Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (43 page)

And there it was: nuclear strategy, complete and irrefutable. Bernard Brodie and his colleagues published their conclusions in 1946 as
The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order
, and after that there was not much left to say about how a nuclear-armed world would have to work. By 1985 it was the way the nuclear-armed world actually did work. But in practice it took quite a while to get there, because the
world of the late 1940s was not a nuclear-armed world. It was a conventionally-armed world with one nuclear-weapons power in it: the United States. In such a world, nuclear weapons were eminently usable, as Hiroshima had just demonstrated.

As the sole possessor of nuclear weapons on the planet, the United States was free to adopt a strategy of “massive retaliation” rather than match the Soviet Union in conventional weapons, and the Western Europeans were free to depend on the U.S. nuclear monopoly for their defence as well. Even after a great war in which the indiscriminate bombing of civilians had played a large part in the Allied strategy, there was something horrific about this doctrine, but it was undeniably cheaper than maintaining mass armies (including a huge American army) in Western Europe.

In theory, the United States should have had to abandon massive retaliation soon after the Soviet Union tested its own atomic weapon in 1949, but in fact the heyday of the strategy still lay ahead of it. Partly this was just because of the greater wealth and bigger production facilities for nuclear weapons of the United States, which allowed it to maintain a huge numerical superiority in the things. In 1949, when the Soviet Union had precisely one bomb, the United States had 235. In 1955, when the United States had 3,200 bombs, the Soviet Union had perhaps 300. By 1962, the year of the Cuban crisis, the United States had a preposterous 30,000 nuclear weapons (most of them only useful for “bouncing the
rubble,” as one critic put it)—but the Soviet Union had at least a couple of thousand, which met Brodie’s criterion for being sufficient to destroy the opposing country. So at this point, at last, Brodie’s theory of mutual deterrence should have been fully applicable, and any thought of using nuclear weapons as an instrument of policy should have been abandoned by both sides. But there was one further hurdle to cross: could the things be reliably delivered on the enemy targets.

For Strategic Air Command, it was never a problem. From the very beginning of the Cold War, its bomber bases encircled the Soviet Union in Western and Southern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, only a few hours’ flight time from Soviet cities and bases. But the Soviet Union had no overseas bases, and its bombers at first did not have the range to reach the United States at all. By the mid-1950s it did have some planes that could attack the United States by flying across the Arctic Ocean—but the U.S. Strategic Air Command reckoned it had a solution for that threat that would keep the massive retaliation strategy alive.

Curtis LeMay, as commander of SAC and later head of the Air Staff, controlled virtually all aspects of U.S. planning for nuclear war from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. He never wavered in his conviction that the United States should and would strike first in a nuclear war.
In fact, as he once told a group of SAC pilots, he “could not imagine a circumstance under which the United States would go second.” The technical phrase is “first strike”—and in practice the United States Air Force was always and exclusively committed to first strike during the first fifteen years of the American-Soviet confrontation.

It all followed perfectly logically from the doctrine of massive retaliation. By 1955 SAC had almost two thousand nuclear weapons—the rest of the U.S. armed forces had to make do with a mere thousand—and its war plan (it only had one) involved destroying at least three-quarters of the population in 118 Soviet cities. It estimated Soviet casualties at around sixty million. And it was so confident of its ability to crush the Soviet Union that it did not worry at all about the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack on North America. The public were pumped full of stories about the threat of a Soviet surprise attack in order to maintain their support for the enormous defence budgets of the time, but nobody in the know really believed in the possibility of a nuclear “Pearl Harbor.”

General Curtis LeMay certainly didn’t. In 1955, for example, an academic strategist called Albert Wohlstetter tried to persuade the SAC commander that his bombers could be destroyed on the ground in a Soviet surprise attack unless he developed policies for dispersing them and built shelters for them. General LeMay was profoundly unimpressed, and gently confided to one of Wohlstetter’s young assistants that SAC already had a policy on shelters. “Really?” the eager young man asked. “What is it?” “Piss on shelters,” replied General LeMay.

LeMay wasn’t worried because he knew that if anybody’s bombers were going to be caught on the ground, it would be the Soviets’. And that was the unspoken context in which the whole saga of North American air defence developed and Canada got dragged into the world of nuclear strategies:
NORAD
was designed not to cope with a Soviet surprise attack but to deal with a ragged retaliation by the relatively few Soviet bombers that survived an American first strike.

C
ANADA 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.

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:

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:

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.

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.”