Lesueur
Well, Colonel, you were the American project officer in building the great American airbase at Thule in Greenland. Now, what is its strategic importance?
Balchen
Its strategic importance is this: that it is one of the key points in the defense of the North American continent and one of the best resources in the defense of the democracies of the world. It's so strategically located that the best way to explain the thing is, for anybody who wants to look at it more closely, take a globe and see its location, and we can track from certain basic facts the location of the population of the globe today: over 85% of them are located in the northern hemisphere between latitudes 35 and 50 North, and where they are located, industries are located, and industries of today, militarily speaking, are our strategic targets.