Before the late 1980s, any attempt to work cooperatively in the circum- polar Arctic had to deal with the grim realities of the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact and the NATO countries obsessively 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 environment. 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 distribution of radionuclides around such potential sources as sunken nuclear submarines or military 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 World War II, the United Nations divided the world into a number of economic 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 remains the same today – except we now have the “new” states that emerged from the disappearance of such confederations as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

In the 1970s, the East and West realized that the transboundary atmospheric transport of sulphur and nitrogen products of power generation and metal smelting was leading to widespread acidification and the degradation of forest and freshwater aquatic ecosystems.