field also contains boundary objects – sites, research stations, equipment, and other field monuments – that serve the function of uniting the group of scientists, or more precisely: the epistemic community that shares in the experience (Star and Griesemer Reference Star and Griesemer1989; Bowker and Star Reference Bowker and Star1999). This was evident in the fugitive field sites of ice and snow that was Ahlmann's main preoccupation.

Arctic Resurfacing in Cold War Geopolitics

The second looking glass with which to catch Swedish circumpolar science is the wider geopolitical agenda. In general, there is an emerging picture to suggest that there was a whole new Arctic that took shape during and after the Second World War. Studies by several scholars have demonstrated that there was an increasing interest in the Arctic as a region, for strategic and security reasons (Korsmo Reference Korsmo1998; Doel Reference Doel2003; Heymann et al. Reference Heymann2010; Doel et al. 2014). If this was to become a strategically critical zone – situated closest to both superpowers and their major cities which could be the targets of missiles – there was an acute need for better knowledge of the Arctic environment and also about possible climate change in the region.

Substantial efforts were made in the United States to establish such science, by setting up institutions like the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL) and the Army's Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE). There were crucial connections between science and environment, but also with politics and security. In writing the history of these connections there is still a strong element of spatiality. The North Atlantic realm, or the Arctic, brings North America, Greenland, Iceland, and the Nordic countries together into an interactive network of science and security. And obviously, NATO was not just a defense alliance but also a science funding organization, as was the Pentagon, which sent its funds across the Atlantic to support research in Norway and Sweden, despite the fact that the latter was officially not part of the NATO networks (Harper Reference Harper2008; Sörlin and Wormbs Reference Sörlin, Wormbs, Gribbe, Lundin and Stenlås2010). One US military officer, the air force lieutenant and meteorologist Philip D. Thompson, who had a very good grasp of the research both in the US and Europe, viewed meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby's International Meteorological Institute in Stockholm as a perfect “‘listening post’ for meteorological intelligence” (Harper Reference Harper2003, 686).

Although the US was the major player it seems as if parallel histories could be uncovered in each country, with institutional counterparts to the Americans and considerable cooperation, within or outside NATO. The Americans, as has been shown especially by John Krige, consciously outsourced their strategic knowledge production to quite an extent in the decades immediately after the war and were prepared to fund work in Europe. Krige has described the efforts of influential figures in the United States to model postwar scientific practices and institutions in Western Europe on those in America. They mobilized political and financial support to promote not only America's scientific and technological agendas in Western Europe but also its Cold War political and ideological agendas as well. Krige also argues that this attempt at scientific dominance by the United States can be seen as a form of “consensual hegemony,” involving the collaboration of influential local elites who shared American values. He uses this notion to analyze a series of case studies that describe how the US administration, senior officers in the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the NATO Science Committee worked to make the world “safe for democracy” (Krige Reference Krige2006).

Work related to the Arctic should be seen against this general background, and it could certainly be carried out with very clear directives from the Americans on some occasions. The general point that needs to be made here is that science carried out in Europe, often in old science centers, could be geared towards strategic efforts to be staged in the Arctic, which of course does not exclude that some research took place in the Arctic as well, not least during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1957–1958.

Sweden did work as part of these transatlantic networks. The IGY started its 18 months of activities without much fuss, with no official opening and few headlines. In retrospect, what did in fact come close to a first IGY event was the launch of the Kiruna Geophysical Observatory (KGO), in northern Sweden, on 2 July 1957. In this remote mining town, in the midst of Sami reindeer herding territory, today hosting Sweden's Sami Parliament, were among a range of high ranking guests a figure no less than Lloyd V. Berkner, one of the IGY initiators, then vice president of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Also present was J. Wallace Joyce, who headed the American IGY office at the NSF. Both Berkner and Joyce had been present at that famous meeting at James A. van Allen's home in a suburb of Washington 5 April 1950 when the idea of a third International Polar Year was first discussed in earnest (Needell Reference Needell2000).

The Americans traveled far for a particular reason: they were firmly involved. The NSF funded and provided basic instrumentation at the new Institute and the US Air Research and Development Command funded much of the research during the first decade of the institute. Indeed, for several years US funding exceeded 50 percent of the funds. The Americans wished the geographically well placed Swedes to monitor activities of the Sputnik, as soon as it was launched in October 1957, and they received assistance in monitoring Soviet nuclear tests in a comprehensive research program. There was nothing wrong with the quality of the science, headed by Director Bengt Hultqvist and published in high visibility journals such as Nature and Science (Hultqvist Reference Hultqvist1957a and Reference Hultqvist1957b). On the first board of the Kiruna Observatory were the elite of Swedish geophysics, including Hannes Alfvén, who would become recipient of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics.

There were good scientific reasons for the Swedes to establish the Observatory, but no less real were the geopolitical circumstances prompting the Americans to be of assistance, adding yet another center to their cooperating network of Cold War observation sites in Europe. The Arctic was a hot zone in the Cold War, potentially a Theatre of War, should tensions between the superpowers grow beyond control. Kiruna Geophysical Observatory benefited from the US military links. The Institute was formed under the Swedish Academy of Sciences and was initially part of the Academy's network of northern research stations. These also comprised the Abisko research station, founded in 1906, the Tarfala station for glaciological research, founded by Hans Ahlmann in 1945, and a small observatory on the Pårte Mountain in the alpine area of Sarek. Public funding was made possible as the Institute was made a centerpiece of Swedish IGY planning (Hultqvist Reference Hultqvist2007; Sandahl Reference Sandahl and Jakobsson2007). The Institute's first director Bengt Hultqvist at Stockholm University College prepared during the break between his PhD exam and his move to Kiruna by following Alfvén's seminars at KTH and by making an extended trip to the United States in the autumn of 1956. Among his stops was the Geophysical Institute, College, Alaska, near Fairbanks, and the Air Force Cambridge Research Center in Massachusetts (Hultqvist Reference Hultqvist1956).

In the following years the Kiruna Institute undertook contract research for the US Air Force according to a constantly growing program on “HF- and VHF-Auroral zone propagation.” The first quarterly report comprised the period 15 October 1957 to 15 January 1958 and reports were issued regularly until 1967, when the program ceased. By and large the Americans funded basic research, and they encouraged publication of results in peer-reviewed journals. Nonetheless, they also secured, in Kiruna as at many other research sites in Europe, observations and data that were collected by their funded partners. The first equipment to be furnished by the Air Research and Development Command was delivered to Kiruna on 13 January 1958 (Hultqvist and Ortner Reference Hultqvist and Ortner1958). In 1958 a new task was added to the program: to track satellites and provide data concerning time for closest approach, by telegraphic means, to the Space Group of the Air Force Cambridge Research Center, during the first days after the launch of a new satellite. Likewise, the Swedish Institute was to provide the American military with Doppler data of every new Sputnik “for ten days to two weeks,” which the scientists in Kiruna delivered (KGO 1959, 8). The obvious reason for the Americans to be interested in the Kiruna Institute was its geographical location, far north of the Arctic Circle and in the vicinity of Soviet territory. The close proximity to the northern Soviet Union also came in handy when the Americans wanted information on upper atmosphere effects of the nuclear weapons tests in Novaya Zemlya between September and November 1961 and Semipalatinsk in October 1962 (twice) (Elkins and Egeland [1962] Reference Elkins and Egeland1963; Hultqvist et al. Reference Hultqvist1961).

The US military funds were crucial for the fledgling institute, which could probably do little but applaud the booster they received. In 1960 a full fifty-five per cent of all funds at the Institute came from the US Air Force, in 1959 and 1961 the contribution was at forty per cent and still in 1963 a third of the income came from the American military.Footnote ² With increasing criticism of the United States in Swedish politics the Air Force program attracted negative media attention. Ultimately it was also questioned by the Swedish Government and in 1967 it was terminated.

Ironically, these were the crass geopolitical circumstances, when science, politics, and local elite met in idyllic, non-alligned Folkhem Sweden in July 1957 – to host the event which can be seen, in retrospect, as the unofficial opening of the IGY on its second day of operation; it ran from 1 July 1957 to 31 December 1958 to accommodate a full field season at both poles. To further emphasize the role of Kiruna as a temporary hothouse of IGY creativity, and polar high politics, we may note that Lloyd Berkner in his Kiruna hotel room drafted a six-page handwritten letter inviting Hans Ahlmann, who by then, after his six diplomatic years in Oslo was elected President of the International Geographical Union, to take the lead in organizing the post-IGY organization of Antarctic science. It was in essence an early blueprint of what would become the Antarctic Treaty regime of a continent “by and for science” that played in Berkner's mind under the Kiruna midnight sun. Ahlmann was, however, too busy to take on the challenge, inadvertently admitting that as a Swede one was not expected to get too deeply involved in Big Polar Politics, even when world history was to be written.Footnote ³

There was clearly a personal aspect to his declining the offer. Ahlmann was 68 years old, he had his IGU presidency to consider, and he may not have identified too closely with Antarctic affairs, despite his role as instigator of the important Norwegian-British-Swedish expedition to Antarctica 1949–1952 (the NBSX). But it could also be read against the backdrop of Sweden's long trajectory as officially a non-actor in polar affairs since the 1920s. This official policy had suited Ahlmann well when he wanted to secure Nordic interests against the major powers in the Arctic because it had given him the freedom to support Norway through all his scientific networks and diplomatic and political channels that he had access to (Sörlin Reference Sörlin and Sörlin2013). To enter the world stage and serve purposes of what ultimately had to be part of Big Power geopolitics was a different matter altogether. The moment of inquiry in the late 1950s came also right before Sweden had started to adopt a new international role, that of the progressive small state, advocating the UN agenda and solutions in favor of peace and protection of small state interests. So, both outside expectations and domestic interest aligned with the timid nature of Ahlmann's personal ambitions in Antarctica to make the conclusion fairly obvious: that this was not a diplomatic role that he neither could or should take. Swedish polar science may have served a purpose to benefit Scandinavia; that it should extend beyond that was not part of his equation nor that of the Swedish Government, which of course wasn't asked. As for polar geopolitics, Ahlmann was a one-man institution.

The Norwegian Approach – Circumpolar Science as Realpolitik

The Norwegian component was quite significant and is a telling case of how in a single nation there is a solid response to Arctic strategic interests, both national and within a larger NATO framework. Robert Marc Friedman's comprehensive chapter in the three-volume Norsk polarhistorie [Norwegian Polar History] (Friedman Reference Friedman, Drivenes and Jølle2004), is a beautiful example of this and has paved the way for more studies from Kim Helsvig on the role of the Academy of Sciences in Oslo (Helsvig 2007) and by Ole Anders Röberg (Roberg 2005) on Norwegian geophysics. In what follows I shall attempt to shed new and additional light on the Norwegian story by giving a fairly detailed account of how the activist agenda grew in the 1950s and how it was shaped by geopolitical considerations that were interwoven with the scientific priorities. This was nothing new to Norway's polar science but in the postwar decade leading up to the IGY 1957–1958 it became reinforced by the special circumstances predicated by the Cold War.

The general situation of diplomatic and political contacts after the war was different from what it had ever been before. Norden had been further disunited and here was a new Cold War under way. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark had negotiated to form a defense coalition, but then came the formation of NATO in 1949 which finally split Norden as a security arena. There was, nonetheless, some military and scientific cooperation between NATO and Sweden, as we have already seen above and as has been confirmed in a growing literature over more than a decade (see e.g. Dalsjö Reference Dalsjö2006).

But there was also some confusion which reflected the difficulty that the actors involved had to face to navigate the new security situation. When Ahlmann, who as a true believer in Nordic cooperation was initially skeptical to the formation of NATO, was appointed ambassador it was for his good Norwegian relations (Sörlin Reference Sörlin and Sörlin2013). But it was also an Arctic and a Cold War appointment to facilitate Swedish collaboration in the North Atlantic security environment. Sweden followed developments in Norway closely after the demise of the Nordic alliance in 1949. When NATO North command was relocated to Oslo in 1950 this led to a lot of speculation and Ahlmann at that point stated that the Eastern Bloc countries had reason to believe that their security was further pressed. Ahlmann, being fundamentally skeptical towards American culture (rather than to US foreign policy) talked in 1951 of an “aggressive” attitude, especially from the US. Ahlmann also claimed that many Norwegians were embarrassed by NATO policies and the operational military character of the North Command. Soviet representatives could in fact refer to Swedish sources when they protested against Norwegian and NATO policies, he argued (Petersson Reference Petersson2003, 59).

Further Norwegian bases were expanded and prepared for NATO use. But Ahlmann also reported that it was not clear to what extent Norway had in fact departed from earlier policies. The Swedes really did not know. Ahlmann was in frequent contact with foreign minister Halvard Lange who in December 1952 told him that Norway would not do anything that would jeopardize security in the Scandinavian north, by for example releasing Russian base installations in Finland. Sweden wanted to avoid precisely that: bases on the ground on the Scandinavian peninsula.

After discussions on the highest level with the US (Eisenhower and Dulles) Lange in early 1953 was able to convince them that permanent NATO bases would be an unwise provocative step in Scandinavia. In late 1953 an issue was raised of rotation air forces meaning that NATO air forces should operate from Norwegian bases. Sweden was again surprised and argued that the chances of détente that had opened up after the death of Stalin would not make this step necessary. Ahlmann spoke to Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen, who was reticent, and with Lange who was far more pragmatic. Lange in particular “hoped,” he told Ahlmann in January 1954, that bases in northern Norway would not be necessary for the rotations, but on the other hand that Russians would not care whether they occurred in the north or the south. Ahlmann disagreed and claimed that northern airfields would be more sensitive and particularly threatening for Sweden, should Russia undertake counter measures (ibid.).

Ahlmann was a dove rather than a hawk and was prone to light and optimistic conclusions. For example he thought on his departure from Oslo in June 1956 that NATO was probably going to change its character, cease to be oriented towards the Soviet Union and rather turn into a pan-European alliance not directed eastwards. This of course was a position that quickly became outdated as the crisis in Hungary unfolded later the same year. In the following year the issue of NATO bases in Norway came up again and was highly critical in 1957 and 1958.

It is against this background that we should consider polar policies and polar science in the 1950s. In general Norwegian Arctic science was much marked by the country's geopolitical situation and the security and national policy roles of Arctic scientists were far more pronounced. In this case study we will look further into the diplomatic discussions concerning the IGY North Atlantic research stations and we will see not only how scientific agendas and the location of resource facilities were influenced by Cold War politics, but also how international collaborations in science were maintained and even improved despite political constraints.

Field Stations and Polar Geopolitics

On 4 June 1954 astrophysicist Halvor Solberg, chief responsible scientist for the Norwegian IGY effort, wrote a classified and urgent memorandum to his host Department of Church and Education regarding Norwegian participation in the meteorological program of the IPY. Solberg noted that the “holes” in the European-African North-South cross section of stations that the Norwegians had been asked to fill in the Arctic were Bear Island and Svalbard. Since this proved too costly the Norwegians had, Solberg noted, negotiated with the Swedes to take over the Svalbard station, which would seem natural since the Swedes “had expeditions in Svalbard during the two preceding polar years [1882–1883 and 1932–1933].” The Swedes had no problems with that, Solberg continued and the Swedish parliament was already asked for support needed to sustain a station at Kapp Linné on Western Svalbard.Footnote ⁴

This seemingly cordial gesture between the old union counterparts might surprise us. Was it only that the scientist wasn't fully aware of the Realpolitik involved? Well, perhaps rather the opposite. As soon as Solberg referred to the Svalbard situation, he went on to say that the Bear Island station should be set up by the Norwegians themselves, for foreign policy and security reasons. Solberg, responsible for the Norwegian IGY science, and with a quite meager budget for it, would soon realize that his mission was part of a game far bigger than he had imagined.

That scientific stations and geopolitics belonged together was of course already an established truth in the Norwegian foreign office, after the Maudheim station and the NBSX Antarctic expedition, with Ahlmann as primus motor and his old comrade Sverdrup as the Norwegian brains behind it (Swithinbank Reference Swithinbank1999; Lewander Reference Lewander and Lüdecke2007). But if the small countries in the past were able to manage their own affairs, the Cold War meant that things quickly grew far more entangled and the presence of security concerns became stronger. In late October 1954 State Secretary Gustav Heiberg received attaché Robert N. Magill at the American embassy. Magill told Heiberg about the recently held IGY-conference in Rome and the ambition to start more stations in Antarctica. The US government, said Magill, wanted “friendly nations” to come together and set up the missing stations “for quite political reasons.” Heiberg consulted Sverdrup who did not see any imminent probability for Soviet expansion in Antarctica and advised no action. But Heiberg insisted that Norwegian sovereignty was weak in Antarctica and he finally concluded that Magill should be given the answer that Norway will investigate plans for the future.Footnote ⁵

In these days of late October 1954 things happened quickly. On 28 October Heiberg met with Leiv Harang, aurora physicist and former head of the Norwegian defense research institute, who argued that the Norwegian IGY budget was insufficient. Harang also revealed that the Soviet Union had installed a radio-sound station on Svalbard. In that context, Harang noted, “Since the Russians have such a station on Svalbard it has been mentioned whether the Swedes should not withdraw their plans to participate on Kap Linné.”Footnote ⁶ Interestingly it seems as if Solberg's 4 June memo had only now become known to Heiberg; on 10 November he jotted down on a copy of the memo: “We should have had this one before,” and on the same memo the foreign minister Halvard Lange himself noted on 7 December: “I received this at the end of June and have by an unfortunate forgetfulness let it rest.” Heiberg, at any rate, was fully aware that now he needed to act decisively. A new memo by Solberg had arrived the same day and Heiberg's reaction is telling: “It looks as if the times around the International Geophysical Year 1957–58 can be very critical years for our Arctic Sea possessions. We must therefore as soon as possible take a standpoint on what we can do to secure them as best we can.”Footnote ⁷ The new twelve-page memo was more explicitly political than the one of 4 June. Solberg reported about the possibilities to get the USSR into IGY thanks to the change of direction following Stalin's death. The Russians were anxious, but calmed down as they learned that the scientific activities were to be conducted by “Scandinavian” expeditions only and that scientific cooperation was on the agenda. In Solberg's words the Arctic was for the Soviets a “holy sphere of interest” which they would never jeopardize. To them the ice floe research, scientifically impressive and productive as it was, also “represents a factor of the utmost military value.” To this Solberg seemed understanding but also regretted that it meant that the observations were considered military secrets, in distinction from the practice in the West (a misunderstanding, obviously, but perhaps Solberg was of this opinion) which gave the USSR an advantage. In this lay the chief gain of making the Soviets join IGY: their data would become available to Western scientists. He was hopeful that the collaboration during IGY would lift the veil “that has hidden their secretive work in the Arctic.” Solberg also referred to his frequent conversations with the Americans during “recent months” and that they were convinced that the Soviets had political goals and “not strictly scientific interests” behind their Arctic activities. The ice floe research on Nordpol 3 would for example be a means of mapping meteorological conditions to pave the way for future military air operations. In addition, the Americans had proposed “that the Russians might have plans to build a deposit of war materials (nuclear bombs?) in this, strategically, perhaps most important area of the world.”Footnote ⁸

It was in this perspective that Solberg read the recently established Soviet Barentsburg station although there still seemed to be some uncertainty surrounding the sources of the traffic that had been decoded in Norway. Would the glaciers serve as Soviet air strips? Were not the Soviet coal ships more heavily loaded going up to the Arctic than going home with their cargo of coal? If so, obviously the mines must serve as storage rooms for weapons and devices. The immediate sources for Solberg's intelligence, he wrote, were the conversations he had held during the Union for Geodesy and Geophysics International (UGGI) conference in Rome in September and the following IGY preparatory meetings with the Swedish and American representatives. The increasingly security-framed conditions for IGY science was, according to Solberg, received in quite different ways.

The American added that the Norwegians should set up a station in Bear Island as well, “before the Russians might get the idea to go ashore.”

In the Foreign Office the report was immediately seen in light of territorial and security interests. As to the Swedish reaction, State Secretary Heiberg noted: “The best would be if we could run the [Svalbard] station alone. If we do not have the means to do that, the issue should well be pondered with Ambassador [Hans] Ahlmann as soon as possible.” Heiberg's comment to the American reaction was quite different and demonstrated the geopolitical realities clearly: “I totally agree and we should if possible start already next summer. Prof. Solberg is going to the US in January and he hinted to me that he might be able to acquire material and other economic assistance there.” Yet another note on the cover of the Solberg report concurred: “It would be best if we could fix it on our own.” To this the Minister, Lange, added: “Yes.” The only doubts voiced towards a unilateral Norwegian action were economic; it would be costly both to set up Arctic stations and have operations in the South Atlantic (Bouvet Island, Princess Astrid Land, Peter I Island) and Antarctica, Heiberg reflected.Footnote ¹⁰

In a swirl of notes and communications over the coming days and weeks Heiberg and his colleagues in the Foreign Office managed to totally revamp the Norwegian IGY effort, multiplying its funding from a mere 0.8 to an impressive 5 Million Norwegian Kroner (ca. 1 million US dollars), and to seek cooperation with the Americans mostly in the Antarctic operations but also in the Arctic. Correspondence was intense with American authorities and not only Solberg traveled to Washington for talks but also, in March 1955, Harald Ulrik Sverdrup went on an aid-seeking trip to his erstwhile homeland. Perhaps most noteworthy in this process are the details that became known about the details of the American reaction in the Rome meetings. It turned out that the “American” that Solberg had referred to was Lloyd Berkner, one of the chief instigators of the IGY and head of the US IGY committee – and, as we remember, also present at the opening of the Kiruna Geophysical Observatory in July 1957. Berkner (called Birkner by Heiberg) had “pressed” the Norwegians on Svalbard, Heiberg noted, indicating the strategic priorities that the Americans had in the Arctic and the indication that the US might send special personnel to Oslo to seek more intelligence on Soviet Arctic science. He also went into detail about Solberg's conversations with Nicolai Golub from the Soviet embassy; Solberg had been convinced that Golub asked to see him in order to gather intelligence despite officially giving other reasons. In the same note Heiberg argues for the use of stations as political instruments in the Arctic: “I wish to strongly recommend that the station [in Bear Island] is set up in 1955 to thereby make the assumed Russian plans superfluous. The station must be permanent.”Footnote ¹¹

Part of the diplomacy surrounding the IGY preparations was to have the Swedes change their plans and move to an alternative location with Finland and Switzerland in the Murchison Fiord on the North East Land of Svalbard. The Swedes seemingly had no objections to listening to Norwegian demands, just as the conversations in Rome had indicated, but when the discussions were formal they rather presented their original plans. The Secretary of the Swedish IGY committee Nicolai Herlofson had sent the original memo on the Swedish IGY program to Gunnar Jarring in the Foreign Office in Stockholm and asked him to pass it on “in some suitable way” to ambassador Ahlmann and through him to the Norwegian authorities. The letter mentioned that Sweden's plans were supported among Norwegian scientists such as Solberg, Harang, the director of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute Theodor Hesselberg, and others.Footnote ¹² Ahlmann sent the memo on the Norwegian Foreign Office on 27 November and the Swedish plans were further supported by scientists in Norway in the following winter.Footnote ¹³

In the long run the Norwegian position consolidated. A secret memo (undated but likely from February 1955) repeated the arguments for an exclusively Norwegian station on Bear Island noting also the needs for civilian air traffic on the polar routes. In Svalbard, the planned meteorological observations by the Swedes at Kapp Linné were officially recognized as problematic, despite the historic precedence Swedish science had in Svalbard from previous Polar Years and the fact that “Sweden is not a great power.”Footnote ¹⁴ In July 1955 this position was already an established fact and the Swedes had decided to move to North East Land. Their official argument was magnetic distortion at Kapp Linné but the real reason was that they did not want to be close to the Soviet activities in Barentsburg, according to what Solberg had learned from his colleague, astronomer Bertil Lundblad. That the Finns were joining Sweden at Kinnvika irritated Norway, likely because they were seen as too close to the USSR. The Swedish decision was in one sense welcome but it also raised concerns: now Norway had to build the station alone which might cause delays and threaten the anticipated 1957 start.Footnote ¹⁵

Why Is There Not a Scandinavian Polar Science?

The cases of Swedish and Norwegian polar science that have been given above, brief and certainly not fully complete as they admittedly are, still convey a sense of fundamental difference between otherwise seemingly similar Scandinavian nations, small and located at the northern periphery of Europe and with open and ethnically and culturally quite – but not totally – homogenous societies.Footnote ¹⁶ Seen from a distance it may appear that we are also talking about nations that developed strong and rich traditions of polar field science thanks to their geographic position and their longstanding traditions of northern travel, craft, and modern science. This is also a trope that is repeated over and over again in the literature of polar science and its history. The image did hold some truth in earlier phases of polar science, say before the First World War, but as the cases above have demonstrated, from the1920s onwards the two nations deviated as much as one could possibly conceive not only in their scientific rationale but also, I would argue, in the actual styles of their research: their choice of topics, collaborations, and methodological leanings.

The Swedish style of polar research turned around decisively when Sweden's immediate economic interests in Spitsbergen ceased in the 1920s. The new research program, launched by Ahlmann that replaced the old resource-oriented one, had two very important dimensions, embodied in the style of work that he applied on his field expeditions. The first was precision. Ahlmann was early made aware of the need to secure long time series of meticulously measured data sets in order to be able to argue solid relationships from field work.

The second key dimension to Ahlmann's program was its lack of economic aspirations for Sweden. This was a polar science befitting a polar policy of demonstrable non-usefulness in material and resource terms, a post-imperial and post-expansionist science that subordinated itself to whatever claims could be heard from other nations, especially Norway, but in a wider sense all Western nations and even, although much less unconditionally, the Soviet Union, with which Ahlmann, as we have seen, had cordial relations (Sörlin and Lajus 2014). The subject matter of Sweden's polar research in this period – climate change, its trends and its possible causes – was in this respect ideal: it was fundamental enough to not bother anyone and yet provided field experience and empirical geographical knowledge important enough to become an asset for foreign policy and security advice in Sweden and Norway.

This included a brief stint of climate related advice in the US in the late 1940s. Ahlmann's work was propagated in the United States military by Rossby, whom he knew from his successful attempt in 1945–46, commissioned by the Swedish government, to recruit Rossby to Sweden to head the build-up of a modern scientific meteorological service.Footnote ¹⁷ From his position as chair of the Panel on Meteorology in the Joint Research and Development Board (JRDB), Rossby recommended to the Executive Secretary in April 1947 that the JRDB take up studies of glaciology and “the characteristics of ice, snow and glaciers . . . in view of the present emphasis on Arctic warfare.” During April and May 1947 Ahlmann was doing a lecture tour in the United States, giving talks at universities such as Yale, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and others.Footnote ¹⁸ More concretely, Rossby recommended to the Board that it inform the Secretaries of War and Navy of “the existence of a serious gap in the present research programs of the [armed] services” and that it send “one or more officers to Stockholm to study under Professor Ahlmann.”Footnote ¹⁹ Rossby also referred to a draft letter by Vannevar Bush, chair of JRDB, supporting the idea. After the Committee on Geophysical Sciences followed up in June by deciding on transmittal to the Executive Secretary of the Board, Ahlmann, accompanied by Rossby, presented his research on “polar warming” (Sörlin Reference Sörlin, Fleming and Jankovich2011) to the JRDB's Committee on Geographical Exploration on 16 June. He was, according to the minutes, quite outspoken in his advice to the Americans, expressing the need for no less than two ice-cap stations on the Greenland ice sheet and pole to pole radio-sonde stations; both these undertakings were on a scale where American involvement was desirable, he added.Footnote ²⁰

Rossby knew what he was talking about, he had for a long time followed Ahlmann and his research environment, which was also one of a small number of research institutes in Sweden after the war that received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. They were friends, but the recommendation to the highest military research agency in the heavily militarized science scene in postwar United States, we can't attribute to bias by friendship. Rossby had seen the light through the eyes of Ahlmann, he had done so already for some time, and now he heard him speak as well of the need for global measuring schemes of strategic interest, very much the kind of ideas Rossby also cherished. So, there was clearly a political dimension to Ahlmann's research, although it in no way interfered with Norwegian economic interests, nor was there any Swedish geopolitical interest that stood higher on the agenda than the missions that Swedish science could carve out in the basic understanding of climate change or in assistance to Norway and her allies. But, importantly, that support came as a derivative of the science: the science had originally not been planned or construed in order to serve geopolitical interests, and certainly not those of the United States, it just turned out that they could, in ways that Ahlmann apparently found useful. Precision and neutrality rather served as assets; with these properties of the research its value as advice carried an even higher weight.

The Norwegian science followed an entirely different logic. Already when Norway was still in a union with Sweden polar exploration was one of the areas where Norwegian nationalism was most intensely manifested. Fridtjof Nansen's crossing of Greenland in 1888 and his journey on Fram across the Arctic Sea 1893-96, complete with ensuing dramatic ski trip and wintering in a stone hut in Franz Josef's Land, were events that boosted patriotic self-esteem and made Nansen a national hero. Nansen was also one of the most respected and outspoken of Norwegian elite secessionists. The deeper message of his and his colleagues’ work, typically in marine and geophysical sciences where Norwegians quickly became world leaders, was that the science became part of a broader political and nationalist agenda (Friedman Reference Friedman1988; Sejersted Reference Sejersted1993; Hestmark Reference Hestmark1999; Schwach Reference Schwach2000 and Reference Schwach2012; Drivenes Reference Drivenes2004; Börresen and Wale Reference Børresen and Wale2008). Its territorial dimensions were decidedly North Atlantic and included the poles. Economically the logic was tied to chief Norwegian trades such as fishing, whaling, shipping, minerals and energy, from hydroelectric power to fossil fuels.

After the secession from Sweden in 1905 this specifically Norwegian pattern of science politics was made official foreign and security policy with an intense focus on the polar regions. How science was generally subordinated to the politics in the period between the two world wars has been well documented in earlier scholarship by Norwegian historians (Blom Reference Blom1973; Berg Reference Berg1995; Drivenes Reference Drivenes2004). The special case of the IGY preparations, as seen through the eyes of Norwegian security- and foreign policy, provides an attempt to demonstrate the political conditioning of Norwegian scientific activities in the early Cold War period. Science comes across in the archival sources from the Norwegian Foreign Office as a tool of politics that proved increasingly useful. The content of the science was, in this respect, far less important than what it could achieve in geopolitical terms. Especially clear evidence of this was the careful work put into locating the IGY research stations in Svalbard, where American security interests were readily accepted and Swedish scientific priorities, and traditions, were neglected when they clashed with adjustments needed to stall perceived infringements from the Soviet Union.

In comparison with the Swedish style of polar science the difference is stark and sends a message about the importance of the national elements in the framing and embedding of science. To investigate national styles of science in this way confirms the importance of the historiographical turns alluded to above: it is a combination of social, economic, spatial, and political factors that makes Scandinavian circumpolar science in the mid-twentieth century decades relevant, not the iconic “breakthroughs” that have gone down in the history books. Prototypical in that regard is Ahlmann's work on “Polar warming,” starkly denying later anthropogenic CO2 forcing orthodoxy but essential to understanding links between field science methodological morals and Cold War scientific advice. In a linear historiography of climate change Ahlmann is an amusing footnote; in an integrated history of circumpolar science politics he stands out as a towering figure, setting agendas and putting states to action (Weart [2003] Reference Weart2008).

Bringing out the differing Arctic trajectories of two close neighbors also brings a wider message about comparing Scandinavian nations and their science. The Scandinavian states share a lot in common, especially to the outside world. They are lumped together as small Lutheran welfare states with strong civil societies and very able, often world-class science. They also share a very solid presence in the polar regions, especially the Arctic. But when odds come to ends they perform an Arctic science which is quite dissimilar in scope, scale and rationale, and they do not collaborate much, not because of rivalry but because their nationalist and political agendas diverge.

What does this tell us of Scandinavian science? Or, to put it more succinctly: why is there not a Scandinavian polar science? A former attempt to approach the Nordic nations comparatively focused primarily on Denmark and Sweden and covered a longer time period, from the eighteenth century to the 1930s. A set of papers presented a similar image of two neighboring nations who shared a northern research interest but performed their science quite differently, each building its own trajectory (see Bravo and Sörlin Reference Bravo and Sörlin2002a). Danish Arctic science, part as it was of a colonial project in Greenland, focused on people, language, and culture. It developed a unique variety of integrated anthropology called “eskimology” with Kaj Birket-Smith (e.g. Birket-Smith Reference Birket-Smith1936) as one of its major representatives and built further on an early tradition of manifesting colonial power relations by displaying cultural artifacts in Copenhagen (Harbsmeier Reference Harbsmeier, Bravo and Sörlin2002; Bravo Reference Bravo, Bravo and Sörlin2002), but also included Arctic medicine and health and even some elementary resource economics typical of the colonial state. Danish geological sciences also flourished based on work in Greenland and followed a quite rigid style of field work morality which disfavored modern technologies (Ries Reference Ries, Bravo and Sörlin2002 and Reference Ries2003). The Swedish science in comparison followed a narrow trajectory strongly focused on minerals and geophysical sciences, preferring basic to applied research and with little or no interest in people or culture; the Arctic was defined as distinct from the Scandinavian circumpolar north where there, on the other hand, was a long standing tradition of scientific interest in the Sami (Broberg Reference Broberg1981–1982; Sörlin Reference Sörlin1988 and Reference Sörlin, Sörlin and Rosqvist2014).

One conclusion may be that there is continuity in diversity. Scandinavian nations and states have followed different paths in their approaches to the Arctic and their various science agendas have been accordingly dissimilar. Nonetheless, the discursive homogeneity which links the Scandinavian countries together, both seen from inside Scandinavia and from the outside, is a reality. So, why is it that we continue to talk about Scandinavian science and the Arctic and the Nordic countries despite these persistent differences? Part of the reason is probably that from the outside they seem less different than when they are compared internally, a benevolent version of what has been observed in conflicting ethnic nationalism, for example in the Balkans; what Michael Ignatieff with a reference to Sigmund Freud has called the “narcissism of minor difference” (Ignatieff Reference Ignatieff1997, 34–71). Another part of the reason might be that after all there are in fact many similar features; Scandinavian Arctic science has always been marked by strong activities in the field sciences, and by a “presence in proximity” drawing on the geographical closeness and the fact that thanks to the Gulf Stream the Scandinavian Arctic and sub-Arctic have been reasonably well populated and open for harvesting of resources very far north.

Chiefly, however, the reason for the seeming unity of Scandinavian Arctic science is that the research has, despite its strong strategic geopolitical framing – in Norway and Denmark declared, in Sweden not declared but tacitly acknowledged – been conducted in an atmosphere of general friendliness. The friction points that have been accentuated in this paper are necessary to observe precisely because they go beyond the rhetoric of collaboration and make visible the fundamentally important links between resources, politics, and science. When that is said and done, however, it is also true that mutual respect for the different geopolitical roles has ruled among the Scandinavian countries as a livable accord. Scandinavian collaboration has ruled in words more than in deeds, in political spirit rather than in field practice.