It takes up to $1 billion and ten years to build an icebreaker. Russia is clearly the leading Arctic power with the largest fleet of icebreakers in the world, thirty-two in total, according to the US Coast Guard Review of 2013. Six of those are nuclear-powered, the only such versions in the world, and Russia also plans to launch the world’s most powerful icebreaker by 2018. It will be able to smash through ice more than ten feet deep and tow oil tankers with a displacement of up to seventy thousand tons through the ice fields.
