Museum keeps Cold War history alive
Canadian Forces Station Alsask was part of larger array to detect Soviet aircraft
The last original piece of a system meant to fend off the Soviets sits near Alsask, a village on the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan.
A bulbous white radar dome perched on a fenced-in compound is just about all that remains of the former Canadian Forces Station Alsask. It was built in 1961 as part of the Pinetree Line, a network of radar installations meant to detect incoming Soviet bombers during the Cold War.
Fred Armbruster, executive director of the Canadian Civil Defence Museum and Archives (CCDMA), said the group took over the site in 2018, after it had sat essentially unattended since the early 1990s.
While no member of the Red Army ever managed to get past the defences, Armbruster said the site didn't fare nearly as well against the pigeons that took up residence in the decades after the installation was taken out of service.
“We had to evict the tenants,” he said with a laugh.
It took until 2019 before the group could open the site to the public. The museum runs monthly tours through the spring, summer and fall, and there are plans to allow the site to be used for events. Armbruster said private tours can also be arranged.
CFS Alsask was one of 44 Pinetree Line sites built in co-operation with the United States. While a few coastal installations are still in use, Armbruster said they use newer equipment.
“(Alsask) has the original dome. This has the antenna inside and it has not been modified in any means since its installation in 1961,” he said.
The current tower was originally one of three that made up the CFS Alsask array, Armbruster noted. Two other towers were designed to detect an incoming aircraft's height, while the remaining tower measured distance.
That information would be fed to a nearby ground-to-air radio site, where it could be relayed to fighter jets dispatched to intercept the threat.
Now that it's safe for people to tour through, the CCDMA is working to restore it fully to its original state. The museum operates on donations and sponsorships, with no government funding.
Armbruster said it's hard work, but worth it to restore an artifact that commemorates the men and women who dedicated their careers to watching the skies to keep
Canadians and Americans safe.
“Without this warning system, our air raid sirens would have had no value, the bunkers that people built would have had no value, the bunkers that cities and municipalities built would have been pointless, the fighter jets would have been completely pointless,” he added.
Armbruster said many Canadians would probably be surprised at the extent of how the Cold War period has shaped modern life.
Locally, Alsask was among the earliest places in Canada to get cable television, as signals from the radar site would routinely interfere with radio and television broadcasts in the area.
More broadly, Armbruster said everything from the way our highway systems were built to the smartphones in our pockets can trace their roots to the decades of tensions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.