Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (47 page)
Read Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 Online
Authors: Gwynne Dyer
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.
