DEW Line (a Cold War Relic)
30x38, collage, charcoal, india ink, amberlith film, 1977
The DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line was a line of radar stations roughly following the Arctic Circle across Alaska, Northern Canada and Greenland. They were established in the mid-1950s and were meant to detect and characterize an attack of nuclear capable bombers from the Soviet Union.
The artist’s father worked on the DEW Line as an Air Force Colonel and an Electrical Engineer specializing in communications. In 1956-57 the artist’s family were stationed in England near Ruislip Air Force Base. The artist has a vivid memory of talking on the phone with his father calling from Thule, Greenland, in 1956.
In the 1960s the artist saw the movie and read the novel, Fail Safe (1964), about how a minor technical error leads to the nuclear destruction of Moscow and New York City. He also saw the dark comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
In the early 1970’s the artist’s brother, as an urban planner, did work for the Hudson Institute, a think tank established by Herman Khan. It was through this connection that the artist became aware of and read Kahn’s book On Thermonuclear War, 1960, Princeton University Press. The book is a discussion of the survivability of a nuclear war. The artist particularly remembers a repeated refrain “Will the survivors envy the dead?”.
It was not long after reading this book in 1977 that the artist put together the images that compose this collage.
The charcoal drawing of the face in the collage was a done as an exercise, without a model, to capture physical features of a generic subject. However, it does bear some resemblance to the artist’s father.