In May 1993, a group of scientific experts and public officials from circumpolar nations gathered in Anchorage to assess the human and environmental legacies of the Cold War in the Far North. Senator Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) opened the meeting by calling for action on the part of the participants to combat widespread radioactive contamination in the Arctic. With the end of the Cold War had come the potential for new collaborative initiatives in the circumpolar north, and Murkowski hoped to use this moment of possibility to establish an international commitment to combat contamination and repair environmental damage. However, he was also acting in response to the grievances of Alaska Native peoples, who had expressed their growing concerns surrounding the potential health impacts of recently-disclosed Cold War activities, including the dumping of radioactive waste in Arctic regions, nuclear weapons testing in the Russian Far East, and biomedical experimentation involving radiation in northern Alaska.
Alaskan political officials, federal government scientists and biomedical ethicists, and Alaska Native leaders and activists found themselves involved in a series of contestations over how and if these concerns could be addressed. Alaska Native communities would be left asking: Who gets to decide when an issue is resolved? How are different versions of the past made legitimate? And, what kinds of imagined futures inform scientific policy decisions? This paper, then, centers scientific temporalities of the Cold War as both a tool of American settler colonialism, and as a potential avenue for Alaska Native self-determination.
