If you look at our position on a global projection, you will see that we are the land, or rather the sky, where the exchange will take place … where the battle that consists of an exchange of inter–continental missiles carrying nuclear warheads will be fought, and we are obliged to foresee that we would be the victims whether we were involved or not.
Hon. Léo Cadieux, minister of national defence, 1967–70
CANADA WAS NEVER STRATEGIC TERRITORY THAT MATTERED IN the great-power game before 1945—and it isn’t now—but for a brief period, from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, we really did matter, because Canada lay on the shortest air route between the Soviet Union and the United States. Indeed, in terms of aircraft ranges at the time, Canadian airspace was the only non-stop route between the two countries.
You’d look up and you’d see a plane of some sort going overhead with a red star on it. The Americans would bring the planes up as far as Edmonton, and the Russians would come, I presume, over the Pole practically, and the planes would be handed over to them.
A large proportion of the Russian planes were piloted by women. It was quite a sight to see them on the street in their uniforms—of course they were tremendously bulky uniforms, because they would be going back over the Pole. And an awful lot of vodka suddenly appeared in the town.
Naomi Radford, Edmonton
The United States and the Soviet Union were allies during the Second World War, and the planes flying over Edmonton with Soviet markings were American-built fighters and bombers on their way to serve in the Soviet Air Force. But it was already clear that something was happening to Canada’s strategic geography. As early as April 1944 Major-General Maurice Pope of the Canadian Joint Staff Mission in Washington was warning Ottawa:
Sometime in the future the United States, from their (ideological) dislike of Russia, may find their relations with that country somewhat strained.… In such circumstances our position would be a difficult one. To the Americans the defence of the United States is continental defence, and nothing that I can think of will ever drive that idea out of their heads. Should, then, the United States go to war with Russia they would look to us to make common cause with them and, as I judge their public opinion, they would brook no delay.
A month later Mackenzie King’s government set up a “Working Committee on Post-Hostilities Problems.” Its initial assumption was that there would be at least ten years of peace between the United States and the Soviet Union, but General Pope warned urgently from Washington that the U.S. armed forces did not share that assumption. The Pentagon had plans for a very large postwar military establishment, Pope pointed out, and it would need congressional support to get it. That meant that the Pentagon needed an external threat big enough to justify such a huge force—and although the Soviet Union was still an American ally in 1944, it was the only plausible candidate for a future enemy that filled the bill.
If the Canadian government rejected the view that a Soviet-American confrontation was imminent, General Pope warned, the U.S. armed forces would be extremely unhappy, for if a persuasive Canadian counter-argument “ever reached the ears of Congress, the hopes [the Pentagon] now cherished and planned to achieve would be dashed against the rocks.” The report on “Post-War Canadian Defence Relations with the United States” concluded:
Canada, lying across the shortest air routes from either Europe or Asia, has now become of more direct strategic significance to the United States.… In the circumstances, the United States may be expected to take an active interest in Canadian defence preparations in the future. Moreover, that interest may be expressed with an absence of the tact and restraint customarily employed by the United Kingdom in putting forward defence proposals.… [and] the pressure on Canada to maintain defences at a higher level than might seem necessary from the point of view of purely Canadian interests might be very strong.
Department of External Affairs, January 23, 1945
First impressions are often best, and External Affairs’ view of Canada’s new strategic situation before everybody there had been marinated in Cold War assumptions for a decade or so are probably more reliable than the views held by the same people in the 1960s. Canada’s real strategic situation in 1960 was just about what had been forecast in 1945—but by then all sorts of nuances of justification and rationalization had been added to the basic description of Canada’s strategic dilemma, in a perfectly human attempt to demonstrate that what had happened was also what should have happened or at least what had to happen.
By 1946 Mackenzie King was warning his cabinet that the American bases and facilities in the north must be bought out by the Canadian government as soon as possible because “the long-range policy of the Americans was to absorb Canada.” It was duly done, but it made no difference to what was really happening: King was barking up the wrong tree. The time of the homesteaders was long past, and the postwar generation of Americans was no longer interested in the physical possession of Canada’s territory. What they wanted now was the free use of Canada for strategic purposes—in a nuclear war.
Canada “Another Belgium” in U.S. Air Bases Proposal Washington Insists Dominion’s Northern Frontier be Fortified “Atomic Age Maginot Line” is Feared
Financial Post headlines, June 29, 1946
In November 1945, only three months after the war’s end—long before there was an open split between the United States and the Soviet Union—the American military representatives on the Permanent Joint Board on Defence (PJBD) brought up the question of a war with Russia. What they wanted was a Canadian agreement on continental air defence. The American air force experts reckoned that by 1950 the “enemy” (the Soviet Union) would be in a position to launch an air attack on North America, and therefore the two countries must cooperate in creating a network of early-warning radar stations and fighter bases in Canada, as far north as possible from populated areas. However, it turned out in the end that the American airmen on the PJBD were not actually expressing U.S. government policy. They had just been overstating the case for continental air defence in the hope of getting a Canadian commitment, which they could then use (“our allies demand it”) in order to further the U.S. Air Force’s interests in the perennial inter-service battle for resources in the Pentagon.
In fact, Canada’s awkward geographical position as “the space between” the Soviet Union and the United States took time to mature into a real strategic concern. In the 1940s neither the Americans nor the Russians had bombers capable of flying literally over the Pole. For the moment all the Americans wanted was staging bases through which their nuclear bombers could pass on their way to their forward deployment bases in Europe, the Middle East or the Far East, from which they would then fly onward to obliterate the Soviet Union. In that context, the only foreign base in North America that really interested the Pentagon was Goose Bay in Labrador, which a U.S. Air Force spokesman described to a top secret meeting in Ottawa in late 1946 as “the most important all-round strategic air base in the Western Hemisphere.”
However, Newfoundland did not become a Canadian province until 1949. So far as Canada’s own territory was involved, Canadian governments faced with regular American requests for the use of Canadian airspace by Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers carrying nuclear weapons continued to insist on a meticulous respect for Canadian sovereignty. Even after the increased range of the new American B-52 bombers made it possible, by the early 1950s, for Strategic Air Command to fly from its bases in the United States directly to targets in the Soviet Union, Washington felt no need for anything more than “Meetings of Consultation” so far as SAC was concerned. If war ever came, either the Canadians would instantly give SAC’s bombers permission to fly north across Canada on their way to bomb the Soviet Union—or they would go anyway, and Washington would sort out the diplomatic niceties afterward.
But in 1949 the Soviets tested their first nuclear weapon, and by the early fifties they were starting to build bombers that could cross Canadian territory and hit the United States. If the Americans wanted to create a defence against them, they would have to coordinate it with the Canadians in advance, which meant negotiating some sort of formal agreement between the two countries. They did not, however, want to explain the strategic context of North American air defence too bluntly to civilians—especially foreign civilians—for fear of offending their delicate sensibilities.
I went to Air Defence Command in 1951, and by then the early [Canadian-U.S.] talks had taken place—the general structure of the warning system, the utilization [of Canadian airspace] by American aircraft, all those items were discussed and agreements reached. From then on it was really refining those agreements: knowing what could be done from a given base and that sort of thing. After that it was not a matter of principle; it was a matter of mechanics.
Air Vice Marshal Claire Annis, RCAF
It may have been only a matter of mechanics for the RCAF, which was finding an exciting new role for itself in North American air defence, and powerful new friends in the air defence establishment of the U.S. Air Force. But as far as the Canadian government was concerned, no questions of principle had been decided; there had not even been any discussions about the subject at the political level. However, after the newly elected Republican administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in early 1953, a series of sensational leaks about the alleged inadequacies of North American air defence began to appear in the American press. Canada’s defence minister, Brooke Claxton, suspected the worst.
The reason for this flood of propaganda is not so much the increased fear of attack by Russia as growing fear of the hostility of the electors when it becomes apparent that the Republican Party’s promises to balance the budget and cut taxes while strengthening their defences has not got the slightest chance in the world of being carried out.… Apparently the Administration has it in mind that the anger of the electorate may be flooded out in a wave of fear of atomic attack.
Brooke Claxton to Prime Minister St. Laurent, September 23, 1953
But there was more behind the growing interest in North American air defence than just domestic American politics. In both the United States and Canada, the air forces were becoming the politically dominant services, and they cooperated closely in the task of extracting money from their respective governments.
The 1950s was the golden decade of the Royal Canadian Air Force. In 1951 fewer than a third of Canada’s servicemen wore light blue, and the RCAF got around 42 percent of the money allocated to the armed forces. By 1955 Canada had become the only country in the world where the air force had more people than the army, and as the spending on new fighter aircraft soared, the air force budget overtook those of the other two services combined. All this gave Canada’s airmen a predominant voice in the Department of National Defence in Ottawa, and the issue where it counted most was the emerging American plan for a unified command that ignored the U.S.-Canadian border and put all air defences in North America under U.S. control: NORAD.
The talks leading to the creation of NORAD took place mostly on the inter-service network, and the fact that it was to be a purely bilateral alliance didn’t bother the Canadian Chiefs of Staff: they saw only the operational and career benefits of being integrated into the U.S. defence structure. However, the evolving shape of NORAD started alarm bells ringing at External Affairs.
My reaction as a NATO desk officer [at External] was to see dangers in this for Canada.… I mean a NORAD outside NATO meant that … we were dealing perforce with only one partner, and that in a framework of disparity of power that could not in any way be modified. I raised the question of associating NORAD in some way with NATO, if not bringing it within NATO, but that did not prove possible.
John Halstead, External Affairs, 1946–82
In February 1956 the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff asked Canada its views on the integration of all air defences in North America. The RCAF then swung into action, providing favourable reports to the Canadian Chiefs of Staff Committee, which approved the proposal in February 1957. All they needed now was political approval.
It is easy enough to see why the Canadian airmen wanted a joint air defence command: access to better equipment, deeper military secrets and lots of jobs in the command structure of a major league organization. But the Strategic Air Command was the dominant branch of the U.S. Air Force; it was wholly offensive in its outlook, and it jealously guarded its position against rival branches of the air force. Why did it let continental air defence grow so important that it required a joint air defence command and a bilateral alliance with the Canadians? There was a perfectly good strategic reason, but it was a bit too embarrassing to discuss in public. North American air defence was originally sold to the American public, and later to the Canadian government, as a necessary measure to protect North American cities from a Soviet surprise attack. In fact, however, NORAD in the fifties was inextricably linked to American nuclear first-strike doctrines.
In December 1949, only months after the first Soviet nuclear test, the Pentagon informed Ottawa that the Soviet Union would probably have 150 atomic bombs available for delivery on North America within five years. By the time the mid-fifties actually rolled around, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were predicting that a Soviet attack on North America in 1960 would dispose of 750 heavy bombers, followed by 700 medium bombers. It was quite obvious that no air defence system could cope with such numbers in the nuclear age, so why bother? But the air force did bother, because the planners didn’t really expect to face an attack on that scale at all.
Nobody saw a thousand-bomber raid coming against North America, but it could be big enough that some of them would get through unless it was an air-tight defence.
Air Chief Marshal Frank Miller, RCAF, vice-chief of the Air Staff, 1953
All air defence works by attrition: it is not like a castle wall that keeps out all intruders until it is breached. There is no wall, but merely a system that must seek out and shoot down the attackers one by one. In practice that means that some proportion of the attackers, however small, will almost always get through: the best interception rate that anybody ever achieved in practice against mass bomber raids during the Second World War was around 10 percent. The air defence planners cf the early fifties were promising a breathtaking 70 percent kill rate, but that would still not have counted as a success now that each bomber was carrying nuclear weapons. Even against the 1949 U.S. estimate of 150 Soviet bombers, a 70 percent kill rate would have meant that forty or fifty bombers would have got through in a surprise attack, and even if they carried only one bomb each, the results would have devastated the United States.
However, it would be quite a different matter if an American first strike destroyed most of the Soviet bomber force on the ground, and if there was a comprehensive radar network and hundreds of fighters in North America to deal with the Soviet bombers that survived. The real problem was not how to deal with a Soviet surprise attack, which was utterly improbable, given the balance of forces. It was how to stop an attempted “revenge from the grave” by a dozen or so Soviet bombers that had escaped destruction on the ground.
Even if the United States did not launch a deliberate first strike against the Soviet Union, SAC was totally confident of being able to pre-empt a Soviet attack. As General LeMay privately told a senior American official early in 1957, the U.S. had aircraft flying secret missions over the Soviet Union every hour of the day, collecting radio intelligence that would give him ample warning of any Soviet preparations for a surprise attack. “If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground,” he explained.
“But General LeMay,” the official protested, “that’s not national policy.” “I don’t care,” said LeMay. “It’s my policy. That’s what I’m going to do.”
The undeniable arithmetic of air defence kill ratios should have made it obvious that NORAD was a total waste of money unless the number of Soviet attackers was small—and it would only be small enough if most Soviet bombers had already been eliminated by an American first strike. Moreover, the inflated U.S. Air Force intelligence estimates of Soviet bomber strength, concocted to justify an ever-expanding American bomber force, ignored the fact that the Soviets had decided to skip the stage of building up a large bomber force and move straight on to the next technological stage: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
Our potential enemy—our principal, our most powerful, our most dangerous enemy—was so far away from us that we couldn’t have reached him with our air force. Only by building up a nuclear missile force could we keep the enemy from unleashing war.
Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers
The Russians built only enough long-range bombers to have some sort of strategic insurance policy if their missile programme failed utterly: their “Long-Range Aviation” amounted to 145 bombers in 1960, and peaked at 195 in 1965. Meanwhile, most of their resources went into developing missiles—against which NORAD provided no defence whatever. Although the actual numbers of strategic weapons and aircraft in the superpower arsenals were closely guarded secrets in the 1950s, it would not have been beyond the wit of a moderately competent Canadian intelligence officer to draw the appropriate conclusions about U.S. strategy simply from the facts that were available to him—including the conclusion that NORAD would soon become redundant.
Traditionally, no strategic thinking was done in Canada. We were doers but not thinkers. In the Second World War we provided the fourth biggest force on the Allied side, yet we had no influence whatsoever in the conduct of the war because we did not think independently, strategically. And here again we simply took over something which was worked out elsewhere.
John Gellner, Canadian defence analyst
The secret of NORAD was that it just might have succeeded in protecting the United States from Soviet nuclear weapons between about 1957 (when it went into operation) and 1963 (when enough Soviet ICBMs became operational to make anti-bomber defences quite pointless). But it would only have worked during that period if the United States had struck first and destroyed most Soviet bombers on the ground. The darker secret was that it would have been Canada that paid the price for this success, which would be measured by how many of the surviving Soviet bombers were shot down over Canada before they reached the United States—and the defending planes would use nuclear missiles to destroy the attacking bombers (which would all be carrying nuclear weapons themselves).
Few if any Canadian military officers or politicians living in the 1950s would have described the situation in these terms. The categories of thought, the justifying myths and the unmentionable topics were different then: the past is a foreign country. Yet just beneath the surface, many Canadians did suspect the truth about the role Canada was being asked to play: that of a nuclear battlefield whose sacrifice might save the United States. That was why NORAD caused a crisis that eventually toppled a Canadian government.
There is no evidence that the Canadian Chiefs of Staff ever passed such an analysis on to the government. Knowing what NORAD was really about might not have enabled the Canadian government to resist U.S. pressure to join, but it would at least have given Ottawa some ammunition to argue with. Instead, the government was left in ignorance—while the armed forces enthusiastically clamoured to be allowed to join NORAD.
Even army officers like General Charles Foulkes, the chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, were thoroughly seduced by their access to American secrets. The price they had to pay was an almost uncritical adoption of American views on defence policy and priorities, and many of them paid it gladly. But this made it hard for the government to exercise proper control over Canadian defence policy, because mere civilians did not have access to the same secrets. For example, when External Affairs officer George Ignatieff was told to put together an analysis of Canada’s new strategic dilemmas for the prime minister that could be made available to parliament and the public, he went to General Foulkes for information—and encountered a stone wall.
He said he wasn’t going to be told by eggheads from External Affairs how to plan joint defence, nor could he satisfy the Pentagon that the release of this kind of information would be without peril. And so we were absolutely stalled.…
The difficulties I was encountering, of course, were reported to the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State, and the clerk of the Privy Council, Bob Bryce, called a meeting at which he hoped to resolve the difficulties, but General Foulkes was absolutely adamant. What he said, in fact, was that the real security of Canada depended on his personal relation with “Rad and Brad”—that was Admiral Radford, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, and General Omar Bradley, who was Chief of the General Staff and an old friend of Foulkes from the war.
He said that the information which he derived through that channel personally was what was required for the security of Canada.… And that was the end of that particular effort. Soon after that I was sent off to Yugoslavia, out of the way.
George Ignatieff, External Affairs ambassador to Yugoslavia, 1956–58
So the discussions continued between the military professionals, delineating a joint command in which an American officer in Colorado Springs (with a Canadian deputy) would exercise operational control over all air defence activities in both the United States and Canada. By the time the NORAD agreement was ready to be passed over to the politicians for signature, however, the St. Laurent government was planning an early election—which, to its considerable surprise, it lost. So the NORAD treaty was lying in wait in July 1957 when the new Conservative government took office, led by John Diefenbaker.
It was almost a generation since the Conservatives had last been in office. John Diefenbaker had never sat in a cabinet, and he had no experience whatever of foreign affairs. However, he temporarily took over the role of secretary of state for external affairs in addition to his prime-ministerial duties, mainly because he felt a need to master the department in which the new leader of the opposition, Lester Pearson, had had such a distinguished career. But Diefenbaker didn’t trust his diplomatic advisers in External Affairs, whom he suspected of being pro-Liberal (if only because they had spent their entire careers working for Liberal governments). And on defence matters, he depended entirely on his defence minister, General George Pearkes.
General Foulkes had served under General Pearkes, and on the old boy network had intimated to General Pearkes that, you know, this had been under discussion for a long time, that it had gone to the previous [St. Laurent] Cabinet, and that all that was really required was the Prime Minister’s signature on something that was regarded as acceptable. He didn’t explain that there was some hesitation on the part of the preceding government. I mean it had been to Cabinet, yes, but it had been postponed. But he intimated that it was simply a matter of they were too busy or whatever it was. Anyway, the full implication was not explained.
George Ignatieff, External Affairs, 1940–60
From the moment I took over, [Foulkes] pressed the urgency of getting a decision. He certainly gave me the impression that it was all tied up by the Liberal government, and promises had been made that it would be signed immediately after the election.… I do know that they [the Canadian military] were under almost daily pressure from the military in the United States.
General George Pearkes, VC, minister of national defence, 1957–60
Diefenbaker signed the NORAD agreement on July 24, 1957, only weeks after taking office, apparently without the slightest idea of what it entailed. Foulkes had passed along only just enough information about it to get his agreement, and had done an end run around all the people at External Affairs and elsewhere who might have pointed out its drawbacks and defects to him. Diefenbaker, presumably, thought he was being efficient and decisive.
Oh hell, I don’t even know if he read it. It came out of there so … signed so suddenly. We were prepared to make a presentation to cabinet and so on.
Q. It just came back signed, sealed and delivered?
Yeah.
Air Chief Marshal Frank Miller, deputy minister of national defence, 1957
There have been a few attempts to turn Prime Minister Diefenbaker into the tragic hero of Canada’s lost independence, but that is ludicrous. For one thing, the country’s independence was certainly compromised, but it was not really lost. For another, Diefenbaker is nobody’s hero: he was a bombastic prairie politico who combined a crude but saleable version of English Canadian nationalism with an unwavering commitment to a Cold War view of the world.
“Dief” never admitted a mistake, had no particular attachment to the truth and suffered from chronic indecisiveness and low-grade paranoia. The image that lingers from his latter days is that of an old-fashioned and rigidly self-righteous man shaking his wattles in muddled indignation. But even though he was dedicated to the struggle against “the Communist evil,” he gradually came to doubt both the methods and the motives of his American allies in pursuing this objective, and to regret his early and unconditional surrender of Canadian freedom of action in signing the NORAD agreement. If he cannot be a tragic hero, he can at least serve as a cautionary tale.
Not only did the NORAD agreement commit Diefenbaker’s government to a joint command that put the air defence of Canada under American control, with little by way of effective guarantees on consultation. It also effectively committed Canada to follow the United States in putting nuclear weapons onto practically everything that could float, crawl or fly—and, most particularly, onto all the air defence fighters and anti-aircraft missiles that would be used to intercept Soviet bombers over Canada. It took some time for it to sink in, but by 1959 Diefenbaker was beginning to realize that he had been had.
It was very traumatic. All of us were fired on a loudspeaker on February the 20th, 1959 at eleven o’clock. The shock of it within the plant was very great.
Q. Could there ever be another Canadian fighter?
I would hope that there could never be another.
Syd Young, chief engineer, McDonnell Douglas of Canada Ltd. (formerly A.V. Roe Canada)
The cancellation of the Avro Arrow in early 1959, with the loss of fourteen thousand Canadian jobs, was the toughest decision that the Diefenbaker government ever took. The all-Canadian fighter project had turned into a monumental problem for the government due to performance difficulties and huge cost overruns, so Diefenbaker was grateful to have an alternative at hand: the pilotless missiles known as Bomarc-Bs that NORAD was planning to deploy in the interceptor role. Diefenbaker was able to point out that Canada had recently agreed to deploy two squadrons of Bomarcs at North Bay, Ontario, and La Macaza, Quebec, which would help to fill the gap left by the cancelled Arrow fighters. And to his dying day he insisted that he didn’t know those Bomarcs would be carrying nuclear warheads.
Diefenbaker must have been told, probably a number of times, that the Bomarc-B would only be available with nuclear warheads. (Sometimes, when he didn’t want to hear something, he just didn’t listen.) But he certainly didn’t comprehend what that implied. The warhead intended for use on the Bomarc-B was variously reported to have been five hundred kilotons or one megaton—between twenty-five and fifty times the size of the Hiroshima weapon—and Bomarc was intended to intercept low-flying bombers over Canadian soil. Even a 500-kiloton warhead, exploded at an altitude of a thousand feet, would cause deaths and injuries over an area of 1,200 square miles. In a war, dozens of these huge warheads would have been exploded over the more northerly populated regions of Ontario and Quebec. In the likely event that not every incoming bomber was destroyed in the northern sector of the Bomarcs’ 150-mile radius of action, these warheads would probably have been exploded over the more southerly parts of Quebec and Ontario too—and what was true of the Bomarcs was true also of all NORAD’S other weapons.
The performance forecasts for radars and interceptors that had been made in the early fifties, when the North American air defence system was planned, had turned out to be overoptimistic. In practice, the only way to ensure a worthwhile kill rate against incoming bombers was to use nuclear warheads that would destroy them even if they missed by a mile or two. The Bomarc-B was strictly nuclear because the Bomarc-A, with a conventional warhead, simply couldn’t do the job. American air defence fighters were also being equipped with nuclear-tipped missiles, even though many of the U.S.-based squadrons, charged with the task of intercepting Soviet bombers as far north as possible from American population centres, could barely reach the heavily populated southern fringes of Canada with their limited range of two to four hundred miles. And NORAD expected Canada to equip its own interceptors with nuclear weapons too.
The same process was going on all over the Western alliance: nuclear weapons had become plentiful, and they were being adopted as the solution to every tactical problem. In Europe the Americans were equipping their forces (and those of some of their allies) with “tactical nuclear weapons”: bombs for dropping from fighter-bombers, short-range nuclear rockets and nuclear artillery. There were even portable nuclear land mines and a hand-held nuclear bazooka (known, of course, as the “Davy Crockett”). The U.S. Navy was getting nuclear depth-charges and working on nuclear missile-firing submarines, and SAC was getting still more and bigger bombs for its bombers, plus the prospect of ICBMs with nuclear warheads in the near future.
It was the last hurrah of the confident, one-way nuclear “deterrence” of the early postwar era, which was being rapidly undermined by the growth of a real Soviet capability to inflict comparable damage in response. The United States expected Canada to play its full role in nuclearization of the Western alliance both in North America in Europe, and it heard nothing from the Canadian armed forces to suggest that there would be any political difficulties. Nor were there, at first.
In January 1958 the Canadian government opened “exploratory talks” on U.S. requests to arm its fighters at air bases in Newfoundland and Labrador with nuclear-tipped MB-1 missiles, and to store large numbers of high-yield nuclear bombs at Goose Bay for “reflex strikes.” (SAC wanted a place to reload American strategic bombers that had already dumped their first cargo of nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union so they could go back immediately and do it again, and Goose Bay was the nearest point in North America to the Soviet targets.) In September 1958 came Ottawa’s decision to acquire the Bomarc-Bs (and, by implication, their nuclear warheads). In December that was followed by an agreement to provide the Canadian navy with nuclear depth charges and to equip whatever Canadian interceptor the cancelled Arrow (the USAF eventually sold Canada 66 obsolescent F-101 Voodoos) with MB-1 nuclear missiles.
It was also decided to equip the Canadian army in Europe with “Honest John” short-range nuclear missiles, and in July 1959 the government announced that the RCAF in Europe would be re-equipped with CF-104 Starfighters, whose sole mission would be nuclear strikes into Eastern Europe. They were intended to fit into the evolving strategy of fighting a “limited” nuclear war in Europe instead of (or at least as a prelude to) a full-scale strategic nuclear war.
There was no discussion whatsoever, as I recall, about changing the role of the overseas forces to atomic carriers, because that wasn’t in Canada, it wasn’t at home here. It didn’t pollute Canada with this nasty business—although it put us right in the middle of the bombing business.
Air Chief Marshal Frank Miller, chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, 1960–64
General Foulkes was an excellent man, but.… It must have been in 1957. I was on the Directing Staff of the RCAF Staff College here in Toronto and he came and gave a lecture and he said: “We are going along because we want to be in the Big League.” The Big League! That’s why we got the nuclear weapons.
John Gellner
By mid-1959 there were no fewer than nine different proposals for placing nuclear weapons on Canadian soil or in the hands of the Canadian forces, and half of them had been approved (in principle, at least) by the Canadian government. Everything was proceeding smoothly—and then the tide began to turn.
Should Canadian forces be armed with nuclear weapons? Our own answer is a flat unqualified no.… Nothing can justify nuclear war.… The first step towards preventing it is to stop planning to wage it.
Maclean’s, September 10, 1960
Canada … can play a noteworthy role in the efforts for peace and disarmament, but this role would be reduced practically to zero if we were a nuclear satellite of Washington.
Le Devoir, September 23, 1961
In June 1959, the same month Canada made the Starfighter deal, Norman Robertson, just back from two years in Washington as ambassador and now once again undersecretary of state for external affairs, sent Prime Minister Diefenbaker a clipping from the previous month’s copy of the British magazine the Spectator. The author of the article, Christopher Hollis, argued that the thermonuclear weapons had changed the nature of war: destruction would now be so great that even if the West emerged from a nuclear war as the nominal victor “there is no chance that the pattern of our own national life … would still survive when we emerge from it.”
Hollis’s article went on to argue for nuclear disarmament and a buildup of NATO’S conventional forces: in effect, a reversal of the Western decision to rely on cheap nuclear firepower rather than expensive soldiers that had been taken at a time when the West had a near-monopoly of nuclear weapons. There was, after all, no objective reason why the West could not rely on its superior numbers, wealth and technology to deter the Soviet Union with non-nuclear weapons, if it were willing to pay the cost. However, Hollis didn’t only want the West to stop threatening to use nuclear weapons against a Soviet conventional attack. He advocated unilateral Western nuclear disarmament—no matter what the Soviets did. And attached to Hollis’s article was a memo to Prime Minister Diefenbaker from the undersecretary: “Mr Robertson wishes you to know that his views coincide with those of the author of the article.”
Norman Robertson had hitherto held quite orthodox views on the question of nuclear weapons for Canada, but recently they had begun to change. In March 1959, having just been briefed by some External Affairs officers who had visited SAC and NORAD headquarters, he remarked that “the whole philosophy of [nuclear] deterrence had been developed at a time when conditions were vastly different from those existing today.… Our minds should be turned instead to the tremendous political effort that needed to be undertaken to avoid the awesome consequences of nuclear warfare.”
The Soviet Union, of course, had already been living with the grim prospect of those “awesome consequences” for over a decade. What caused numbers of Canadians to begin questioning the West’s nuclear-oriented strategies was the growing probability that the West itself would suffer those same consequences. A policy that had been seen as a regrettable strategic necessity when it implied immolating tens of millions of Soviet citizens became a great deal less acceptable when it also involved the prospect of unstoppable Soviet ICBMs aimed at North America, and millions of Canadians dead. And in June 1959 Robertson got a new minister who shared his thinking: Howard Green.
This was the time when the frozen silence between the two great alliances was hesitantly starting to give way to semi-permanent (if glacially slow) arms control talks—and Howard Green devoted a great deal of time and effort to promoting various proposals to lessen the danger of nuclear war. He insisted that Canada’s ability to take a lead on these issues would be undermined if at the same time it was equipping its own forces with nuclear weapons.
Mr Green was passionately committed to two things. One is that he was against war: he had been a veteran who was wounded in the First World War, and like most people who have seen the horrors of war at first hand he was not a great enthusiast about repeating it for other generations.
The other thing was that he was a tremendous believer in the United Nations.… He was not a great enthusiast about NATO, and an essential part of security as he saw it was arms control and disarmament.
George Ignatieff
The great issue during Green’s time in office was a nuclear test ban, which was universally seen as the indispensable condition for any other arms control or disarmament measures. And things were falling apart: the moratorium on nuclear tests that had been agreed by the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain in 1958 had not led to a treaty on account of differences about “verification,” and the Soviet Union had finally denounced it. In October 1961 the Soviets tested the biggest bomb ever, the “Tsar Bomb”—fifty megatons—and in early 1962 the Americans also began testing again in the atmosphere. But Green never lost heart.
Green felt it necessary to keep up a public facade of optimism which led many to call him naïve, but in fact he was an adroit operator who knew how to exploit Canada’s prestige, especially among the non-aligned states, to get proposals on the agenda that could break the logjam. In October 1962, for example, his close ally General E.L M. Burns, Canada’s representative on the UN Disarmament Committee, put forward (much against the wishes of the United States) the amendment that finally made a limited test-ban treaty possible: it separated underground tests from all the others, and proposed banning all the rest. And it was Green himself who first brought up, at the eighteen-nation Geneva Disarmament Conference, the idea of a ban on all weapons of mass destruction in outer space. That annoyed the Americans even more, but it too produced a treaty in the end.
The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and the ban on nuclear weapons in outer space in 1966 are monuments to Howard Green’s persistence, and it was quite true that Canada’s influence among the neutral countries was very important to these results. But Green’s constant argument that Canada should shun nuclear weapons in order to retain its influence among the non-aligned nations was probably deliberately overstated: the Indians and the Egyptians weren’t really worried about nuclear warheads on Bomarcs in North Bay, or even slung beneath Starfighters in Germany.
The truth is that Green thought the whole nuclear game was insane, and used any argument he could find to keep Canada out of it. From 1959 on, Canadian defence policy was a battleground in which External Affairs, under Howard Green and Norman Robertson, fought against the Department of National Defence to win Diefenbaker’s support for radically divergent policies, with the nuclear weapons to be acquired from the Americans as the main focus of the argument. Most people in Ottawa still subscribed to the orthodox credo about Western defence policy, but there were a couple of wild cards operating in Green’s and Robertson’s favour. One was that Diefenbaker, unlike most politicians, had no faith in opinion polls. Instead, he read his mail—and Canadians active in the peace movement wrote him a lot of letters. Diefenbaker became persuaded that an anti-nuclear stance was popular with the Canadian public.
Dogs know best what to do with polls.
John Diefenbaker, November 1, 1971
The other wild card was Diefenbaker’s nationalism. He was not reflexively anti-American, but there were signs of strain even when President Eisenhower was still in office.
In spite of all the flowery exchanges between “Ike” and Mr. Diefenbaker, he was already brewing up for trouble with the United States because he thought they were getting above themselves: “They think they can lead the world and shove us all around.”
Q. Was there a reason for Mr. Diefenbaker’s feelings?
Well, yes, of course. It was the great moment of American imperialism at its height, when they really felt they had the answers to everything in the world, and had dozens of alliances, and were willing to move into any cabbage patch anywhere in the world and fight against Communism or feudalism or anything which didn’t go with the American way of life. It was rather overpowering.
Charles Ritchie, ambassador to Washington, 1962–66
It was this coincidental combination of things—Diefenbaker’s conviction that there was a powerful groundswell of anti-nuclear feeling in the Canadian public, his growing inclination to resist American pressures on every subject, and a small band of determined partisans of nuclear disarmament at External Affairs headed by Green and Robertson—that inexorably led the Conservative government into confrontation with the Americans over nuclear weapons. And Diefenbaker’s legendary capacity for dither, delay and indecision defined Green’s and Robertson’s tactics for them.
By the time Green became secretary of state for external affairs, it was too late for the government to make a principled rejection of the whole idea of nuclear weapons for Canada: the basic agreements to acquire nuclear weapons systems for the Canadian forces both in Canada and in Europe had almost all been signed. So Green simply produced innumerable objections to the terms of the agreements that had to be negotiated with the Americans for the custody of the nuclear warheads.
I was given the task of negotiating these agreements. So, working with the people in National Defence and others, we worked out a draft agreement and sent it up to Mr Green and it sat there for six weeks and nothing happened. Finally General Pearkes, who was the Minister of Defence, got hold of Mr. Green and said: “We’ve got to get moving on this, Howard.” And so Mr. Green called me in and said: “This is not tough enough. Go back to the drawing board.”
And over the loud objections of National Defence, we went back to the drawing board, and the same performance was repeated at least three times. By then I had drawn the conclusion that Mr. Green had no intention of having such an agreement concluded. At that point I decided this was no place for me, so I succeeded in negotiating my way to another assignment.
Q. Were the armed forces very upset by all this?
I think they just sort of despaired, you know.… They eventually reached the sort of numbed stage where they felt they would do anything they had to to get the agreement.
Bill Barton, External Affairs, 1952–70
Diefenbaker dealt with this guerrilla warfare between his ministers and advisers by simply stalling on the nuclear warheads—for years. The acquisition of various nuclear-weapons carriers went ahead as planned, Canadian servicemen were sent to the United States for courses on how to handle and use nuclear warheads, and Diefenbaker never said he wouldn’t accept them in the end. But he didn’t actually do anything about arranging to take them, either, and after John F. Kennedy became the president of the United States in early 1961 U.S.-Canadian relations went from bad to worse. It was loathing at first sight.
Kennedy thought that Dief was a mischievous old man who was a nuisance, and I think Dief thought Kennedy was, as he used to say, an arrogant young pup. And then their styles were completely different: that sort of Harvard veneer on top of the Irish politician, and the social mix, and the Camelot bit—it was completely antipathetic to Dief, who was a real populist. He had no use for any of that sort of thing.
And I think that Kennedy wrongly saw Dief as someone from the sticks, and so they were temperamentally … it was very unfortunate.
Charles Ritchie
But despite fraying tempers and an ever-lengthening delay on the outstanding question of accepting nuclear warheads for all of Canada’s new weapons, relations between Ottawa and Washington staggered along without an open break until the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Then they fell apart.
I knew that President Kennedy was still smarting over the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco.… I also knew that the President thought he had something to prove in his personal dealings with Khrushchev after their unpleasant Vienna meeting, where Khrushchev had treated him like a child, referring to him as “the boy.” I considered that he was perfectly capable of taking the world to the brink of thermonuclear destruction to prove himself the man for our times, a courageous champion of Western democracy.
John Diefenbaker, One Canada, vol. 3
The Cuban crisis came in the last year when the United States still had a sufficient margin of nuclear advantage for its strategy of “massive retaliation” to be practicable. The ability to carry out a first strike against the Soviet Union and survive the retaliation with relatively little damage, which had been the foundation of American strategy for fifteen years, was eroding rapidly, but in 1962 the United States still had a decisive nuclear superiority.
During the Berlin crisis of 1961, the U.S. Air Force had advised President Kennedy that American civilian losses in a nuclear war would probably not exceed ten million dead and injured, provided the United States struck first. “That ten million estimate,” remarked Daniel Ellsberg, a strategic analyst serving in the Kennedy administration, “reflected to me that the Joint Chiefs all knew—including SAC—that what [the Russians] had was four missiles.” In the same year the basic American war plan, the SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan), called for almost 2,500 American nuclear strikes against Soviet, Eastern European and Chinese military and civilian targets, destroying the Soviet bomber fleet on the ground and killing an estimated 350 million people in less than a day. It would probably still have succeeded when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred just one year later.
If we installed the missiles [in Cuba] secretly, and then if the United States discovered the missiles were there after they were already poised and ready to strike, the Americans would think twice before trying to liquidate our installations by military means.
I knew that the United States could knock out some of our installations, but not all of them. If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles survived—even if only one or two big ones were left—we could still hit New York, and there wouldn’t be much of New York left. I don’t mean to say that everybody in New York would be killed—not everyone, of course, but an awful lot of people would be wiped out.
The main thing was that the installation of our missiles in Cuba would, I thought, restrain the United States from precipitate action against Castro’s government. In addition to protecting Cuba, our missiles would have equalized what the West likes to call the “balance of power.” The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, and now they would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you.
Khrushchev Remembers
Khrushchev’s decision to extend a Soviet military guarantee to Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba, taken soon after the defeat of the American-backed rebel landing at the Bay of Pigs, was mainly meant to deter further invasion attempts by the United States or its surrogates, but the fact that the Soviet guarantee to Cuba took the form of nuclear missiles simultaneously made it a confrontation about the whole strategic balance.
At the time the Cuban crisis occurred, the Soviet Union still did not have a reliable force of ICBMs capable of hitting the United States from its own territory. The emplacement of shorter-range missiles in Cuba was a Soviet attempt to leapfrog to strategic parity with the United States by “forward basing”: from Cuba, those missiles could hit most U.S. cities. True, it would be only another year or so before the Soviet Union had enough home-based ICBMs for a guaranteed “second-strike capability”—the ability to retaliate massively against the United States even after an American first strike. But even a week is sometimes a long time in politics.
If a nuclear war occurred over Cuba before the Soviet missiles there became operational, the results would resemble those predicted for the Berlin crisis the previous year: 350 million dead “Communists,” and total American casualties of perhaps ten million. But if war broke out after the Soviet missiles in Cuba became operational, then the United States would probably lose most of its big cities in the subsequent exchange. However, once U.S. reconnaissance planes discovered the Soviet missile sites in Cuba prematurely, the game was up for Moscow.
It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.
U.S. president John F. Kennedy, October 22, 1962
The U.S. Air Force had an inflexible commitment to destroying the Soviet missiles in Cuba before they became operational, and for the Soviet Union to risk a nuclear war without those missiles would be a unilateral act of national suicide. The Cuban crisis was therefore never really as dangerous as it seemed. But the Americans did expect prompt and unquestioning support from their allies in this crisis—and from one ally, it was not forthcoming.
President Kennedy requested that we immediately and publicly place the Canadian NORAD component on maximum alert. I considered it unacceptable that every agreed requirement for consultation between our two countries should be ignored. We were not a satellite state at the beck and call of an imperial master. I telephoned the President … [and told him] that I did not believe that Mr. Khrushchev would allow things to reach that stage. While I hated the Communist system and its philosophy … I knew something about politicians, whatever their stripe.
I saw Nikita Khrushchev as essentially a cautious man, well aware of the strategic superiority of the United States. He could have no interest in a major confrontation with the United States except where the vital security interests of the USSR were at stake. He had been caught fishing in American waters, and the President had seized the opportunity to erase the memory of the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
One Canada, vol. 3
As soon as Kennedy’s speech ended, NORAD declared a DEFCON 3 alert (the third-highest alert status). NORAD headquarters at Colorado Springs naturally expected that Diefenbaker would instruct the Canadian forces to go to the same level of alert at once—but he didn’t.
I think that one of the reasons why he delayed … was because he saw this as the first test of consultation under NORAD. He didn’t feel that what had been said and done by the President … amounted to the degree of consultation that Canada had a right to expect under the agreement.
Basil Robinson, External Affairs liaison officer to the Prime Minister’s Office, 1957–62
Such Canadian foot-dragging, especially in a crisis, was bound to irritate the Americans. That was no reason to act otherwise, if enthusiastic compliance was not the appropriate response to an American request. But Diefenbaker never realized the degree to which his own Department of National Defence had lost its ability to distinguish a separate Canadian perspective in matters of national security.
My response immediately was that we had to go to the same stage of alert. I went to see Mr Diefenbaker and told him that this was the situation. He insisted on holding a cabinet meeting [the following day].…
So following that I went back to my headquarters and called the Chiefs of Staff together—that would be in the evening, well on in the evening as a matter of fact—and told them that this was the situation; that we’d go on the alert anyway but say nothing about it. They put those orders out immediately, starting, I should think, about midnight.
Hon. Douglas Harkness, minister of national defence, 1960–63
Harkness’s act of disobedience to the prime minister was merely a ratification of what had already occurred. The Canadian armed forces had gone on alert even before their minister secretly authorized their action.
I suppose that I bore the ultimate responsibility for that. It was just too abhorrent to me that Canadians should be put in the position, the whole of Canada, of dishonouring its solemn pledge and word. How wrong it would have been for us to have been caught unaware, with neither ships in position, nor ammunition, nor fuel. Somebody had to do it so I said: “Go ahead, do it.”
Rear Admiral Jeffry Brock, DSO DSC, vice-chief of Naval Staff
The American government was far too busy deciding whether or not to blow up the world to worry very much about Diefenbaker’s recalcitrance during the crisis, and in any case Washington knew that its allies at the Department of National Defence in Ottawa had taken all the military measures it desired. The cabinet meeting on October 23 accepted Diefenbaker’s decision not to go on alert for the moment (unaware that the Canadian forces were already on alert for all practical purposes). But when the Americans actually began their naval blockade of Cuba on October 24, NORAD bumped its alert state up to DEFCON 2, and Harkness finally got the prime minister’s reluctant assent to formally place the Canadian forces on the same alert status.
As to the popular notion that Canada’s Minister of National Defence, Mr. Harkness, under the influence of the Canadian military and the United States Pentagon, engaged in a clandestine authorization of a full alert on 22 October, I do not believe it to be true.
John Diefenbaker, One Canada, vol. 3
I never did tell Diefenbaker that I’d done it, but no doubt he learned of it later.… So far as the American armed forces were concerned, particularly through NORAD, they were aware of the fact that we were on the same stage of alert as they were although it hadn’t been announced.
Hon. Douglas Harkness
Torn between obedience to their own national authority and a “higher” ’ alliance loyalty during the Cuban crisis, the Canadian armed forces chose the latter. They rationalized their disobedience by making the same distinction between the orders of the present government and the “true interests of the state” which has served as the justification for every coup from Chile to Thailand, but the Canadian forces are not coup-prone.
In 1962, at the end of a decade of headlong expansion and deeply immersed in the self-righteous rhetoric of the Cold War, the Canadian military followed their instincts (and their interests), and aligned themselves with the great English-speaking allies whose strategic interests had always provided them with their reason for being in the past. In the far humbler circumstances the armed forces find themselves in today, even this degree of military disloyalty is difficult to imagine: the Canadian forces can probably be relied upon to obey the decisions of the Canadian government in almost any circumstances.
As for the Cuban crisis, it ended more or less in a draw: the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba (and the United States withdrew its own comparable Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey after a face-saving interval of a couple of months). In the longer term, the much-chastened governments in both Washington and Moscow would begin to approach the problem of managing their nuclear-armed confrontation in a somewhat more cooperative spirit. As for Diefenbaker, what got him, in the end, was Canadian nuclear weapons.
By the end of 1962 the Bomarcs were all fully operational in their Canadian launching sites—except, of course, for the nuclear warheads without which they were about as useful as the tail fins on a ’62 Chevy. But then, they wouldn’t be very useful with their nuclear warheads either: the bomber threat was fading rapidly in U.S. strategic calculations as intercontinental ballistic missiles became the main strategic weapon. However, there was still the question of alliance discipline. As Diefenbaker observed: “What the Kennedy administration actually wanted was Canadian acceptance of nuclear weapons in NORAD and NATO. It did not matter that the Bomarc was useless, or that the threat was now from the ICBMs; we were to take the warheads because the President said we must.”
Canada’s growing “nuclear allergy” was becoming a problem for the United States. The Americans were concerned that the Canadian reluctance to take nuclear weapons might spread to infect other members of the alliance unless checked—there was already an active “Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament” in Britain—and that could have serious effects on American strategy.
I think they took the nuclear issue seriously, not so much in terms of relations with Canada but as an exemplary issue. They were frightened, or they alleged that they were frightened, that things would come unstuck in other countries, and that the whole thing would begin to erode.… And on top of that, there was a desire for a change in the terms of general Canadian-American relations—there were the two things.
Charles Ritchie, Canadian ambassador to Washington, 1962–66
The simple strategic bargain that had underpinned NATO in the fifties—by which the Western European countries gave their political loyalty to the United States in return for an American promise to exterminate the Russians with nuclear weapons if they dared to attack—was getting much more complicated. As the American ability to keep that promise without suffering unacceptable Soviet retaliation on their own homeland declined, U.S. strategists tried to shore up its credibility by inserting an intermediate phase of “limited” nuclear war in Europe.
The notion of a limited nuclear war allegedly “reinforced deterrence.” The American threat to blow up the Soviet Union in response to a Soviet attack on Western Europe got hard to believe once the Soviet Union could also blow up the United States, but it seemed plausible that the Americans would start using nuclear weapons in Europe. But since that would probably start an uncontrollable pattern of rapid nuclear escalation, you would still get your nuclear war between the superpowers out of it in the end. So the basic American threat to blow up the Soviet Union if they laid a finger on Western Europe was still effective after all.
I apologize for the baroque logical processes on display here, but that, stripped of the jargon, is what the strategists of the time said the doctrine of limited nuclear war in Europe was actually for. Governments can believe this sort of thing, but you can hardly expect ordinary people to swallow it, so the move to a limited nuclear war strategy caused serious political problems in Europe. It required basing U.S. nuclear weapons on European soil, getting many of the European allies to accept them for their own armed forces and getting everybody to accept the probability that those weapons might end up being used on their own territory in a war. So the whole business of spreading nuclear weapons through most of NATO’s armed forces and preparing for a limited nuclear war in Europe was almost comically furtive.
Most NATO countries quietly bought the appropriate equipment for delivering “tactical” nuclear weapons, and the appropriate agreements were signed to make American nuclear warheads available. In theory the Americans remained responsible because these weapons could only be armed by an American soldier (plus a soldier from the country where the weapons were located—the so-called “dual-key” system), and this enabled the European governments to pretend that it was a purely technical matter best left to the soldiers. However, Canada’s increasingly obvious refusal to accept its quota of nuclear weapons was not helping at all. In the aftermath of the Cuban crisis, Washington was determined to shift its reluctant ally on the nuclear weapons issue, and the pro-nuclear faction within the Conservative cabinet, led by Defence Minister Douglas Harkness, was equally determined to push Diefenbaker to a decision:
Howard Green and the External Affairs people followed a policy of delay, constantly saying: “Well, we can’t do this; agree to this; now let’s do something else; and so on and so forth.” And kept delaying it and delaying it and delaying it until finally it got to the point that it was quite apparent that no action was going to be taken. I finally brought the matter to a crux by [stating] that I would resign if this wasn’t done.
Hon. Douglas Harkness
General Norstad, retiring as supreme commander of NATO in Europe, was invited to call at Ottawa on January 3, 1963, on his way home to the United States. It was widely assumed that he would be a presidential candidate in the next election, so anything he said in public would carry considerable weight in Canada. He had lunch with Harkness and the Canadian Armed Forces Chiefs of Staff—and at the end of it they told him about the press conference.
So I remember saying: “What press conference?” We went down and the room was full. I’ve never seen so many cameras.… The questions started flying … and it started boring down on this: Was Canada meeting its commitments? Well, it got to a point where I thought it deserved an answer. So when they asked the question whether Canada had met the [nuclear] commitment, I just said “No.” And you’ve never seen so many people leave a room so fast. (Chuckles.) They were all running for the phone and the cameras were dismantled and people ran away.
General Lauris Norstad
The impact of Norstad’s remarks in Canada was enormous: for the first time, a senior American official had implied in public that Canada was not a reliable ally. The effect was even greater because his visit came only ten weeks after the Cuban crisis, which had scared Canadians half to death. A widespread initial reaction to that experience in Canada had been to conclude that American nuclear weapons were, after all, good for you. In effect, a great many Canadians followed their armed forces’ example and defected from the government to the Americans: by December 1962, 54 percent of Canadians believed that the country should accept U.S. nuclear weapons. The landslide that would sweep Diefenbaker away was beginning to move: just a week after Norstad’s visit, Lester Pearson announced that the Liberals now favoured accepting the nuclear warheads.
On January 25, 1963 Diefenbaker claimed in a speech in Parliament that it would be inappropriate for Canada to accept nuclear weapons at that time. Among other things, he said that the United States and Britain had recently discussed moving the whole NATO alliance’s strategy away from nuclear weapons at a summit meeting in Nassau. This was not even a half-truth, and on January 30 the U.S. State Department issued a press release correcting what Diefenbaker had said about the Nassau summit and all but calling him a liar. It added tartly that “the Canadian government has not as yet proposed any arrangement sufficiently practical to contribute effectively to North American air defence.” Diefenbaker replied by recalling the Canadian ambassador from Washington—the only time that has ever been done.
By the time that I was recalled to Ottawa to “mark our displeasure,” Dief and the government were dead-set for an election with anti-American overtones and they thought they could win it.
I, rather naively—the way diplomats are very naive, compared to anybody else—thought that we could sort of patch up the difficulty that had arisen over this very arrogant and ham-handed operation of the press release. I thought that we could get, you know, apologies, “misunderstandings,” denials. But of course when I arrived here I found I was barking up the wrong tree entirely.
That was the last thing they wanted: to patch it up, paper over the cracks. Because they had got their eyes set on an election in which anti-American overtones would play a very important and perhaps victorious part. So there you were.
Charles Ritchie
Diefenbaker soon got his election: the cabinet was torn almost daily by chaotic disputes as Harkness pressed his demand that the government accept nuclear weapons. On February 3, 1963 Harkness resigned, and the following day he read out his resignation letter on national radio and television, explaining that it had been explicitly over the nuclear issue. The government lost a vote of confidence in the Commons on February 5, and Parliament was dissolved the next day.
Q. When you submitted your resignation, did you know it would bring the government down?
Well, I was pretty sure it would, yes.
Q. And at that point you reckoned this was necessary?
Yes.
Q. Do you still think so?
I still think so.
Hon. Douglas Harkness, 1984
If Harkness really believed it was worth resigning to get nuclear warheads onto Canada’s Bomarcs, he was desperately out of touch with military realities. The day after Diefenbaker’s government fell, U.S. secretary of defense Robert McNamara was testifying about air defence to a subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations of the House of Representatives. He was not having an easy time of it: the whole concept of North American air defence had been taking a beating over the previous few years in the United States, as American strategists slowly came to terms with the looming reality of unstoppable ICBMs. In due course the congressmen got around to their favourite topic.
REPRESENTATIVE MINSHALL: No hearings of this subcommittee would be complete unless I at least mentioned in passing the word “Bomarc.”
REP. FLOOD: You are speaking of the woman I love.
REP. MINSHALL: … If I remember correctly … we put somewhere between $3 billions and $4 billions into this program. I just wonder … why we even put any money into the operational cost of this weapon when it is so useless.
SECRETARY McNAMARA: For the protection we get, I do not believe it is an unreasonable amount.
REP. MINSHALL: The protection is practically nil, Mr. Secretary, as you said here in your statement.…
SECRETARY McNAMARA: At the very least, they would cause the Soviets to target missiles against them and thereby … draw missiles onto these Bomarc targets that would otherwise be available for other targets.
REP. MINSHALL: In view of the statement you just made, Mr. Secretary, why do we not leave the Jupiter missiles in Italy and Turkey? If we have to draw enemy fire, that is a good place to draw it.…
SECRETARY McNAMARA: As they are deployed, [the Bomarcs in Canada] draw more fire than those Jupiter missiles will.
Edited transcript of House Committee on Appropriations hearing, February 6, 1963
On March 29, 1963, in the last week of the Canadian election campaign, this testimony was released in the United States, and Diefenbaker leaped on it with glad cries. Conveniently forgetting that his own government had installed the Bomarcs in the first place, he told an enthusiastic crowd in Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto that “the Canadian people would not approve of useless Bomarcs being used as missile bait in Canada.” In the days that followed he accused Pearson of making Canada into a “decoy duck in a nuclear war” by agreeing to arm the Bomarcs, and asked if it was Liberal policy to “make Canada into a burnt sacrifice.”
Pearson was clearly unhappy about his U-turn on nuclear weapons, but he stuck it out and promised the voters that a Liberal government would take and keep the nuclear weapons Canada had signed up for “as long as they are useful for defence.” The fact that some of these nuclear weapons, at least, were manifestly not useful for defence, and had just been so described by no less an authority than the U.S. secretary of defense, didn’t matter, because the electorate wasn’t interested in details.
If the election had really been about NORAD and the nuclear weapons that came with it, Diefenbaker could hardly have lost, for NORAD was a strategic irrelevance almost from the day it was created. The first successful Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test took place only one month after Diefenbaker agreed to join in mid-1957, and by early 1963 the U.S. Department of Defense had been reduced to justifying the Bomarcs as targets to soak up Russian firepower. But Diefenbaker was constrained from discussing the full and brutal truth about NORAD in public by the rules of secrecy covering strategic information obtained from the Americans, and also by the fact that he himself had signed the NORAD treaty. So the election campaign rapidly moved on from a muddled argument about nuclear warheads to a straightforward loyalty call: Diefenbaker’s vision of Canada (whatever that might be) versus loyalty to the alliance, and especially to the Americans. But he got the wrong answer from the Canadian people.
Canada has voted American.
Headline, Paris-Presse, April 9, 1963
Canadians, it turned out, trusted and admired the U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, more than they did their own prime minister. The Liberals won the election in April 1963, forming a minority government that inaugurated another twenty-one-year run of Liberal rule with only one brief interruption. Five months later, Prime Minister Pearson signed the agreement with the United States, accepting nuclear warheads for Canada’s forces at home and in Europe. And within another few years, Canada’s short and hectic ride as strategically important territory was at an end.