Artico da una rivista internazionale
THE GREAT ARCTIC GAME
The warmer climate, new technologies for the extraction of hydrocarbons and
increasing interest for northern maritime routes are igniting the game for the Arctic.
Includes points of view of the United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark and Norway.
THE NEXT 25 YEARS WILL INTRODUCE
the Arctic to major power competition for secure access to energy, minerals, food and
markets on a scale hitherto unknown to the region. Historically, changes of this
magnitude, of the conditions for human life and activities, (climate change, discovery
of new major deposits of strategically important raw materials or the opening up of
new strategically important transport routes etc.), has frequently led to political
instability.
The main drivers behind the current changes in the Arctic are:
Discovery of new petroleum deposits at a time of increasing demand for, and
thus rising prices of, energy;
Technological development that makes mineral resources more accessible, and
thus contributes to and increases competition for them;
A general shortage of food in the world that increases the demand for fish
protein, and thus the competition for access to the rich fish resources of the Arctic;
The end of the Cold War, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the birth of
Russia, which ended superpower confrontation and, also in many other ways, changed
the geopolitical situation in the region;
Last but not least, a driver that increases the effects of the other four, namely
global warming, which threatens to ruin the subsistence and cultural basis of the
indigenous peoples in the Arctic, while at the same time it contributes to making the
region more accessible to human industrialized activity;
The Arctic and the Polar Sea
The Arctic covers about one sixth of the earth’s landmass, or more than 30
million square kilometres. Centrally placed lies an ice covered ocean, the Polar Sea.
It covers approximately 14 million square kilometres, and thus constitutes about one
half of the area that is normally referred to as the Arctic.
The Polar Sea is an inland ocean that has outlets into the Pacific through the
Bering Straits and into the Atlantic through the Greenland/Norwegian Sea. For the
remainder it is surrounded by nation states on the Eurasian and the North American
continents. One half of the bottom of the Polar Sea consists of a deep Central Basin.
The other half is a Continental Shelf, the majority of which is situated on the Eurasian
coast. Off the islands of Franz Josef Land, for instance, the continental shelf runs
more than 1,500 kilometres from the Russian mainland. No other ocean has a
continental shelf of this relative size.
THE POLAR GAME THE GREAT ARCTIC GAME
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The Central Basin is traversed by three, almost parallel sub-sea mountain ridges,
of which one constitutes the extension of the volcanically active Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
The Lomonosov Ridge, in the middle, connects the continental shelf outside
Greenland with the one outside Siberia.
The major part of the continental shelf surrounding the Central Basin is covered
by unusually shallow water. The average sea depth between the island of Novaja
Zemlja and the Bering Straits is substantially less than 100 meters, while the Barents
Sea, eastwards of the line between North Cape in mainland Norway and South Cape
on the Svalbard archipelago, is between 200 and 350 meters.
The climate is arctic. There are long periods of continuous darkness in wintertime
and similar periods of continuous daylight in summer. In the course of the short arctic
summer, the sea ice along the coast breaks up, and the snow-covered shores are
reverted to green tundra, where people have lived for thousands of years. The Arctic
has also given life to a rich flora and fauna with highly specialised species, like, for
example, some of the largest mammals in the world.
Most of the Polar Sea, up until now, has been permanently covered with ice.
Every autumn the sea ice that has survived the summer thaw starts to expand south
from a minimum extension of about five million square kilometres to a maximum of
around eleven million. On its way south it encounters new ice that spreads northwards
from the coasts, and that gradually brings surface shipping, other than by assistance of
icebreakers, to a complete stop. From October until June the Polar Sea, for all intents
and purposes, has been covered by ice from coast to coast. As we shall see, this pattern
is rapidly changing as the thickness and extension of the sea ice rapidly decreases as a
result of global warming
global climatic change. Long term temperature variations are substantially larger in the
Polar Regions than elsewhere on Earth. And the large quantities of ice in the Arctic,
both glaciers and sea ice, react dramatically to any long-term temperature change in
the Earth’s atmosphere. We shall return to this later.
The polar ice constitutes basis for a rich food chain. Algae and plankton grow on
the underside of the ice and constitute food for fish that again make food for birds, seal,
walrus and whale. The seal, that gives birth to and raises its cubs on the ice, in turn
provides food for ice bear and polar fox following in its footsteps, often as far north as
to the North Pole. For millennia the Inuit have found food from seals sleeping on the
ice or from whales coming up in the ice channels to breathe.
The Polar Sea, and the adjacent Norwegian Sea, contains some of the largest and
most valuable stocks of fish, the basis for an extremely lucrative fishing industry.
The Arctic land areas that surround the Polar Sea contain considerable amounts of
strategic mineral resources like diamonds, gold, silver, copper, iron, platinum, coal and,
not the least, uranium. Today the most economically important resource is petroleum,
oil and gas. It is estimated that around 25% of the unexploited petroleum deposits in
the world, or approximately 130 billion barrels of oil equivalents, are located in Alaska,
Arctic Canada and Russia, and in the continental shelf beneath the Polar Sea.
All territories in the Arctic, including the islands, are subject to undisputed
national sovereignty by the Arctic nation states Russia, the USA, Canada,
Denmark/Greenland, Iceland, and the Scandinavian Peninsula with Norway, Sweden
and Finland. The Svalbard Archipelago in the Barents Sea is under Norwegian
sovereignty pursuant to the Paris Treaty of 1920. According to this treaty, Norway is
obliged to grant all signatory powers equal rights with regard to the extraction of
natural resources on the islands. Pertaining jurisdiction over the Polar Sea and its sea
bed, including the delineation of the continental shelf between neighbouring nation
states, several questions, however, remain unsolved. We shall expand on this issue
later.
Even if large parts of the Arctic are sparsely populated, around three and a half
million people live north of the Arctic Circle, including more than 30 different
indigenous peoples or tribes. Dozens of different languages are spoken. The large
majority of the inhabitants of the Arctic are either engaged in hunting or fishing, the
extraction of natural resources, or associated with the military. After the end of the
Cold War, the military have been somewhat reduced in numbers. The majority of the
population lives in cities, towns or villages. This is especially so in Arctic Russia,
where the city of Murmansk alone counts around 310,000 inhabitants, and where there
are more than thirty cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants. On the Kola Peninsula,
Russia maintains the largest military base complex in the world with naval bases,
military airbases, army camps, firing ranges and exercise areas. In North America the
largest cities north of the Arctic Circle are Barrow, Alaska, with 4,500 and Iqualuit, the
capital of Canadian Nunavut Territory, with 4,000 inhabitants.
Except for the areas surrounding the Russian Arctic industrial towns, where air,
water and soil often are heavily polluted, the Arctic benefits from relatively clean air,
oceans, rivers and lakes, compared to the situation in the temperate zones of the world.
Territorial expansion into the Arctic did, as a rule, take place without the kind of
conflict and strife that has characterized expansion of national sovereignty in the
world’s temperate zones. Even when there were clashes of national interests, states
normally1 did not permit that it developed into major conflict. The Arctic was not
worth the risk. The main reason was that the states for a long time regarded the Arctic
as having limited economical value. With its remote location, far from political or
economical centres or important transport routes, it was also not considered military
strategically significant. After, and partly as a direct result of, World War Two this
view of the Arctic changed substantially. The Arctic region increased both in economic
value and in being militarily strategic and political significance. After the American
discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska in 1968, and after substantial Russian and
Canadian discoveries of oil and gas on their Arctic territories, it has been evident that
the Arctic is a major petroleum reservoir. The days when Arctic states, easily and
almost absentmindedly, would draw boundaries, sell (Alaska) or give away (Svalbard)
territories in the Arctic are irrevocably over. Or to put it differently: Had it been today,
the Major Powers would hardly, if at all, so light-heartedly have given Svalbard to
Norway as they did in 1920. But during the Cold War, the danger of inadvertent
nuclear war between East and West, if conflicts over boundaries or resources in the
strategically sensitive Arctic were allowed to develop, put a lid on such issues. The
Super Powers reverted from putting them to the extreme, and disciplined their
respective clients to do the same. After the Cold War such limitations no longer apply,
and states are much freer to pursue their national interests at will.
The Military-strategic significance of the Arctic and Polar Sea
In military-strategic terms the importance of the Arctic Polar Sea is a function of
the geographical location of the Polar Sea situated between the North American and
the Eurasian continents, and of the fact that the Arctic contains strategically significant
raw materials as well as important naval and military bases.
The shortest line between Russia and North America runs across the Arctic.
From the northern point of Canada, which lies 4,000 kilometres north of Ottawa, the
distance to Murmansk, Russia, is only a little over 2,500 km. With the development of
long range bomber aircraft, and even more importantly, with the advent of
intercontinental missiles during the Cold War, the direction of the treat of aerial attack,
both in Russia and in North America, became north. During this period, consequently,
a large number of radar stations for the early warning of attacks through the air, with
aircraft or missiles, were placed along both the Russian and the North American coasts
of the Polar Sea. Post Cold War, the American radar chain is being modernized in
order to constitute an important part of the global U.S. Missile Defence System.
Another important reason why the Polar Sea is militarily important is the fact that
it constitutes Russia’s only unrestricted access to the Atlantic. This is why Moscow
after World War Two decided to establish base-areas for its Northern Fleet on the Kola
Peninsula, with the associated air and army units in support. After the Cold War and
the loss of her Baltic and Black Sea base areas, the Northern Fleet base complex has
become relatively more important to the Russians than before.
It is not incidental that Russia’s Northern Fleet contains the majority of Russia’s
strategic submarines. These are submarines armed with nuclear tipped missiles of
intercontinental range that constitute the secure second strike capability of the nuclear
powers. Their primary objective in peacetime is to remain undetected. And the deep
Central Basin, especially that part of it that borders on the Norwegian Sea, is
extremely well suited as operations area for submarines that do not want to be detected.
In addition to the Polar Sea being ice covered, the combination of an extremely broken
and hilly sea bottom with large variations in the salinity and temperature of the ocean,
makes detection of submarines most problematic. Submarine launched nuclear
weapons still constitute an important part of the nuclear power’s deterrent force, and
the Polar Sea and the adjacent Norwegian Sea are still among their most important
operation areas, whether they are French, British, Russian or American. The Polar Sea
also has an important role as a transit route for American nuclear propelled submarines
between the East and the West Coast of the USA.
While, during the Cold War, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union allocated large
resources to military preparations in the Arctic, Canada, the country with the next
longest Arctic coast, only second to Russia, chose not to establish any significant
military presence in the North. Canada has always known that they could trust the U.S.
to deploy the necessary military force if need be. In addition, to establish a meaningful
military or naval capability in the Arctic is extremely expensive. The U.S. will thus
continue to be the main provider of military security to the North American Arctic.
And the good news is that Canada is protected, not by American generosity, but by
American self-interest, which is much more reliable.
The Arctic as Petroleum Province
After the Cold War the military-strategic value of the Polar Sea, as buffer zone
between the U.S. and Russia, has been reduced in significance, economic and
energy-political factors have become more important. This is, not the least, due to the
fact that large petroleum resources have been discovered in the region, and that it has
become technologically and economically feasible to exploit them at a competitive
price. Due to the harsh climate, production costs in the Arctic are high. In addition, the
markets are far away. That Arctic petroleum has become competitive is therefore also
due to rising energy prices and that it is situated in a region where conflict and political
instability does not threaten secure and reliable delivery.
Never the less, petroleum production in the Arctic is controversial, mostly due to
environmentally related political challenges associated with Arctic petroleum
production. Negative consequences for the vulnerable Arctic environment, to the
extensive fisheries in the region and to the living conditions for indigenous peoples in
the region, are among the issues that are being debated. Among the “western” Arctic
states, environmental issues and consideration for the well-being of indigenous
peoples have been high up on the political agenda for a long time. We have seen hard
debates taking place between environmentalists, the petroleum industry, spokesmen
for the indigenous peoples and local and central governments, over concrete issues like
oil and gas pipeline type and projected trace, (in North Canada and Siberia), and
whether certain especially vulnerable ocean areas should be closed to oil exploration
and production (in the Norwegian Exclusive Economic Zone, EEZ). In the 1980’s and
1990’s, Western governments were increasingly willing to subordinate their petroleum
interests to questions of environmental preservation and a sustainable development for
indigenous communities. Even in Russia, where the extraction of petroleum in the
Arctic has come the furthest, environmental issues moved higher up on the political
agenda. The technological development both within exploration drilling, petroleum
production and transportation at sea, that has made production safer and transportation
cheaper and more efficient, also contributes to increasing the pressure for exploitation
of the petroleum resources in the Polar Sea. With continued shortage of energy, and
thus political pressure to produce, the interests of the petroleum industry may once
more prevail over those of the environmentalists.
