Icebreaking

Did you know …

That the popular children’s game “Don’t Break the Ice” is based on Soviet polar bear population management strategies? It’s true!

A quick side note: Is “Don’t Break the Ice” still popular? Was it ever? I don’t think children have anything worth saying, so I don’t speak with them. Never have.

Anyway, the game is played by balancing a model polar bear in the center of a grid of “ice” cubes. The ice cubes are supported by tension provided by an elevated frame. Players take turns hammering out individual cubes, until the network of cubes becomes fracture-critical and the bear falls with the remaining ice, presumably drowning. The player who murders the bear is the loser. The other players don’t exactly “win,” they just continue with their lives without the burden of knowledge that they have killed a bear.

Soviet wildlife managers played a very similar “game,” except they played with arctic sea ice and actual polar bears. And instead of using miniature plastic hammers, they used submarine-based ballistic missiles to break apart the ice. Another major difference is that the object of the game was to sink the bear (or explode it with a missile directly).

At no point in the history of Soviet Russia were polar bears actually overpopulated. Rather, this population management technique was employed based on a long-standing enmity between bears and Russians—they hate each other! Also, when you put a bunch of 25-year-olds in a nuclear submarine packed with missiles, you have to accept that some bears are going to get exploded.