Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (44 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).