Encircling the Earth between the stratosphere and near space is the ionosphere, made up of ever shifting layers of electrons and ions. The planetary character of this natural phenomenon was instrumentalized by radio technology for global communications. The modern forms of warfare, reconfiguring maps and borders since the beginning of the twentieth century, rendered both the scientific understanding of and technological engagement with this phenomenon invaluable. At the heart of “The Unreliable Nation“ is the story of how the planetary and the global were brought into the service of one nation and its distinct geographical and geopolitical identity in the context of the Cold War.

However predictable around the temperate latitudes, the high-northern ionosphere disturbed signal propagation and caused numerous radio apparatus malfunctions. This resistance to technology was articulated as a natural anomaly. The coupling of the anomaly with the Canadian northern territories in turn entered the national political imagination. The location of the North Magnetic Pole in Canada – manifested in the world’s largest experience of the aurora borealis, the northern lights – was the most visible revelation of a unique national identity, while the technological failure of the short-wave radio transmission associated with radio aurora became the locus and the impetus for distinct technocratic visions, discourses, and technological choices. Jones-Imhotep conjures powerful arguments about the combined histories of nature and of machines. The greatest achievement of the book is a nuanced and productive reading of technological failure as a condition – “not failed machines, but failing machines,” in Jones-Imhotep’s phrasing (p. 11). A masterful realization of the archival and analytical exploration that the category of “techno-science” demands of the late twentieth century historian, the book is not simply a contribution to the historiography of modern Canada or radio or atmospheric sciences. Pushing beyond recent narratives on the colonial politics of scientific activity in the Canadian Arctic as well as the history of the disciplinary consolidation of atmospheric science, Jones-Imhotep offers a methodological springboard for reflecting on knowledge and mediation broadly speaking.1

The projects, laboratories, and experts of Canada’s Defense Research Telecommunications Establishment (DRTE) serve as principle site for Jones-Imhotep’s investigation of technology, science, environments and the politics of unreliable communications, with its activities being well preserved in the numerous collections of the Library and Archives of Canada. The chronology of the book follows the first two decades of the Cold War. “The Unreliable Nation“ ends with the rise of a new communication technology, the satellite, and a novel configuration of the national imaginary and its contestation around the emerging groups of actors, ranging from native activists to Quebec separatists. Radio transmissions are the intangible artifacts that structure the book’s narrative and analytical choices.

The opening chapter, “The Nature of War,” is indispensable for readers unfamiliar with the overlapping histories of atmospheric research and short-wave radio communication in the first half of the twentieth century. The rising strategic role of ionosondes in modern warfare developed in parallel with the better known radar, but the instrument visualized the height of the reflection surfaces of ionized layers, not enemy planes. During World War II, the Canadian Ionospheric stations were integrated into the network spread across six continents and tasked with charting the reliability of radio reception. Global, polar, and national scales interlocked around 1943, when the dominant understanding of the ionosphere as symmetrical to Earth’s rotational axis gave way to a general preoccupation with the “Longitude Effect” or “Anomaly,” the term used to refer to variations according to both geographical latitude and longitude. The experts drew on the language of geophysical anomaly to reimagine Canada as a "natural geophysical laboratory” (p. 33). This notion used by actors, grounds Jones-Imhotep’s analysis of the post-war preoccupations with both territory and knowledge throughout the book.

The political and epistemic sovereignty of the nation crystallized in representations such as radio prediction charts. The relationship between the two is at the core of chapters 2 and 3, “Machines and Media” and “Reading Technologies”. Each of them demonstrates how the production and interpretation of ionograms flowed into the realm of politics. Studying the operation of the new Radio Propagation Laboratory (later renamed DRTE), Jones-Imhotep makes crucial observations about the role of standardization. Unlike the majority of scholarship, which focuses on its coordinating function2, he sees standardization as a possibility for divergence and autonomy, that is “a polysemous standardization underwriting the project of identity”(p. 64). As materials, interpretations, and phenomena all enable different version of standardization, the Canadian experts studied by Jones-Imhotep came to emphasize the local know-how of reading the ionograms, a technical skill that enmeshed with politics of national representation. The author draws on and contributes to the historiography of scientific representations by demonstrating how the peculiar techniques of reading high-latitude ionograms transformed into visual arguments that were eventually adapted in cultural narratives beyond the laboratory, effectively reversing the causality and defining the northerners as a function of communication disruption. From the economic historian Harold Innis (a mentor to Marshall McLuhan) to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), to the new field of nordology established by geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin, the quality and location of northernness has been articulated as an essential relationship to unreliable communications forming a distinct regime of perceptibility.

Chapters 4 to 6 trace a series of projects housed at the DRTE that eventually came to disturb this regime of perceptibility. These projects include ionospheric satellites, the work with the massive data flow that these satellites generated, and novel communication technologies adapting to or bypassing the high-latitude ionosphere altogether. The design, testing, and construction of S-27, carried out in collaboration with NASA, was not only the first satellite built outside the Cold War superpowers and embedded with the symbolism of national achievement. Launched on September 29, 1962, the miniature laboratory renamed “Allouette” investigated the near space environment and its threats to weapons and surveillance technology, producing some 1,100 ionograms a day. The status of the ionogram as the main product of the organization’s work became overshadowed by electronic circuits and the satellite’s role as a representation of the DRTE’s culture of reliability. Chapter 5 addresses questions of the analysis and circulation of the mass-produced data breaking with the national perspective and depicting international science, priority and credit attribution as viewed from Canada. The chapter also adds to our understanding of the computerization of science in the late twentieth century, as the numerical solution of the differential equitation of long radio waves were among the early applications demonstrating the power of digital computers. Chapter 6 follows the trajectories of several projects carried out in obscurity, in the shadow of the public image of the DRTE, which highlighted its production of the ionogram. But the organization was also integrated into a vast network of secret collaborations between civilian scientists, federal agencies, and intelligence communities preoccupied with survivable communication. Jones-Imhotep sees these projects as predicated on and representative of an important shift in the representation of natural order, a shift from high definition to low definition. The last chapter explicitly turns to the territorial arguments of the book, with the conception of radio geographies as objects produced by measuring infrastructures, mapping technologies, and political ideologies. The CBC Northern Service, created in 1958, was the institutional incarnation of the northern radio geographies of the period, as is manifest in a particularly representative 1963 quote defining the borders as “an imaginary line that would include those listeners who do not receive a consistent and adequate broadcast signal from CBC network stations or private stations located ‘outside’” (p. 204).

Jones-Impotec’s book exposes a breadth and variety of arguments not all of which are pursued to their logical conclusions and whose interrelationship is not always clear, leaving the reader not so much with a tool kit as with a source of inspiration. This is as an observation rather than a criticism, though.

The main limitation of “The Unreliable Nation“ is in its interpretation of the Cold War. Moving from threat to threat, the trajectory of the book leaves no place for the war’s counterpart, peace, which played an equally important role in the Cold War techno-scientific imaginary as well as in the professional and national identities of the late twentieth century. That said, the book handsomely achieves its goals, bringing together histories of science, technology, and environment. It raises the question of the connectedness of the medium and the message, and leaves it open for further exploration.

Notes:
1 See: Andrew Stuhl, Unfreezing the Arctic. Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands, Chicago 2016; Chen-Pang Yeang, Probing the Sky with Radio Waves. From Wireless Technology to the Development of Atmospheric Science, Chicago 2013.
2 For an example, see: Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine. Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming, Cambridge MA 2010.