The Coldest War: Imagining Geopolitics from the Bottom of the Earth

Puns are difficult to avoid when the polar regions and the Cold War are brought together. Metaphors of icy exchanges and thawing relations spring easily to mind, pointing up the potential for symbolic uses of the Earth’s icescapes in literary texts of the period. Of course, the Arctic and Antarctic are not only symbols […] but also material places with their own specific histories and geopolitics. However, while the strategic importance to the Cold War of the Arctic, positioned between the US and the USSR and occupied by early missile warning systems, is readily acknowledged, the relevance of the remote Antarctic is less immediately clear.