A riveting account of stealth moves by the world's superpowers to establish control of trillion-dollar resource finds in the polar regions?from the author of the iconic national-security bestseller The Puzzle Palace.
The Arctic holds 13% of the world's undiscovered oil and 30% of the world's hidden gas reserves, and has become a critical frontier for rare earth elements. And it's never been neutral. The war for the region has been largely hidden, but the battle for control of the North Pole and the vast, rapidly melting Arctic Ocean surrounding it is quickly gaining intensity. And Russia is winning.
Meanwhile, dozens of nations are swarming over Antarctica, entranced by the colossal resource deposits beginning to be discovered under the melting ice. Currently, there are more than eighty ?research? stations on the continent maintained by over thirty countries. Russia alone has seven. And no one is naïve enough to think that, under the veil of conducting ?pure science,? military positioning and espionage is not taking place. Even Iran has announced its intention to build a military base there. Greenland may be less remote, but as a potentially rich source of critical rare earth minerals, it may hold the key either to the West's polar power surge or complete marginalization.
Written by award-winning national security expert James Bamford, the first to interview American whistleblower Edward Snowden in Moscow and famed for his unmasking of what really goes on at the NSA in his landmark book The Puzzle Palace, Battle for the Ends of the Earth portrays, in stunning detail, the next phase of the world superpowers' vying for dominance, replete with secret ice islands, exotic submersibles, clandestine listening stations, and hidden nuclear weapons. Battle for the Ends of the Earth is the harrowing story of an epic battle that will increasingly heat up as the world's most remote, ice-choked regions rapidly thaw.
