Angry Planet - Puffins, Zyn, and ‘Polar War’

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Greenland fever has faded for now but it will return. The world’s polar region, you see, is pretty damn important. As the planet heats and the ice melts, what was once an impassible warren of ice and snow has become a geopolitical opportunity.On today’s Angry Planet, we host journalist Kenneth R. Rosen who just published the book Polar War. He’s spent the past few years among the ice and snow, embedding with troops, yearning for snus, and smoking cigarettes with morticians in the long dark.Rosen knows what makes the Arctic so important and can see the truths that undergird the obsession with Greenland.Getting bombastic and angry about Greenland“We already have Greenland”How is Turkey “near Arctic?”The Greenland obsession as proof of climate changeWhat makes a good Arctic forceAccession to NATOServicing subs in the ArcticTrying to embed on a nuclear submarineMispronouncing place namesThe most powerful navy in the world doesn’t have an icebreakerSpies in the polar regions“It should have been an article.”Smoking under a tree in the darkSnus vs ZynThe death drive of the penguinBuy Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting ArcticUS Army Poorly Prepared for Arctic Operations: Finnish Troops Forced Them to Surrender During Exercises in NorwayCan we just appreciate the fact State secrets were just leaked on this sub?Life Aboard a Nuclear Submarine as the US Responds to Threats Around the GlobeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello, I guess I should do a real intro. I've gotten so, like, this used to be like a big produced show, and then I found that the softer opening is usually better and more interesting. So do you want to talk about Greenland and the Arctic with me?

No, I don't. sick of Greenland. No, yeah, we could talk about Greenland. Sure. I've got my pat answers all lined up. Well, I mean, that's the, that's unfortunately, as we were talking about before we jumped on, you kind of, you pick to the right topic for the right time, right? Like now, now like the general public is interested in this in a way that I don't think they were before. Yeah, even though the news cycle has swiftly moved past it, you know, and Greenland has fallen to the wayside ever since Mark Root, the Secretary General Nato, said that they came to some sort of framework agreement.

But I'm convinced it'll come back into the news cycle. And if you were tracking a chronology of my media appearances since the book came out, you'll see I've become increasingly bombastic and angry when speaking about Greenland. So I'll try my best to temper the emotions today. Why increasingly bombastic, angry? By the way, that you are Kenneth Rosen. and we were talking about your book, Polar War. Why increasingly bombastic and angry about Greenland, though,

just because it's like so ridiculous, kind of the way that things have played out? Well, because I don't have a crystal ball. I'm a journalist and a writer, and I did write a policy note in the back to help Washington and policymakers navigate some of the issues in the Arctic. But the way Greenland blasted into the collective conscious

earlier this month is both understandable and vexing at the same time. Vexing in the way that it entered the public sphere by way of Trump saying, I want to get Greenland and we're going to attack on the heels of the Venezuela unseating of Nicholas Maduro. But it's also not clear what benefits there are. People ask, you know, why do we need Greenland? And the only answer I could come up with is we already have Greenland. You're familiar with publishing processes. So when I filed the book a year ago, I was the last time I could really put anything in there.

And I had said then, as I do now, that we are great partners with the kingdom of Denmark. And through that partnership, have wonderful unlimited access to Greenland. So what he wants from it, I don't know. I can't fathom. I could give you a bunch of lines about, oh, well, we need rare earth minerals. And that's true. But we already have the agreements that allow for that to happen. We need more defense in the Arctic.

True. We already have a Greenland, a basin Greenland in the north. We could expand that if we want. So it's confusing because it's so erratic and follows suit with what everything else President Trump has been doing. And that's my spiel, Matt. And that's the final word. Yeah. Well, for now.

Yeah, I mean, for now. Have they been doing that thing where, and God knows I'm guilty of this as a journalist, I'm sure you probably are too, where you're. you ask the subject, like, okay, so what's going to happen? Will you make the predictions? I try. Well, I'm better than I used to be. And so I try now to ask people, and I did this for the book as well, you know, were someone to do X, what do you think the response would be? And there's a more likely Arctic flare-up that I tossed around from the very outset of reporting the book. And that's only now making it into the more marginal news. outlets in the, a European Arctic, but it hasn't come into the conversation full board in the U.S. because the U.S. is primarily concerned with Alaska and Greenland now. So one of the reasons I was excited to talk to you about this just in general, I mean,

obviously the Greenland thing puts everything in the news, but there is like, as your, as your book describes, like, there are reasons to be interested in this area. It's not, even though the way that the U.S. is going about it and like the Greenland obsession is wild. There are strategic defensive reasons that great powers, quote unquote, should be interested in this region, right? Yeah, absolutely. Walk me through those.

Well, as the Arctic is warming four to five times faster than the rest of the planet. And with that warming comes the opening of new shipping lanes and also accessibility to those rare earth minerals and subsurface materials that would be of benefit to a number of industries. For America, that's defense and also computer chip design and creation. It's become more and more of a focus of nations that haven't traditionally been Arctic nations for that very reason. And so the eight Arctic nations, you have Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, or Canada, and the U.S. and Denmark is a part of Greenland, so Denmark sort of folded in there as one.

You have nations outside of those eight who are seeking a stake in decisions that are being made in the region because it's becoming more accessible. Otherwise, it was just this place that we could ignore at the top of the world and only a few people really cared about since it was on their littoral coastlines.

But, I mean, beyond that, there's also the impacts of climate change that are actually damaging communities that exist there, which is a totally different conversation about sort of a medium-level security matter when it comes to the security of communities and people and livelihoods and indigenous rights as opposed to like hard security, what we're talking about, defensive positions and operational capabilities. How do you get interested in this region? How did I get interested in the region? Yeah, because there's a personal story here, right?

Yeah, well, I was, you know, I was a cub reporter out in June. Juneau, Alaska, which is the state capital for several months when I was younger. And, you know, as many young people do, look to the north and the wild and say, I want to start a life up there. And I ended up coming back to the region many, many years later to report a magazine article about security issues in the north because I was talking with my editors. And we were trying to come up with potential hotspots in the globe that would come after the invasion of Ukraine, regions that were not being. wholly attended to by the U.S. or other nations partnering with America. And so we looked at sub-Sahara Africa, I looked in Indo-China, and then I was looking at the Arctic, and because I have an affinity for the Arctic from my previous work there, and then also just I love snow and the cold

and darkness. I started researching the North and found it to be much bigger story than I could fit into a magazine article, and lo and behold, you got Polar War three years later. So who do you see as the, obviously you kind of outlined to the eight major nations. What are the battle lines here in the Arctic? Who are like, what are the groups? I would say there's loosely nations like Turkey and India who are claiming to be, you know, Near Arctic powers, near Arctic interests. They're observer states to multiple treaties in the north.

and also the Arctic Council, which is the main governing body of the north. And then you have, so that's one group. And then you have Russia and China cooperating on the northeast passage. And then you have U.S. and NATO writ large on the other western hemisphere. And they've been slowly budding heads in the region over the past 10 decades, about the last 10 decades. But it's been ratcheting up more with a recent. Surgent Russia opening up Cold War era bases in the north and China shipping liquid natural gas across the top of Russia from eastern China to Europe. And the U.S. has frankly just not been paying that much attention to the region.

We did see with the Biden administration some more invocations of the need to operate in the high north and to have more capabilities and compatibility with our allies in the north. Since then, Russia's just sort of claimed it as its own, and frankly, it is its own. I mean, Russia is the largest stakeholder in the Arctic and is threatened by climate change and then by the Western states wanting to also claim part of the North. So it's evolving every day and writing a book like this was extraordinarily difficult to see how the news changed day in and day out and what people were doing in the North was different than what they were doing the next day. So I like to look at the book also as just a snapshot of those competing interests

and whether or not those three factions change over the next few years. At least we have a great way to ground us in how that ended up becoming what it is then or in the future. What does it mean to be near Arctic? And how can a place like Turkey possibly justify any kind of interest there? So where do you live? I live in South Carolina. South Carolina, great. Mid-latitude, not wholly a part of the Arctic, but the warming there does impact you.

It will impact the cost of fish and seafood that you get that might come from the north, that might come from Norway. The melting of the polar ice cap will potentially change the circulation of the Atlantic current, which would change whether or not you have predictably reliable spring days or if you may get snowfall in March, April, May, if at all. And that's the sort of argument that a lot of those nations are making Turkey, India, China, is that, yes, we are far removed geographically, but the changes that are occurring in the North, the reasons it's warming and those trickle-down impacts will reach us as well. And I think one of the arguments I make in the book is that as far removed as you could be from the Arctic, you're still touched by it every single day. I mean, I'm in the northeast right now, and we always hear about the polar vortex, right, coming and getting everyone cold. And I think it hit you guys as well. So there are things that are happening and they slowly, slowly start to impact our lives. But right now, the major concern is this militarization and the opening up of more access. So that isn't directly impacting us, us, you and I in the mid latitudes, but these other things will start to occur slowly over the next few decades. I always think it's so interesting. And this is something we've touched on on the show before.

There's this, obviously, if you only listen to like American conservative media and conservative talkers, like this climate change thing, who cares, not happening. I mean, even Trump, as this polar vortex is coming in is like, what happened to glombed? global warming, blah, blah, blah. But all you have to do is look at what other world militaries are doing, how they're talking, how they're actually preparing and operating. Right. They take it very seriously and are changing and reacting to the reality, right? What President Trump is saying about Greenland is on its face in admission of climate change. We need it for security and access.

There's climate change. You can't have one without the other. Okay, let's get into some of, so this took three, three years to report out. Yeah, correct. And that was undertaken through various trips and stints embedding with the U.S. Coast Guard, the Norwegian Coast Guard, the Swedish Armed Forces, the Norwegian Border Guard. I spent a month living in Iceland and circumnavigating Greenland. And I also spent a lot of time in Alaska in the Bering Sea, trying to get a sense of what our military was doing, but also to really understand what NATO planners and militaries were doing. And as I moved sort of west to east in that venture over the course of those three years, I garnered a great appreciation for what those NATO allies were able to achieve in the north and extremely devastated by what the U.S. was incapacitated.

of in the North. And I think that comes clear in the book. And I hit on it a couple of times, in part because I didn't want the peanut gallery to say, oh, well, that's an aberration. It was only one thing that you saw. But I consistently saw an American inability to operate in the North and to appreciate how difficult it can be. Yeah. Yeah. So there's this story kind of floating around right now that I think got picked up in like the British press and has kind of gotten aggregated out where the exercise yeah can you kind of walk us through that and talk a little bit about that because it sounds like it reflects what your experience was yeah but it's not it's not the first time either um the one you're referring to was a nato exercise uh in which the finish armed forces

um well the u.s had to surrender to the finished armed forces during an arctic exercise um they were outnumbered outmanned and uh outgunned uh in in the above the arctic circle and there was a NATO exercise only two years ago in which the U.S. Armed Forces had to give up on finding a feld aircraft because it was too cold and too dark and they didn't have the equipment necessary to go and retrieve it, which, as you can appreciate, is a disaster if there's advanced level technologies on that aircraft that could fall in the hands of an enemy. So that's just the last, that's just two instances in the last three years, But generally speaking, the U.S. really only trains in these regions for short periods of time and then those forces go get deployed to the Pacific or Middle East or what have you. And we only have the 11th Airborne Division based out of Alaska as our primary Arctic force.

And they have been trying to instill within that regiment, you know, a sense of purpose in the north. But that's still not enough to compete with these armed forces that that is their identity and historically has been. their identity for centuries that, you know, we are in the cold. We, you know, could defeat Napoleon if he were to come back to the, to the region. And that's just not the case for America, which was a sad realization indeed. Yeah, you just kind of take a short deployment up there and you're just doing your time and then you leave. You never get really adjusted to it, right? You don't get adjusted, but then you also don't have those same commanders and NCOs who are there to, you know, share and impart the knowledge that they've learned over five, 10, 20 years. And there's no knowledge sharing.

no growth in that respect. People think that when you get deployed to Alaska, it's like my two years sitting and then I'm out of here. I'm going to Arizona. I'm going to go to Georgia. You know, let me get Fort Stewart because I don't want to be in the cold anymore. And it's not this identity that is necessary to appreciating and then also operating up there. What does it take, do you think? Like, what is it, I mean, obviously there's the easy things like, you know, they're there. It has there been in their identity for hundreds of years. But what is it about the forces that are successful there that that sets them apart? They fall back on the rudimentary tools and ethos of operating the north. You change your clothes when you get wet, full stop. You have multiple,

you don't need multiple layers. You need multiple clothing stops. The U.S. comes up with a convoluted five-layer system in order to stay warm when the finish, the Swedish armed forces that I was with had two. but they were very warm and they would change when they sweat. It keeps trench foot away and keeps you warm and also dries off your clothes for the next battle. They use skis rather than snowshoes because they appreciate the fact that skis can be used for gun mounts. They could be used for tent poles. They can be used for other things that snowshoes couldn't be used for. they rely on

cabled telecommunications devices rather than radio signals because they know that radios are finicky in the north and that the handhelds that the U.S. military uses, the plastic, the high composite plastics, are more apt to be brittle and breakable in the north. They carry smaller weapons rather than bigger weapons because they're easier to warm

as opposed to, you know, 155 millimeter howitzers whose barrels will free, over, if not tended to consistently. I also saw the Swedish armed forces take classes in the viscosity of different liquids and understanding what their reactions are to different temperatures, whereas I heard a U.S. Marine Corps enlisted officers say that, you know, why do we need to know how to use skis when we could just throw grenades? You know, so there was this totally, there was this total disconnect in how you should operate and how you shouldn't operate. And I think the Nordic and Scandinavian nations really have a more robust curriculum when it comes to that and also the identity

component that we mentioned earlier that's already built in. As you move from west to east in your journey, I'm also wondering like what the view of Russia is and how it changes. Did I say west to east? I mean like east to east. I'm going to, I'm going to always get confused because such a big, big region, like east to west. Yes. Well, west to east. Well, as you get closer to the border with Russia, say. Oh, as you get, okay, you're right. The view of how the view of Russia changes. I mean, until the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO, those two nations were horrified after the invasion of Ukraine. This resurgent, Russia and the narratives coming out of the Kremlin were stirring up. emotions not felt since the Second World War. You know, they share these, Finland, especially

shares an enormous border with Russia. Norway shares a modest border with Russia. And then Sweden's sort of stuck there in the middle. And they began to spend more on their defense, their defense apparatus because of the fear that Russia would then invade them. Estonia has also increased their defense spending in part because of their shared border. with Russia and realizing they're a small state and that maybe NATO won't come. And then these fears are justified because there have been instances of hybrid tactics and destabilization efforts within those countries that can't quite be attributed to Russia, but, you know, officials can more or less guess who would want to see a nation eat itself

up from the inside. What, in the timeline of your reporting, when you were in Sweden, Are they about to join NATO? Have they joined NATO yet? Like, what's the, are you there right before? So I was at the NATO summit when Finland acceded to NATO. And then I was in Sweden shortly before they acceded because there was some issues with the, the coddling or the acceptance of Kurdish.

militia fighters in the country, which was not Turkey's favorite tactic. So I was in Sweden for a more important thing before the NATO session, which was the Defense Cooperation Agreement under Secretary Blinken, Anthony Blinken, which stated that the U.S. could have more access to Swedish bases and military units across the country. So there was already this, sense that the U.S. needed to do more with its partners and to collaborate with people who already had the infrastructure and the military components in the north. So it was really an exciting time because all this was changing. And then we were heading into the next presidential election, which then shifted gears from this appreciation for how much the West had to come

together to push back against the resurgence in Russia and a pacing challenge of China to now worried about whether or not the U.S. would support its needs. security in the in the next four years. Yeah, I would assume that the people in those countries in that in that moment were kind of just looking at what was in front of them, right, which is like a resurgent Russia, just trying to get into NATO, trying to kind of like shore up everything and get everyone on the same page, got thrown quite a curveball. And it was, yeah, and it was an existential change for Finland and Sweden who had traditionally

been non-aligned and independent of any global conflict. So to have them make these statements on the world stage and to join NATO was a sea change and in fact was aligned with what President Trump wanted from his first term, which is more defense spending from these nations. And now we had two puzzle pieces that were lacking in the Nordic and Scandinavian planning of defense and NATO come together to form a more perfect union in the Arctic of defense capabilities. But yeah, now it seems like the narrative has shifted to, well, maybe Russia is still a problem, but we have to worry about whether or not the U.S. would come to our aid where we didn't need it. What is the submarine lane look like in the north? There's nuclear subs up there, right? Yeah, so the Kola Peninsula, which is above the Arctic Circle in Russia, is the home to the Russia's nuclear fleet and its submarines.

I know that the surveillance capabilities of Western nations in what they call the Guk gap, the Greenland, Iceland, United Kingdom gap, the area of sea that runs between Iceland and the UK and also Greenland isn't as monitored as much as it should be or as much as military planners would like for it to be. where the U.S. and Western nations post those submarines, I have no idea. Unfortunately, despite my multiple efforts to embed on a nuclear submarine, I was not successful. Did you see, this is just a tangential thing. There was a guy on Reddit. He's playing Crusader Kings 3. supposedly he was stationed on a nuclear sub

and he took a picture of of his current playthrough with like a foot like took a photograph and uploaded it on the Reddit supposedly from inside of like the IT room and it was identifying enough that people were like hey man you're going to get in a lot of trouble you're not supposed to be like outing your outing where your nuclear sub is anyway

you know a reporter can't get on can't get unbedded onto a nuclear sub, but somebody will... They did, though, but they did. I was really P-Oed because, I don't know what sort of rating we have for parental advisory. I was pissed off that we couldn't, I couldn't get on one because Vanity Fair then came out with a photo essay, I think, like mid-last year from a sub. And great, I think that's what they really wanted. They wanted to show, you know, a show of force, a force projection photo spread rather than a nosy, you know, know, journalist figuring out where their weaknesses were or trying to paint them.

What are your questions about life on a nuclear sub? Like, what do you think would be interesting to learn? What do we not know? I mean, I know there's a lot we don't know because they're nuclear subs, but. Well, I mean, I would just sort of like to go on a mission where they operated in the high north and then, because they have in the past broken through the polar ice cap and deployed troops there on the gyrating ice sheet that exists up there for now. Just to see the comfort level of the semen and service members who were trapped under water for six months and then their first breath of fresh air is in negative 40 degree Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures.

And that's the tactic I took with the U.S. Coast Guard and the Norwegian Coast Guard and the Swedish Armed Forces was to just sit back and observe. And then I had a comparison. I was able to say, oh, this is what they did in that situation and this is what the U.S. did in that situation. And that's what I wanted to see. And a fly on the wall is the best way to be in these instances. It's a pretty tight space to be a fly on the wall, though. Yeah. Yeah, I could have done it.

Hide away in a torpedo tube. Where do you, do you call it husbanding if a sub comes in or is there a different term of art for that? I'm not sure. I was just recalling that the U.S. has started to base. or refuel submarines in Iceland, which was apart from the tactics that we used after 20, the mid-aughts, 2014, when Iceland says it didn't want nuclear forces coming through there anymore. And after the U.S. got kicked out of Keplovic Airport, where we also had stationed troops. So I don't know what it's called, but I do know that U.S. submarines are trying to make a show of force in the Arctic more and more regularly. and one of those ways is through Iceland.

Yeah, because it can't, uh, was it, is it Putufik that they, they could go to in Greenland, but I don't think they, there's not much a sub can do there, right? There's not much it can do there. And also, um, because it's the, well, it has a deep water port, but it's only open part, part of the year, um, during the summer. And other than that, it's impossible to get through. Um, so there's only limited capabilities for it to, to, to, to refuel. you know, three months out of the year.

But they are trying to build a deep water port in Nome, Alaska, which could potentially be open year-round for situations like that. So you'd see, there's not a lot of like infrastructure for the subs, American infrastructure anyway for the subs in this Arctic area, then. No, and there's not much need for it. I mean, if you're coming from Norfolk where some of our subs are stationed, you can have direct access to Greenland and be up in the Arctic Ocean. in several hours, right?

So the East Coast primarily is of concern, and that's where the GI UK gap comes into place. If it's not surveilled enough, then is the East Coast surveilled enough? And are we in a defensive position for potential incursions from Russian submarines? I don't know anything about Chinese submarines. But I do know that Russian submarines had visited Finland. I'm looking at my map here. Finland and Sweden, not that long ago. When you say not that long ago, you mean like last week or?

Two years ago was the last sighting, like the confirmed sighting. And then whether or not the intelligence communities know anything about the current state of submarine affairs is beyond my pay grade for now. So one of the, um, started to rapidly switch gears, but kind of, I just have a lot of questions. if we can bring it back to Greenland and I apologize. But one of the stories that I kept thinking about as all this Greenland stuff plays out is the Thule disaster, which is just like something that seems to be completely forgotten about now. And I'm wondering, in America, at least,

is completely forgotten about now, which is this moment during the Cold War where America irradiated, irradiates a large part of Greenland and poisons a bunch of the ice. And I'm just wondering if there is a memory of that at all in Greenland or in these Nordic countries. If there's, you know, I know it was a long time ago. But is there any sense of that like America has never, has not always been the best caretaker of Arctic spaces? No. And the few times that I've seen it mentioned, you're referring to Camp Century where they had

portable nuclear generators that they never cleaned up after removing them. And that was near the current Petific space base, formerly Tully. Is it Tully? I said it wrong. Yeah, that's all right. I think Petific is also pronounced, I think it's B2FIC, but everywhere you go in the Circumpoly North, they change. There's no real recognition of, you know, America's,

failure there. I think it's one of those stories that comes up, be like, hey, did you know? And then Greenlanders and the Danish will move on to something else. But what they do recall with fondness, at least until earlier this month, was the fact that a lot of their current infrastructure, their roads, their airports were all built by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, Army Corps of Engineers, that the U.S. has provided geological surveys for their benefit so that they could potentially open up mining industries to both of their their own GDP toward this hope that they would become independent from Denmark. But it's, you know, the fact that the U.S. isn't a great steward to the Arctic doesn't need to be predicated on that

story alone. We just need to see what we've done in Alaska. We know we've opened up the Ambler Road project. We're continuing to open up preserved wilderness spaces for increased drilling and exploration. And that's a devastation to both the indigenous communities and to a national treasure. We haven't been responsible there. We haven't been responsible in Valdez. And now we're, you know, opening up more and more with the hopes of, I don't even know, securing what exactly? You tell me. I think you would know more about it than I would. So you would have to tell me. That's why we're both flabbergasted is because I don't know. If I don't know, then it's a frightening thing indeed. there's a lot of things that I think the current administration is doing in the Arctic that seems like hopeful and wishful thinking.

And what I argue for in the book is that in order to benefit from the North and the Arctic is to more conscientiously move into the Arctic and using partners on the ground, both indigenous and international partners, to understand how to benefit from the region, whether that looks like, and this will be in your interest. whether that looks like data centers moving to places where cooling is a lot cheaper. Well, maybe that's a possibility, but we don't need to just say, let's open up, you know, refugees, natural refuges in the north and hope that there's oil there. That seems caustic and not well thought out. Well, they'll build small modular nuclear reactors to power all of it. They won't need the oil. It'll be fine.

I did see someone argue for that once during my research that, you know, small portable nuclear generators are indeed something that would be a benefit in the Arctic writ large, but I just don't know enough about their operation and their cost to say whether or not they're beneficial. But I can say that renewable energies in Alaska is a surefire win, though we seem to forget about that. and blanket statement. We're not doing that anymore. We're doing nuke. Yeah. It's okay. Yeah, we don't do wind.

We don't do solar. We don't do geothermal. We just, we're done with all that, apparently. I mean, the, the dirty secret about small modular, small portable reactors is that, um, there's a lot of promises, but no one's deployed one yet. Well, the Russians have. I mean, the Russians have their, um, their, they have some in that mountain, don't they? where they were like one of the plutonium farms, a cult of a farm.

Well, they have, yeah, they're farming. You got farmers out there like scraping plutonium out of the ground. There's a Russian ship that is a portable nuclear reactor that is, I don't think, seaworthy. And there was news last year about it being stranded on one of the coast of Russia. And, you know, there's a disaster waiting to happen. Which isn't a surprise, I guess, with some Russian vessels, right? Right. Dating back to the Soviet era.

You know, you go to war with the army you have, right? Not the one you wish you have. But is that one of those things where it's like this is what Russia is saying they have versus the versus what we know is the reality? Like, you know, they're not, God knows America is not a whole lot better, but we're not, they're not exactly, they're going to be advertising the best parts, right? Yeah. And I've heard that argument before. and that worry before. But I can confidently say,

even if, say for, so Russia has more than 50 icebreakers, right? That's what we're told. Even if they had two, they would be a hundred times better off than the U.S. Right. Because we have how many ice breakers?

Do you mind the audience? One, but it's hardly operational. We did just buy another one from Canada, I believe, and we're supposedly building more, but I don't know if you know this, the shipbuilding industry is in America's atrocious and non-existent more or less.

So even if the news was fake, that they didn't have as many ice-faring ships and that they weren't operational as much as we say, even if they had two, they'd be better off than we are. And China certainly has more than two. So what is, all right, so backing up, what is an icebreaker? Why is it important to this story? So even though the ice is melting and the permafrost is thawing, there's still going to be sea ice in the north at some time throughout the year.

Scientists are saying that by 2030, there won't be sea ice during the summers, but there still be first year and second year sea ice, which could be a feet, two foot thick, two feet thick in the Arctic. And to open up those channels of commerce, you need icebreakers to help facilitate the movement of ships that aren't ice class vessels that can't break through ice. Have you heard of the Titanic? Exactly. So there are some vessels that simply can't go through.

through these waters. And you need ice breakers in order to facilitate the transfer of those commercial vessels. It also is important for military and scientific research to be able to go up into the high north and break through the ice in order to get data and readings from deep within the Arctic Ocean. So these things are necessary. On top of, you know, not even mentioning search of rescue operations, where one of these cruise ships that aren't ice classified goes up to the northwest passes to try to take 300 people to an Arctic expedition and then get stuck, you need vessels that are able to operate up there. Now you're going to ask me, how many icebreakers of the U.S. Navy have? How many icebreakers does the U.S. Navy have?

None. Okay. So the most powerful Navy in the world, allegedly, does not have an icebreaker capable of traveling, you know, 900 million nautical square miles of sea. That's not the right number. You're going to have to fact check me on that. But, you know, I just wanted, with the book, I really want to underscore these things to say, you know, we've always said that we're the greatest at all these different things. And as American, I'm ashamed to say that we're just not in this fear. Why don't we have an icebreaker? I think the importance has been, the premium has been placed on operating in the world's oceans elsewhere.

The South China Sea, you know, we're more invested in regions of immediate concern, and that's our failure as a nation. we haven't looked toward a broader horizon, a farther horizon, saying what might we need? We always have looked and said, what do we need? You know, the fact that we're building naval ships now for the next 10, 20 years, but aren't putting more and more effort into building autonomous vehicles in their places, you know, autonomous vessels, seems irrational and also unawares of the current. state of conflict in the world. And so to have seen 20 years ago that Russia was moving into the Arctic should have lit a fuse and said, we need more polar security cutters in the Coast Guard. We need more ability to access the North. And it just hasn't come down to Washington, in part because it's hard to sell that to the public, right? Well, it's melting. Why do we need ice breakers? Well, it's melting,

but not that much. Or, well, then we don't need to worry about it. Or, you know, we're not up there. Who's up there? No one's up there. So why bother? It's a hard sell. But I think for military planners who are aware of the way the Scandinavian Nordic countries are operating and also how China and Russia are operating, they can see the writing on the wall. What does it take, like what kind of ship has to be built to cut through the ice? Like what do you put on the front of it to get through? And like, what does it actually look like? Well, they have, so normal ships are angled or regular ships are angled in such a way

that it cuts through the water more quickly. And sea, ice-faring ships have a more. more a bulging bulb in the front to act as a ballast in the ice. And it's extremely unstable in regular open sea. So there's a whole design that's different. And then there's also the composite and the thickness of the material that's different. And that changes depending on what class the vessel is because there's one through eight of the different types of ice classes. you can cut through first-year sea ice, you can cut through a small amount of ice,

you can cut through four feet of ice. You can cut through five, but only if you're going 20 knots or only 10 knots. So there's various different degrees of ice capabilities, but we just don't have that. You know, the range. We don't even have the range. What does it take to be a spy in the Arctic? You have to like the cold. You have to be comfortable in the cold, I guess.

I mean, spy operations are still the same, right? It's not anywhere different except it's not wholly different than operating elsewhere as a, as a, you know, intelligence asset elsewhere in the world. But in the Arctic, there are fewer people. So I think that newcomers are more quickly gleaned as potential spies or potential foes of the nation. It's hard to really move around the Arctic without people knowing that you were there. in part because they're aware of outsiders. Right. So how do you, like, how do you solve that problem? How do you get into these communities if, you know, they're so small? Like, how do you solve that?

Well, so some of the, some of the spies that I cover in the book were Arctic researchers who came with credentials from Canada and moved to Northern Norway, which has been a hot bit of intelligence gathering for the last. five years and worked at universities that way until they were discovered. Then you have the Russians who are claiming asylum or seeking asylum in Finland or Norway or Sweden and crossing the border that way and saying they didn't want to fight the war. And so, you know, I've come here, but then, of course, later turned out to be spies as well. I think this is preface on the notion that we need more of a presence. You know, the State Department opened up a listening post in Trumpso and Northern Norway, in part so that they can be more visible and that way blend in more readily.

And we've seen that more and more in Greenland and Norway with different nations opening up consulates and diplomatic posts for what I believe could be that very reason. Tell me about Delilah. Delilah. What do you want to know about Delilah? just who she is, why she's in the book. Well, you tell me, why do you think she's in the book? Why do I think she's in the book?

Yeah. You're the first person to ask me about Delilah. I had to think for a second because obviously I changed her name. Right, right, right. Because I think that you do a decent job in this book of, I'll take decent. I'll take decent. You'll take decent. I'll take it.

You do a good job. Okay, look. All right. You back up. It will have a meta conversation. I read a lot of nonfiction for the show and otherwise. And I mean, I read a lot. I read a lot of nonfiction.

I read a lot of fiction. And something I've come to realize in the past couple of years is that a lot of nonfiction is really shitty. And a lot of it is really shitty often in the same ways. A lot of times, it could have been an article. right it's like a lot of times it was an article and then they thought well we'll expand it and then it's

and then it bombs just just nothing yeah just nothing just like yeah just treading water my favorite kind of nonfiction that I've read a lot lately is like big promise in the beginning doesn't pay off

anyway you have characters and people and human beings in this book about a great power competition and the polar region that like root it in these communities and you talk to people, you were there and it like gives a color and texture

to the nonfiction that is often absent from this kind of work. And that would that would be my like meta reason for why Delilah's here. Why did you include Delilah? I wanted I wanted someone from Alaska who was going to stand in for this notion that it's a region that'll kill you if you don't take care of it. You know, the book is premised

on the notion that climate change is real, so what comes next? Well, this is the militarization. But I also wanted to touch on something that, and I didn't have all the space to do, I wanted to touch on the notion that, you know, ecologically, we need to take care of the planet. You know, I didn't want to go too far into tree-hugging, but I felt like Delilah, given her job as a mortician, both physically stood for the death that was occurring in the Arctic, but also allowed me to tell the story beyond that, going back to the military, of how frequently the 11th Airborne was experiencing suicides within its ranks. You know, there were those efforts to reflag the 11th Airborne division as the Arctic Angels, yet the region has this, I don't want to say notoriety, but it has this Paul. wherein, you know, it's known for drug and alcohol abuse and also suicide. But I didn't want to go around just saying that or pointing to numbers.

I wanted to show the people that were actually witnessing it day in and day out. And she is an Anupiac woman who also dealt with the military in that respect. So it was a great perspective to see, all right, well, this is her home, but she's also seen these outsiders come in and respond to her home. And they're responding how? Oftentimes, you're suicide. Yeah, how long is the dark season? It depends on how far you go above the Arctic Circle.

It changes. It could be a month and a half. It could be two months. It could be less than that depending on where you are. It's a long time to go without seeing the sun for most people. Yeah, and they have things to help, right? They have happy lights, these little LED desk lamps that are supposed to give you the vitamins necessary to happiness, to increase your endorphins. But if you don't like the region, if you don't feel a sense of purpose, which is what the NCOs were trying to do in the 11th Airborne Division, then you're just not going to, you're going to fall prey to that.

You're not going to find the connective tissue that would get you through those dark seasons. And, you know, for me personally, I'm a fan of, you know, of working through the dark season through a number of extracurricular activities, depending on where I find myself. So I have my ways of managing, and I think other people do too if they have the right support systems. Okay, well, what are some of the things that the survivors of the darkness or the angels of the darkness have that lets them survive in an environment? So let me beat on this drum again is community. Is everything in the Arctic is predicated on your family and the people around you and you're not going to survive without them. And that goes both physically and mentally and emotionally as well. You know, I have a wonderful family back home, but there were also people who I met during my travels who made me feel like I was, you know, a lifelong resident.

And that that eased the journey and also reflected in the way the communities operated together. What do the people that live there, the indigenous people, the people who've lived there for generations, make of, I mean, I obviously know that, reactions are going to vary. But what do they see when they see the militarization and they see the melting and they see the change? How are they taking it? So because you have this interest in national defense and security issues, I'll tell you, I'll share this with you. Is a lot of the communities that I visited in rural Alaska, indigenous communities, population 300 or so in a lot of them, or Nome 2000. They see the military when the military comes in for an exercise and then it leaves.

And what do they bring with them the military units? They bring in generators. They bring in massive tents. They bring in a lot of equipment. They bring in portable kitchens. They bring in things that are useful to a small community of military operators working in a remote place. And then what do they do? They leave.

They take it all away with them. And the indigenous communities were wondering, why wouldn't you forward station some of this equipment? in our communities, we could use it, of course, allow us to use it when we need it, the generators, the mobile kitchens, some of the tents, some of the vehicles. And if you need it, you're already positioned out here in the far removed stretches of Alaska in case of an invasion or in case of, you know, defensive operations. And I found that to be extraordinarily fascinating. You know, the U.S. military ups and goes and doesn't hang out in places that are of strategic benefit. And it would cost nothing, more or less, you know, compared to opening up a full-fledged base.

And when we do see bases in the Arctic, what do they do? They're homogenous small communities that don't impact the area around it. They stay within their sphere, and that's it. So I thought that the reaction in this regard from the Zocco communities was really a keen insight into how we could better position our armed forces in the north. And then there's, of course, the reactions to just the broader news about Greenland and, you know, sucking out of the oxygen from a room that really didn't have oxygen to begin with.

I mean, I know you're probably tired of talking about it, but you have no idea. You have no idea, Matt. I'm a journalist. I like popping from one subject to a next. I like being a generalist. This is...

I do too. But I, okay, let me ask you, let me ask it this way then. Like, how does it feel to be the guy everyone's calling about Greenland? Like, what is it like to kind of be stuck at the whims of this madman? On one hand, it's great for the book. It's great for visibility on the subject matter of the book. On the other hand, I think, why aren't you talking to the community members who are out there?

You know, if this is of such interest now, then the best voices to hear are those who are living through the climate change impacts, the militarization impacts. And yet, I don't see that happening. I rarely see the indigenous voices coming out. And I mentioned this in the book. What we can learn from them of how to deal with climate change is a well of knowledge that isn't being tapped. So that's how it feels. It feels almost like we're back to square one where the outsider is more of a vocal point than the indigenous communities who can tell us much more, who can share their experiences and give us better insight. Like the one I just offered about, you know, for positioning of military assets in a region that is disparate and hard to get to.

Are you still smoking? Smoking. Yeah. Cigarettes? No, no, I smoked that one cigarette because I'd run out of snooose. So that's my real Arctic takeaway is I was smoking when I started out on this journey. And then the Scandinavians gave me snooos. And I've been loving it ever since.

And now it's come to America. And it's just this crazy zin. This is making me insane, actually, because it's been here. Snoose has been here for like 30 years, but no one was, no one was using it. No. Because I remember, I used to smoke, and I remember going into the, like, the gas station one day. And it was like 2001, back when I was still smoking and seeing like the snooose packs. And they called it snooose.

I was like, what is that? I like nicotine. I've got to try it. Hated it. Kept smoking. But now, yeah, like Zen. Everyone, everyone's on this Zen kick. Oh, I mean, I remember back when we would call it dip, you know, like this is just like a consolidated dip version.

Put it in a little packet, basically. It's the same thing. But people forget it. Here you go. Back to the original, the start of the conversation. How does the Arctic impact the rest of us? Well, all that snooos came from Sweden. They taught us a better way to get to get together.

They taught us a better way to kill ourselves. Yeah. I'll offer this as a. So I was thinking about like Trump's Greenland obsession, like the Greenland obsession, like all of that stuff. I think that there's a key, if I can do some like armchair psychology, memeology. Have you seen the penguin that they've been sharing? Are you aware of this? Yeah.

What do you make of that? It's AI slop. Isn't that the term of art? I mean, it is. Yes. There's AI slop penguins. But it's from a moment because there's a clip from a Werner Herzluck movie with the penguins. Yeah, but okay.

So how do you view that penguin? So how do I view that penguin is so the, I think there's the DHS account, shows the penguin going off. Yeah. Herzok asks, why is he doing this? And then it cuts to Americans have always known why. And it's like the clips of the brutality and the horror of what's going on in the country. Okay, but the actual penguin from that clip, like the original penguin. How do I take that?

That one's going to die. No, see, that's not. See, it's going toward a more hopeful future. Really? Okay. It's seeking out its people. It's going to find its clan that might have gotten that it got separated from. So there's two ways of looking at, yes, it's going out to die or it's going out to find the people that it left.

And I think that, you know, moving toward that mountain is another way of looking at it. Like, all right, we're going to go conquer, right? Or like, okay, well then, yeah, I was taking it the nihilistic and sad direction. Right. Right, which is, I'm only here to exercise the other mind. Whether or not I believe one or the other, I don't know, it's hard to say. I just think that the fact that they used it is sort of atrocious. It is.

Penguins aren't even in the Arctic, you know? No. No, that's like, I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous, right? You would have been better off with a puffin. Puffins are beautiful. I've got my, I've got a little like puffin coin. My parents got me when they visited it. Anyway. But yeah, no, that's just, I just, I've seen death drive all over America right now.

Like, that's what I'm, that's what I'm seeing. just like that. So when I see that penguin march to the mountain, like, that's what, that's what the country's doing. I don't think, I mean, I guess the conception of the people that shared the meme, it's going to find its community, it's going to conquer the mountain, right? Yeah. I think we're going out there where there's no fish and we're going to fall into that. Yeah, there's a number of ways of taking it, but I just, you know, back to the fact that there's no penguins in the Arctic is we go, you know, back to the initial thing. We don't know enough about the Arctic clearly and yet we won a whole Arctic Island. Let's get real, folks. Oh, okay. I think

the book is Polar War. The author is Kenneth Rosen. What are you working on now? If you've got another book, are you taking a break? Are you just promoting this one? Are you just enjoying your Zen? I do have another book. I'm enjoying my Zen and promoting this book. So, D, all of the above. Well, what's the next book? I can't tell you, Matt. Oh, that's terrible. You can't tease? I think I will tell you, I will tell you that in five years,

you'll want to have me back, though. Okay. Well, hopefully if we're not, if we're all still here and the penguin hasn't gotten to the mountain and killed over, I will, I will have you back on in five years. Cool, man. I appreciate it.

It's been fun. Absolutely. Thank you.