Word: arctics
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...ARCTIC REGIONS...
Classic definition of the Western Hemisphere was a line drawn by Pope Alexander VI. confirmed in 1494 by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The line ran from the Arctic to the Antarctic on approximately the 46th meridian, 1,475 miles west of Cape Verde. All lands discovered east of this line (including the Azores) went to Portugal; everything west of it was part of the New World which Columbus had just claimed for Spain. Iceland, by this definition, would belong to Europe. So would most of Greenland. So would a large part of Brazil...
...Americans also learned that the winters aren't so cold and the defenses aren't so hot. Even though Iceland is tangent to the Arctic Circle, its air is warmed by the Gulf Stream, its houses by water piped from its many hot springs. The best natural element of defense is Lake Thingvalla, which, because it is fed by these hot springs, never freezes, and is therefore ideal for flying patrol boats. Otherwise the advantages of the natural defenses are offset by the scarcity of roads and materiel-scarcities which the Yanks knew their Army would...
...second Plan opened new mines and industries, with ports in the Arctic at the mouth of the Lena and Kolyma Rivers. Later defense industries and power plants were constructed as far east as Lake Baikal, new oil fields opened in the Urals. Most railroad construction under the Plans was in the East, and as population followed production, agriculture and food industries followed...
Nature's Pincers. Between the Arctic and the Black Sea lie 3,000 miles of Russian border (see map, p. 24)-as long as the U.S.-Canadian border. The long miles bulge in a great convex arc-incipient giant pincers against Russia. It was to push these pincers as far as possible from Moscow and the industrial area of European Russia that the U.S.S.R. had grabbed buffer areas every time Germany had pushed over a nation on the Soviet border...