Nature, Technology, and Nation

Abstract

This essay explores the early cold-war attempts of the Radio Physics Laboratory (RPL) to link shortwave radio disruptions to the unique geophysical phenomena of northern regions. Born out of prewar traditions of geophysical research and applied to the communication demands of the Second World War, this approach placed the laboratory in the midst of wider post-war programs to assert territorial and cognitive sovereignty over the Canadian North as a way of empowering and defining the nation. The laboratory’s approach to linking nature and technology, however, required an additional act of sovereignty—a reform of the practices of geophysical research on which those associations depended. The resulting arguments from the laboratory echoed with broader post-war understandings of how the North and technology were intertwined.