Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (45 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.