What Happened to Canada’s Cold War Relics? - The New York Times

What Happened to Canada’s Cold War Relics?

The DEW, or Distant Early Warning, line cost about $7.5 billion to build in today’s cash. When it was decommissioned between 1988 and 1993 and replaced with automated radar stations, Mr. Jeffrey said, pretty much everything was destroyed, although a few of the structures were retained. As a result, the only physical artifact his museum today owns, aside from photos and documents, is a rule panel for a diesel power generator from one region. (Dismantling and cleaning up the stations, which were built minus consulting Indigenous people and with little regard for the environment, cost 575 million Canadian dollars.)

The Alberta-based Canadian Civil Defence Museum is a third museum that preserves Cold War history. In 2018, it purchased the remaining radar dome and buildings of Canadian Forces Station Alsask, located in the community of the same name that straddles the frontier between Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Fred Armbruster, the exclusive director and founder of the Canadian Civil Defence Museum, told me from his home in Red Deer, Alberta, that his interest in Cold War commemoration grew out of stumbling across a miniature bunker while hiking in Edmonton several years ago.

Mr. Armbruster is passionate about how the Cold War changed Canada.

“The Cold War became the future,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the Cold War, we wouldn’t have the technology that we have currently. We would be backstepped a decade or even more in technology because we wouldn’t have had anything to spur us on.”

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SRC: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/28/world/canada/canada-museum-cold-war.html