My travels in early 2001: Andrew Hodges

Out We$t 

Gran Canaria: pages 1 | 2 | 3
America (east): pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
America (west): pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 and page 10
More pages will follow.

Wednesday 18 April/ Thursday 19 April 2001


On the dark side: the Arctic batleground

Across Idaho, the Canadian prairies and Hudson's Bay, I remember the fantasist on my outward flight in February who told me all about how he used to target the Polaris missiles against Russia.

Do students now have the faintest idea how real the cold war was?

Who knows about SAGE, the biggest computing project of the 1950s, stationed in the Canadian Arctic?

Now it's National Military Defense in the Arctic battleground.

Now the gap between USA and Euroland is growing.

Even the flight screen shows the effect of continental drift.

GPS is at present an American monopoly.

The United States wants to stop the European deployment of a rival Galileo.
BBC News items: (1), (2).

We approach the tip of the great mysterious island of GREENLAND,
first step for European invasion and colonisation of America 1000 years ago.

US bases displaced ancient Inuit settlements in the 1950s. Now there is Inuit resistance to NMD. Denmark is legally responsible for all this, and is increasingly at odds with the United States.

A glimpse of Greenland's gigantic ice cap, a key to climate change and perhaps melting more rapidly now, threatening the stability of the deep ocean currents:(1), (2).

Now we fly on towards Iceland, over the strait where the Bismarck and the Hood lie buried
from the last great war between Europe and America.

Remember the Reykjavik summit? Remember Mikhail Gorbachev?

On 1 May 1985 I was returning to Europe from California, at the same time as President Reagan.

Remember: no-one then had any idea what was going to happen after Gorchachev succeded Chernenko on 11 March 1985.

On 5 May 1985, Reagan made his famously undiplomatic visit to Bitburg Cemetery. On the same day, the Reagan Administration declared its policy of sponsoring armed insurgencies against Soviet-backed governments in the Third World, the "Reagan doctrine..."

Dawn over Europe, 1 May 1985

Dawn broke

But those warheads are still around.
Steven Weinberg, New York Review of Books, July 18, 2002.



my Second Home Page

Next stop:

Brussels, Euroland
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