OPERATION Breakthrough stands as a shining example of what rival superpower nations can accomplish if they put their guns down for a moment.
October 1988. We were in the waning years of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan was wrapping up eight years as president of the United States, and Mikhail Gorbachev worked desperately to hold the Soviet Union together a little longer.
Far to the north, in the Beaufort Sea, three juvenile gray whales found themselves trapped in ice near Point Barrow, Alaska. Their way to the open sea was blocked and the ice floes continued to close in around them.
An Inupiaq hunter by the name of Roy Ahmaogak discovered the imperiled creatures and used a chainsaw to cut through the ice, creating a pathway out. But it was so cold that the water froze over again almost as fast as he could cut.
The Americans asked for help and the Russians arrived first. Using a giant Sikorsky helicopter, they employed a massive five-ton hammer to punch holes in the ice along Roy’s route. The method worked, but slowly. The whales were running out of time.
A barge was then borrowed from Prudhoe Bay to try to break a path through, but the barge got stuck. Calls for help grew more desperate. Meanwhile, the story had been picked up by the national and even international media. Armies of reporters swarmed the area to get a look at the trapped whales. Scientists gathered to discuss their plight (the whales, not the reporters). NOAA sent in a team to determine if the young whales could survive even if they did break free. The Eighties marked the height of the Save the Whales movement, when public outcry motivated many countries to ban whale harvesting.
The Soviet Union then sent two modern icebreaking ships, the Admiral Makarov and the Vladimir Arseniev. One drove a path through the ice and the other scooped the pieces out of the way. When the whales tried to swim through the channel, lights and noise coming from all the media activity scared them and they turned around, back into the trap. So close, but still so far. By this time the whales were in a sore state. They were not getting enough to eat, and their bodies were slashed and bloodied by jagged ice.
Finally, with everyone out of the way, the whales were ushered to the safety of open water. Two of them, anyway. The youngest of the three died on October 21. The other two were seen swimming away to the south but we lost track of them. It is not known if they lived or for how long.
The great Pacific migration route would take these creatures from the waters around Alaska in the summer to the area off the coast of Mexico in the winter. Each whale travels thousands of miles per year in the casual, regular living of their lives. Since nearly all of these whale species are now protected, populations have rebounded from their lows in the Seventies and Eighties, and whale watching has replaced whale hunting as the primary way we interact with these majestic creatures.
Thirty-five years ago, the two superpowers, United States and Soviet Union, cooperated to save three stranded whales at the edge of the world. Did that lesson in brotherhood help bring about the end of the Cold War a couple years later? I like to think so.
BC Cook, PhD lived on Saipan and has taught history for 20 years. He currently resides on the mainland U.S.
BC Cook
