The last of three programmes telling the history of Arctic exploration.

The airmen of the thirties dreamt that one day the Arctic would become the crossroads of the northern hemisphere. Instead it became a vital battleground during the Second World War when German weathermen fought secret battles with Allied troops on remote Arctic islands. When the war ended the military buiId up continued as Soviet and American generals planned Cold War battles over the North Pole.
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(Subtitled)
BBC book: Icemen: A History of the Arctic and Its Explorers £12.99 from bookshops

Icemen 9.30pm BBC2
Nowhere was the Cold War more frigid than in the Arctic, as the final programme in this absorbing series shows. It surveys attempts to make use of the region's strategic value as the shortest route between America and the former USSR.
Early forays included Sir Hubert Wilkins's attempt to go under the icepack in a second-hand submarine. The Second World War brought conflict as far north as Spitsbergen, 600 miles from the Pole as Norwegians and Germans sought to maintain weather stations to provide meteorological information.
But it was the Cold War that saw the real militarisation of the region, with the USA's chain of early-warning radar stations and the USSR's ice stations. The key to supremacy lay under the ice, as Wilkins had dreamt 30 years earlier.