The Arctic Messenger Gains a Voice - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 23

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3 The Arctic Messenger Gains a Voice:
The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme
Remember that to change your mind and follow him who sets you right is to be none
the less free than you were before.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Before the late 1980s, any attempt to work cooperatively in the circumpolar Arctic had to
deal with the grim realities of the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact and the NATO countries ob-
sessively distrusted one another. Any suggestions that topics of mutual interest might exist
and could be tackled cooperatively were met with deep suspicion and formidable hurdles
on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It was a poisonous milieu and certainly not one likely
to welcome a proposal to monitor and assess the health of the circumpolar Arctic environ-
ment. Imagine suggesting to either the United States or the Soviet Union before the arrival
of Mikhail Gorbachev that cooperative studies should be put in place to evaluate the distri-
bution of radionuclides around such potential sources as sunken nuclear submarines or mil-
itary and civilian marine radioactive waste sites! But this is exactly what happened in the
Gorbachev years.
During the Cold War, there were some bright spots. In the years immediately following
WorldWarII,the United Nations divided the worldinto anumber ofeconomic commissions
- one of which became the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE).
Despite its misleading title, the UNECE was composed of the countries of Europe north of
the Mediterranean, the Soviet Union, Canada and the United States. This membership re-