When harried President Andrew Johnson and his Secretary of State William H. Seward laid out $7,200,000 to buy Alaska from Russia in 1867, the only question seriously raised was whether the U. S. got its money's worth. Apparently it did because since then Alaska has ex ported more than $1,250,000,000 in fish, furs, gold and other metals. And Alaska's 70,000 inhabitants (half of them Indians) have not yet scratched its natural resources, which include water power, lumber, oil, iron, zinc, copper, chromite, antimony, nickel, platinum, tungsten. But Johnson also got his money's worth in natural defense, for today Alaska is one of the U. S.'s two most important outposts against invasion from the Pacific (the other: Hawaii). Today Army and Navy are rushing to spend more than six times what Alaska cost in order to fortify the U. S.'s northwest outpost.
Up the Strait of Juan de Fuca and into Puget Sound the slim-hulled Coast Guard cutter Perseus pushed her nose last week. She tied up at Seattle and sent her crew ashore on liberty. Some of her seamen were less than judicious in what they had to tell friends and newspaper reporters. The Perseus had been on patrol in Bering Strait where only 54 miles of water separates Continental Alaska from Continental Siberia. Out in the Strait, the Perseus had stopped at U. S.-owned Little Diomede Island with a mission: to find out what was afoot on Soviet-owned Big Diomede just one and a half miles away and across the International Date Line (see map). The crew said that Russian workmen were building an airplane hangar on Big Diomede, replacing its radio station with a bigger one, that Big Diomede with its smooth ice runways ten months of the Arctic year, was being made into an advance weather, communications and flying station.
There seemed to be grounds for keeping an eye on Russia as well as on Japan as a possible invader of Alaska. Russia's submarine base on the Komandorskie Islands off the Kamchatka coast (280 miles north of the Aleutians' tip) and its submarine and air base at Petropavlovsk, farther south, might still be regarded as defenses against Japan. And Pravda's recent sound-off against Alexander II's sale of Alaska for a "few paltry millions" might be so much wind & fury. But the Soviets have a flying base at East Cape on the North Siberian mainland, are building a new station on Big Diomede and both are guns that point at Alaska.
In spite of Alaska's strategic position, the U. S. never wasted money on Alaskan defenses because until recently Alaska was never threatened. From gold rush days in 1898 until a few months ago, its military garrison never consisted of more than 400 infantry soldiers at Chilkoot Barracks not far from the Skagway. One of their main jobs was to increase the Army's knowledge of cold-weather living and maneuvering. Then the U. S. found out that the U. S. S. R. was extending its bases north along the Siberian coast, and that Japan had built a naval base at Paramosmiri Island, just south of Kamchatka. These bases threaten each other. They also threaten Alaska.