and North Korea. Gov. Palin came of age in Alaska during the heighth of the Cold War. All of us who lived near Anchorage well knew that we would be the first at the scene of the nuclear war, a war that at times didn’t seem very far off. All of us can recall being awakened in the middle of the night by a flight of F-4s screaming out of Elmendorf on burners and you really didn’t know if it was a drill, a Bear bomber playing hide and seek, or the real thing. The massive DEW Line radar antennae still sit abandoned now all around Alaska. Even today, the E-3s and EC-135s cycle in and out of Elmendorf for missions towards the Sakalin area or on the edge of NorKor airspace. And there’s a reason that Elmendorf was one of the first deployments of the new F-22, and a major component of the missile defense system is near Fairbanks – we’re already in range of NorKor missiles.

Our fishermen compete with them in the Bering Sea and North Pacific, the Coast Guard and Alaska State Troopers catch them cheating and chase them down when they run. Every few years the US Marshall gets to auction off one of their ships for fishing violations.

There’s only one place in Alaska that on a good day you can actually see Russia, Little Diomede Island, but you can feel it everywhere in the State.