Fox-Main Dew Line Station, Hall Beach, Nunavut in 1979
FOX-Main DEW Line station at Hall Beach seen from the air. The "DEW Line", which stands for Distant Early Warning Line, was a chain of 63 radar sites extending from the north shores of Alaska to the east coast of Baffin Island, a distance of about 5000 km, designed to "protect" North America from a possible attack from the North during the cold war. The Line was built in the 1950's under very difficult conditions due to the extreme isolation of most of the sites and extreme weather conditions. At the time of our visit in 1979, the stations were all in operation. Today, many of these original stations have been decommissioned and abandoned, eight have been upgraded with more modern equipment and several new ones were build. The name of the network has also changed from DEW Line to North Warning System.
Photo taken in July 1979 with an SLR camera on Kodachrome film and scanned with a Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 slide scanner.
Published by Spiegel online in January 2012 as part of an article on DEW line stations. Please click here .