Polar War
Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic
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- CHF 15.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
A gripping blend of travelogue and frontline reporting that reveals how climate change, military ambition, and economic opportunity are transforming the Arctic into the epicenter of a new cold war, where a struggle for dominance between the planet’s great powers heralds the next global conflict.
Russian spies. Nuclear submarines. Sabotaged pipelines. Undersea communications severed in the dark of night. The fastest-warming place on earth—where apartment buildings, hospitals, and homes crumble daily as permafrost melts and villages get washed away by rising seas—the Arctic stands at the crossroads of geopolitical ambition and environmental catastrophe. As climate change thaws the northern latitudes, opening once ice-bound shipping lanes and access to natural resources, the world’s military powers are rushing to stake their claims in this increasingly strategic region. We’ve entered a new cold war—and every day it grows hotter.
In Polar War, Kenneth R. Rosen takes readers on an extraordinary journey across the changing face of the far north. Through intimate portraits of scientists, soldiers, and Indigenous community leaders representing the interests of twenty-one countries across four continents, he witnesses firsthand how rising temperatures and growing tensions are reshaping life above and below the Arctic Circle. He finds himself on the trail of Navy SEALs training for arctic warfare, embarks on Coast Guard patrols monitoring Russian incursions, participates in close-quarter-combat training aboard foreign icebreakers in the Arctic sea ice, and visits remote research stations where international cooperation is giving way to espionage and the search for long-frozen biological weapons.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and three years of reporting from the frontlines of climate change and great power competition, Rosen blends incisive analysis with the vivid immediacy of a travelogue. His deeply researched and personal accounts capture the diverse landscapes, people, and conflicted interests that define this complex northern region. The result is both an elegy for a vanishing landscape and an urgent warning about how the race for Arctic dominance could spark the next global conflict.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Arctic could be the next front in a new cold war that rapidly alters the balance of geopolitical power, journalist Rosen argues in this captivating debut investigation. Two years of travel to the Arctic regions and hundreds of interviews bolster Rosen's hypnotic descriptions of the frigid crossroads where nations vie for domination and control. Through peripatetic wanderings, tag-alongs on Norwegian icebreakers and U.S. Coast Guard cutters, and tours of international air bases, Rosen identifies the alarming consequences of climate change and their impacts on a host of international security and scientific concerns. Particularly worrying is Russia's "vision and strategy" for arctic supremacy since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which has hampered scientific expeditions and crucial data sharing, leaving scientists "exhausted and limited at a critical time for climate-change science." What data can be gleaned is highly alarming: Rosen cites predictive modeling that shows the Arctic Ocean could see "ice-free summers" by 2030. However, rather than prompting nations to address climate change, this data seems to only be amping up the "urgency to stake a claim to the spoils of the rapidly melting arctic." Spotlighting America's "years of relative inattention" to the region, Rosen somberly warns that "while the American Arctic sleeps... the European Arctic prepares for war." Both lyrical and deeply reported, it's an ominous wake-up call.
