Review of Wiseman, Frontier Science

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Matthew S. Wiseman. Frontier Science: Northern Canada, Military Research, and the Cold War, 1945–1970. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024. 308 pgs. ISBN 9781487504199.

Reviewed by Tina Adcock.

People who live with or love animals may find this book’s opening pages difficult. The first few paragraphs depict dogs suffering trauma and death from exposure to extreme cold during experiments conducted at Defence Research Medical Laboratories in Toronto in the early 1950s. Despite – or perhaps because of – its disturbing nature, this introductory vignette is well chosen. Both the experiments and the researcher spearheading them illuminate key themes in Frontier Science, Matthew Wiseman’s valuable survey of military-sponsored research in and about northern Canada between 1945 and 1970. These dogs’ pain was potentially Canada’s gain. Their reactions might yield a better understanding of how hypothermia affected humans, including how to arrest it among members of the Canadian armed forces serving in cold climates. For the lead researcher, Wilfred G. Bigelow, such knowledge could not come too soon. Having served in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps during the Second World War, he wanted to continue defending his country after 1945 by undertaking medical research of operational relevance.

Not all of the hundreds of scientists employed or funded by the Defence Research Board (DRB) during this twenty-five-year period shared Bigelow’s commitment to Canada’s security and defence. For many, intellectual curiosity and the potential for professional advancement were stronger lures. All benefited, however, from a new belief among civilian and military leaders in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom: that the Cold War would be fought in the northern reaches of Canada and of the Soviet Union, and that better knowledge about these regions’ environments and their suitability for military operations was needed. As the junior partner in this North Atlantic security triad, Canada had a powerful card to play, environmentally and scientifically speaking: its northern nature. Southerners regarded the Canadian North as a “natural” laboratory in which to conduct basic and applied research into arctic and subarctic environments. Northern Canada was further perceived as a simulacrum of the Soviet North. First-hand encounters with this region enabled the American, Canadian, and British armed forces to anticipate and plan for the capabilities of Soviet soldiers, sailors, and aviators in cold-weather warfare. The Canadian North was also an internal colonial space during this era. Wiseman documents how civilian and military scientists and administrators from the South engaged with Indigenous northerners and their homelands in paternalistic, racist, extractivist, and other harmful fashions.

Frontier Science explores military-funded science in northern Canada over six chapters. Chapters 1 and 4 survey activities at Fort Churchill, situated in subarctic Manitoba, and the Defence Research Northern Laboratory established there in 1947. Canadian, American, and British soldiers gained direct experience with the techniques and equipment used to fight in cold environments. Meanwhile, DRB-funded scientists worked to develop better techniques and equipment and to produce better knowledge about the Subarctic’s human and nonhuman inhabitants and landscapes. Scientific research at Fort Churchill expanded until the mid-1950s, when the Korean War diverted defence funding into studies with immediate strategic relevance. Basic and civilian research waned at Fort Churchill thereafter, while training in cold-weather warfare and operational research continued into the mid-1960s.

Each remaining chapter studies a particular instance or type of frontier science. Chapter 2 analyzes G. Malcolm Brown’s investigations into cold acclimatization. Brown searched for a biological basis for Inuit resilience to subzero temperatures, the better to screen southern soldiers’ fitness for northern service. Tests were conducted on Inuit under dubious conditions of consent but yielded insufficient evidence of acclimatization on biological grounds. Chapter 3 examines basic and applied entomological research in the postwar North. Engaging explicitly with environmental historical scholarship, Wiseman chronicles efforts to repel and eradicate biting insects through chemical experimentation with insecticides (including DDT) and to deploy such insects as agents of biological warfare. Chapter 5 focuses on military-sponsored science during the International Geophysical Year, including the multidisciplinary Operation Hazen on Ellesmere Island and atmospheric research near Fort Churchill. Chapter 6 considers how Canadian concerns about nuclear fallout from atmospheric tests of atomic weapons became focused on the North during the early 1960s. Studies from other circumpolar countries positioned northern Indigenous peoples as particularly at risk, given their reliance on country food and the biomagnification of hazardous material through food chains. The Radiation Protection Division accordingly sought samples and data from the bodies of Indigenous northerners, pressuring colonial medical practitioners and facilities for access to deceased subjects of autopsies as well as patients sent south for treatments.

There’s much to praise in this monograph, empirically, historiographically, and methodologically. By recovering an array of military-adjacent scientific actors and activities from the archival shadows, Frontier Science provides an excellent starting point for future research into this subject. Fascinating stubs of environmental and climate history include British desires to establish a nuclear test site in subarctic Manitoba and Canadian desires to artificially warm the North’s climate to encourage southern resettlement and industrial capitalism there. Some case studies expand scholarly understandings of recent topics of interest among environmental historians and historical geographers, such as nuclear and radioactive contamination of northern Canadian ecosystems.[1] Frontier Science also moves seamlessly between military history, the history of science, and Cold War history. Providing the right amount of historical and historiographical context at the right junctures, it’s accessible even to readers unfamiliar with these subfields.

There’s now substantial scholarship on the postwar North American North, including southerners’ military and scientific endeavours there.[2] What fresh insights and approaches does Frontier Science offer? Wiseman’s framework of “Canada’s long Second World War” (16) emphasizes the centrality of security and defence issues to all Arctic science, military and civilian, conducted between 1945 and 1970. The DRB’s progenitors “continued to advise and serve the federal government as though they were still at war” (17, emphasis original). Their agonistic attitudes influenced the research funded in 1947 and after, and therefore the very shape of science about and in northern Canada. “Environmental protection,” as the DRB understood and advanced it at mid-century, meant protecting servicemen from environments, often at the latter’s expense. Frontier Science offers an important counter-narrative to the ascension of environmentalism in North America during this era.

Wiseman also identifies an important external driver of Canada’s self-fashioning as a northern nation after 1945. Most scholarship on this phenomenon centres domestic discourses, such as John G. Diefenbaker’s Northern Vision. Frontier Science shows that foreign perceptions of Canada mattered, too. Americans and Britons believed that Canadians were natural experts on the North; Canadian military and civilian officials funded arctic science to make it so. Wiseman rightly critiques this hastily acquired, shallow “expertise,” arguing that southern scientists and administrators “regularly misunderstood and (worse) misrepresented the peoples, animals, lands, waters, and resources of northern Canada and the Arctic” (34). Wiseman is equally frank about his own study’s limits. His acknowledgments, introduction, and conclusion model how to discuss and frame historical research into northern Canada that is conducted by a southern settler and that focuses on other southern visitors to and sojourners in that region. Scholars in similar positions with similar projects should take heed.

Better historical contextualization of arctic science would have strengthened Wiseman’s analysis at points. In Chapter 5, he seems to suggest that government-sponsored “geographical and geological surveying” of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago did not begin until the 1950s (146, 153). The Canadian government sponsored such surveys throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as did British naval expeditions earlier in the nineteenth century. In Chapter 3, Wiseman could have underscored the poignancy and tragedy of his case study by specifying just how little southern researchers knew about insects in northern Canada prior to 1945, compared to mammals, birds, and even fish. No sooner did scientists conducting the Northern Insect Survey gain basic information about insects’ lives than their military funders weaponized that knowledge, seeking to extirpate mosquitoes and blackflies.

Connecting Canadian arctic science to certain more-than-national currents would likewise have enhanced some of Wiseman’s contentions. Contrasting the DRNL’s multidisciplinary scientific staff with the specialists in one or two disciplines staffing Canada’s other defence laboratories, Wiseman frames this multidisciplinarity as characteristic of “the DRB’s wider Arctic research program” (62). It was also characteristic of the international field of northern and polar studies at mid-century; Wiseman misses the opportunity to highlight the transnational dimensions of this intellectual approach. A similar missed opportunity arises when Wiseman discusses Americans’ and Britons’ belief that simply “to be Canadian meant to live and understand the North” (220). He does not mention that many Canada-based researchers who studied the country’s North during the early Cold War were not themselves Canadian. They had emigrated from the United States, Great Britain, and other western European countries to access academic opportunities, including DRB funding. Cast in this light, the conflation between “Canadian” and “northern” that Wiseman critiques appears even more ridiculous.

Frontier Science is a careful, thoughtful, and well-informed study of how war and conflict were fundamental to science’s conduct and expansion in northern Canada between 1945 and 1970. Environmental historians and historical geographers of North America and the circumpolar North will find much to interest and challenge them in this book, which has great potential to stimulate new lines of thinking about human-environment relations.

[1] See, for example, Ellen Power and Arn Keeling, “Cleaning up Cosmos: Satellite Debris, Radioactive Risk, and the Politics of Knowledge in Operation Morning Light,” The Northern Review 48 (2018): 81–109; Lisa Ruth Rand, “Falling Cosmos: Nuclear Reentry and the Environmental History of Earth Orbit,”  Environmental History 24 (2019): 78–103; John Sandlos, Arn Keeling, Caitlynn Beckett, and Rosanna Nicol, “There is a Monster Under the Ground: Commemorating the History of Arsenic Contamination at Giant Mine,” Papers in Canadian History and Environment, no. 3 (2019): 1–55; and Jonathan Luedee, “Locating the Boundaries of the Nuclear North: Arctic Biology, Contaminated Caribou, and the Problem of the Threshold,” Journal of the History of Biology 54 (2021): 67–93.

[2] A good introduction to this subject is Stephen Bocking and Daniel Heidt, eds., Cold Science: Environmental Knowledge in the North American Arctic during the Cold War (Routledge, 2019).

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Tina Adcock

I'm an associate professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University, where I research and teach Canadian and environmental history. I'm the author of *A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North* (UBC Press, 2025). I'm also the editor of *Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History* (UBC Press, 2018, co-edited with Edward Jones-Imhotep) and *Landscapes of Science* (NiCHE, 2019). My current research focuses on the cultural and environmental histories of oil in Alberta.

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