I just think the nuclear/cold war angle is so much fun to play with.
There was a theory that some numbers stations were in fact part of a soviet dead man's hand system, designed to launch missiles in the event of a surprise attack that resulted in all the commanders being wiped out. in the event of a large strike, radiation would mean the transmission was broken....
It just seems like a very BOC theme - the innocence of an entire generation wiped out by being constantly, forcibly, graphically reminded of the imminent possibility of Armageddon. The irony is that in the end (excluding indirect wars such as Nicaragua) I think less than a hundred soldiers died due to hostilities. The location I pointed to yesterday fits in nicely here - the international date line passes exactly halfway between this town and Siberia. We talk of east versus west, and Europeans always imagine themselves caught between the two (then) superpowers, but in reality the USSR and the US were separated by no more than 35 miles....
In 1955, shortly after the formation of the Warsaw pact, shortly before the heads of state met at the Geneva convention, a US patrol aircraft was shot down by Russians, and crash landed on this remote island, which had a population of less than a thousand, nearly all Eskimo whaling families. The papers relating to the incident tell of them heading out to the incidents on hunting sleds, offering immediate assistance before, to their reported astonishment, a rescue plane arrived. No-one died during the incident. It's perhaps most notable because it was the only time during the entire cold war that the Soviets admitted responsibility.
The other claim to fame of Gambell is detailed in a book called 'The Kids From Nowhere'. As wiki puts it, 'In 1984, two teams of Gambell students -- one team of junior high students and one team of 9th through 12th grade -- stunned American education by winning two national championships in Future Problem Solving, one of the nation's most difficult academic competitions. Most of the Gambell students had never been off the island, ridden in elevators or on escalators, or stayed in a hotel. They had to compete against students from schools and programs for the gifted on subjects, such as genetic engineering and nuclear waste disposal, of which the Gambell students had never before heard.' Let's put that in perspective, these were 12 kids from a school of 41, on an island with a population of something like 500, who had lived their entire lives over two hundred miles from the nearest city. There was no internet. They were the sons of Eskimo whalers. True outsiders, whose own idea of their identity was tribal, rooted to their location first and foremost, a location that ended up as the dividing line at the heart of a global conflict between the two greatest superpowers the world had ever seen, a conflict they had absolutely no interest in whatsoever.
There is a neat parallel here with the image of BOC - isolation allowing creativity to flourish.
Finally it's nice to note that scientists are convinced that at several points during the last 10,000 years (the oldest evidence of inhabitation of these areas), the sea level would have been such that humans would have been able to walk across this stretch of the Bering sea.