Ebook: The unreliable nation: hostile nature and technological failure in the Cold War

Natures and technologies have long been central to the making of modern nations. Only recently, however, have scholars seen nations as sites where the very understandings of the 'natural' and the 'technological' were articulated, contested, and remade in the interests of the nation. This work examines the role of technological failure in crafting both national identities and the distinctive natures that support them. Focusing on the mid-twentieth-century attempt to extend reliable radio communications to the Canadian North, it explores how a group of Canadian defense scientists sought to visualize, map, and catalog the connections between a distinctive natural order of ionospheric storms, auroral displays, and magnetic disturbances on one side, and the particularly severe communication failures that cut the North off from the rest of the nation on the other.