Under the Radome: The Architecture of American Cold War Surveillance

ABSTRACT Radomes, the iconic structures protecting sensitive radar antennas from wind, weather, and the prying eyes of adversaries, marked and maintained the geographic boundaries of America’s Cold War. The radome’s unique architecture, most commonly a rigid geodesic dome, captured the essential tensions of the Cold War, instantly recognisable but inaccessible; transparent (to radio waves) but opaque (to the naked eye); highly classified but often hidden in plain sight. Along the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line inside the Arctic Circle in Canada and in the arid desert of the Australian outback, radomes became the telltale signs of US surveillance and spy bases; a network constructed in partnership with American allies but politically fraught for their host countries, which had little political or technical control over them. Those bases, and the communities that grew up around them, have endured, but their new missions have raised troubling new questions of national sovereignty, dependency, and privacy.