The U.S. occupies a dual place in the novel: it is a center of military and political authority, yet its reach depends on marine systems and infrastructures that can fail beyond the limits of national control. The story links ocean surveillance and emergency governance to more immediate vulnerabilities, from severed transatlantic cables to contaminated urban water.

National Power and Emergency Authority

The U.S. appears as one of the two governments represented by the Allied Emergency Committee, whose military chief of staff is Judith Li of the U.S. Navy. In a televised statement, Li rejects speculation about the animal attacks and warns fishermen, industrialists, shipping lines, whale-watchers, and activists against taking matters into their own hands. Her stated policy is to avoid violence against the animals, investigate what is causing the attacks, and keep people out of the water until more is known. This public stance places the U.S. at the center of crisis management while also showing how military authority can shape what information is permitted and how the public may respond.

The novel also connects U.S. power to the long reach of military technology. The U.S. government has authorized the Navy to test SURTASS LFA, a low-frequency active sonar system designed to detect submarines. Its operators claim it can place eighty per cent of the world’s oceans under surveillance; the system has cost three hundred million dollars. Although officials insist that it will not harm whales, the evidence discussed in the novel leaves its effects on feeding, reproduction, and migration unresolved. The tension is significant: an instrument intended to make the ocean more legible to military observers operates in a realm where human knowledge of ecological consequences remains incomplete.

The Ocean as a Limit to Surveillance

The novel’s account of the ocean puts that ambition in perspective. Continental shelves are described as the comparatively familiar underwater continuation of land, while the depths beyond them remain more mysterious to science than outer space. At sea, the absence of visual markers can erase the distinction between water and sky; from the edge of the continental shelf, even oil platforms may disappear in rain and cloud. The ocean is therefore both an object of surveillance and a space that resists easy observation.

That gap between technical confidence and environmental uncertainty recurs in the discussion of ship-navigation failures. Radar, anemometers, depth sounders, and speed logs are treated as essential safety systems, but crews rely on them precisely when darkness, fog, or rough water obstructs direct sight. Reports describe marine life interfering with a vessel’s speed log, causing it to register no movement, and a depth sounder giving a false impression of shallow water. Collisions follow as crews maneuver on the basis of faulty readings. These incidents are not confined to U.S. waters, but they broaden the novel’s portrait of a maritime world in which technological dependence can turn hidden biological activity into a navigational and political crisis.

Arctic History and the U.S. as a Geopolitical Presence

The U.S. is also present in an account of Canadian Inuit displacement, not as the government that carried it out but as one of the powers feared by the Canadian government during the Cold War. In the telling to Leon Anawak, officials in Ottawa worried that either the Soviet Union or the U.S. might claim the uninhabited Canadian Arctic. The Canadian government consequently relocated nomadic Inuit from their traditional territory to Resolute and Grise Fjord, presenting the move as relocation while the account describes its effects as expulsion. The relocated families were sent north without their tents, kayaks, canoes, or sleds, and the new settlements lay far from caribou trails and summer breeding grounds.

The same history is placed within a longer disruption of Inuit life. White trappers arrived with guns in the 1920s; animal populations declined, disease spread, and people moved into settlements. Later, military radar stations were built on traditional hunting grounds, and Inuit residents were transported farther north. The story relates these experiences to political efforts to reclaim rights and to the establishment of Nunavut in 1999, while emphasizing that political self-government could not restore a lost way of life. In this context, the U.S. signifies geopolitical pressure whose consequences were borne by people whose land and knowledge were treated as obstacles to strategic plans.

Networks, Cities, and Material Vulnerability

The novel gives the U.S. a concrete infrastructural setting in New York City. Beneath its streets lies a complicated system of water and sewage pipes, including old tunnels that are no longer in use and cannot all be located on a single map. After vehicles from Long Island are washed, contaminated wastewater enters the drains, passes through the city’s water system, and returns to circulation. The first ambulances are moving through the streets within six hours. The episode makes the city’s hidden plumbing, ordinarily taken for granted, a route by which a local exposure becomes a public emergency.

A parallel vulnerability appears in the transatlantic communications network. TAT 14 is described as a high-capacity undersea cable linking Europe to the U.S.; its optical fibers carry the traffic of a global communications system. When a submarine avalanche destroys the seabed and severs the cable, a message from Kiel cannot reach its intended recipient through the ordinary route. A week after the northern European disaster, transatlantic Internet traffic has stopped and phone calls are possible only by satellite, if at all. The failure reaches a crisis meeting at Chateau Whistler, where Gerhard Bohrmann is left waiting for data on worm growth and the likely spread of similar invasions. The U.S. is thus connected to the crisis not only through policy and military technology but through the cables and urban systems on which everyday communication and public safety depend.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, the U.S. is represented through systems that promise control: ocean-wide surveillance, military command, reliable navigation, digital communication, and managed water supplies. Yet each system depends on conditions it cannot fully master. The sonar’s ecological effects remain uncertain, ships misread their surroundings when instruments fail, a rupture beneath the sea interrupts transatlantic communication, and wastewater travels through a city’s hidden pipes into its water supply. The result is a portrait of national power that is extensive but not self-sufficient: in the novel, the ocean and its interconnected infrastructures repeatedly expose the limits of what the U.S. can see, predict, or govern.