Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014

by Gwynne Dyer

  This cooperation would take place within the framework of the United Nations, which was actually a second attempt to make the League of Nations work, with somewhat tougher rules but the same basic concept of collective security. Everybody at San Francisco was determined that the enterprise should succeed this time, for there had never been a war as bad as the one just ending. Forty-five million people had been killed, and every traditional standard of civilized behaviour had been repeatedly violated. (Newsreels showing the horrors of the concentration camps were just being released.)

  The Americans, who were acting as hosts, were disorganized. The War Memorial Opera House building was still being converted for the conference when the delegates arrived and nobody had been given office space. In his diary Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat, mocked the theatricality of the plenary sessions.

  The session is declared open by [U.S. secretary of state Edward] Stettinius, who comes onto the dais chewing (whether gum or the remains of his lunch is a subject of speculation).… He makes the worst impression on the delegates. He reads his speech in a lay-preacher’s voice husky with corny emotion.…

  After him Molotov mounts the tribune in an atmosphere of intense curiosity and some nervousness. He looks like an employee in any hôtel de ville—one of those individuals who sits behind a wire grille entering figures in a ledger, and when you ask them anything always say “no.” You forgive their rudeness because you know they are underpaid and that someone bullies them, and they must, in accordance with Nature’s unsavoury laws, “take it out on” someone else.

  The Siren Years

  The great powers were in constant disagreement at San Francisco, but the main problem for the Canadian diplomats was that they all cooperated in trying to exclude the lesser powers from the discussion. In their determination to avoid the paralysis that had destroyed the League, the great powers were concentrating most of the United Nations’ powers in the Security Council (of which they would be permanent members). And although Canada was almost a great military power itself in 1945—it had the fourth-largest armed forces among the victorious Allies—“almost” was not good enough for a seat on the board of directors.

  We wanted to be a middle power which would be a kind of semi-permanent member of the Security Council. We said important military countries like ourselves ought to have this special position. Well, the trouble with that argument was that we had to demobilize. You know, our boys had been away longer than anybody else’s. You had to get them home. Everyone wanted to reduce the defence expenditure, and if we’d got some kind of semi-permanent seat in the Security Council on those grounds we would have had to maintain an army of several hundred thousand men or so. So I don’t think we really wanted to be a great military power.

  John Holmes, External Affairs, 1943–60

  Although Canada’s relative economic and military power in the world was greater in 1945 than it ever had been (or ever would be again), the country still lacked the instincts of a great power. However, it had lost its isolationist reflexes: Prime Minister Mackenzie King was only a very reluctant convert to collective security, but the younger generation of Canadian politicians and diplomats who had matured in the war desperately wanted the United Nations to succeed. Lester Pearson, for example, was suggesting a two-hundred-thousand-man United Nations standing army to which Canada would contribute (exactly the sort of idea that made King nervous about Pearson). But the question of who would control the army was crucial.

  If the United Nations actually ended up as the world’s policeman, then it would presumably have to enforce the rules of collective security against aggressors by armed force from time to time, and Canada might find itself being ordered by the great powers to contribute troops to impose Security Council decisions in which it had no voice. So the Canadians fought hard for better representation for all the middle and smaller powers, especially on the Security Council. Norman Robertson argued, “We are confident that no workable international system can be based on the concentration of influence and authority wholly in bodies composed of a few great powers to the exclusion of all the rest.”

  Yet even while trying to keep the United Nations from turning into a great-power directorate, the Canadians were of a generation who had learned that the world runs on power. They were quite realistic about the difficulty of persuading jealous great powers to surrender any of their sovereignty to an international organization, and about the gulf of suspicion and incomprehension between the “Anglo-Saxon” and Russian great powers (who were the only great powers still on their feet in 1945). If the price of getting them to support the United Nations wholeheartedly was giving them control of it, then they were willing to pay it.

  It was the Russians, above all, who insisted on the great-power veto and the primacy of the Security Council—but then, the Soviet Union could expect very little support in the General Assembly, where all the Latin American countries and a lot of the other Western countries would automatically support the United States. (Most of the rest of the world was still under European colonial rule.) It was finally agreed that the smaller nations in the General Assembly would have the right to raise issues and make recommendations to the Security Council. But the Big Five (France joined the original “four policemen” after May 9, 1945) retained permanent seats in the Security Council and had the veto over decisions taken by that body.

  It could not be avoided: the great powers, and especially the Soviet Union, simply would not allow themselves to be put in a position where the United Nations had the legal right to take military action against them. So in the end the Canadian representatives, like everyone else, bowed to the inevitable: they decided that a United Nations dominated by the great powers was better than no United Nations at all.

  Finally, after two months of tedious haggling, the exhausted delegates managed to agree on a charter (though some issues, like how to choose the secretary-general, were postponed). But the length and difficulty of the negotiations were actually good signs: it meant that the nations were taking the new organization seriously—as did President Harry Truman, the small-time politician who had suddenly been catapulted into the most powerful job on earth by Roosevelt’s death, when he flew in for the signing of the Charter.

  If we had had this Charter a few years ago—and above all the will to use it—millions now dead would be alive. If we falter in the future in our will to use it, millions now living will surely die.… We all have to recognize—no matter how great our strength—that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please. Unless we are willing to pay that price, no organization for world peace can accomplish its purpose. And what a reasonable price that is!

  U.S. president Harry S. Truman, Address at final session

  It could have been Sir Robert Borden or General Jan Smuts talking about the League of Nations in 1919. But the resolve to change the way the international system worked had been great at the end of that war, too. The question was: Would it last this time?

  PERSONAL AND MOST SECRET.

  In December 1938 and January 1939 in France and Germany discovery was made that certain elements, chiefly uranium, could be made to “burst” (scientific term “fission”).

  Since 1941 active research in the U.K., and the U.S., and Canada has been carried out and it is now certain a bomb can and will be made that will be, if not a million times, at least hundreds of times more powerful than anything yet known.…

  C.J. Mackenzie, National Research Council, to C.D. Howe, April 10, 1944

  The Potsdam Conference, held just outside the ruins of the German capital in July 1945, was the last of the wartime meetings at which the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union decided the basic shape of the postwar world. It was the old world of power politics, but that was the reality the new United Nations had to deal with: the Americans and the British argued with the Russians over the Polish border and the future of Germany (whose division was implicit in the Potsdam agreement), and all three powers sent an u
ltimatum to Japan. When no reply came, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

  The Russians scrambled to declare war on Japan before it surrendered, so as to get their agreed share of the spoils, but the destructive power of the atomic bomb shocked them. Atomic weapons threatened to change all the traditional calculations about the balance of power, which had been moving strongly in the Soviet Union’s favour in Europe. In 1945 most of Europe was in ruins, France was just emerging from more than four years of German occupation, Germany was now occupied by Allied troops, and Britain, though nominally a great power, was bankrupt. The Russians had paid the price (twenty million dead) and they intended to collect the reward: a predominant influence in European affairs.

  This did not mean that the Russians intended to station tanks in Italy or to direct the traffic in Paris, but Moscow did expect to have the largest voice in the shaping of the European peace settlement. It also looked forward to having no rivals on the continent capable of threatening its security—especially if the Americans went home again, as they had done after the First World War. But the power of the Soviet Union was of a familiar, quite conventional kind: it relied on large armed forces, ideological allies and diplomatic manoeuvre to exert its influence. Atomic weapons might cancel all that out.

  The United States had huge armies too in 1945, but even after they had been demobilized it would still have an awesome new kind of power. Atomic power was secret and invisible, and it had changed everything (except, as Einstein said, the way people think).

  Norman Robertson … is obsessed with the problems of the atomic bomb. He is afraid that one day they will start going off and that the statesmen of the world will say, in surprise, like the clumsy maid, “It just came to pieces in my hands.”

  Escott Reid, External Affairs, 1941–62 Letter to his mother, November 1945

  For the generation of 1945 nuclear weapons were profoundly unsettling and corrupting. Those who possessed what seemed like absolute power could not ultimately resist the temptation to arrogance, while those who did not possess it felt terribly vulnerable and struggled to catch up. The Bomb at once cast a shadow over the new United Nations, even as it made it more urgent to find a way to end great-power war.

  In spite of the great secrecy that surrounded it, the Russians knew long before Hiroshima that the Americans were far ahead in the development of the new weapon. They knew it because they had a very efficient organization spying on the American atomic weapons programme—until it sprang a leak in Ottawa. Only a month after the first atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a cipher clerk in the Russian embassy in Ottawa called Igor Gouzenko defected, bringing evidence of the spy ring with him.

  In September 1944 Gouzenko had been told he was going to be recalled to Moscow. He managed to have his stay extended for another year, but by then he and his wife, Anna, were determined not to return to Stalin’s Russia. During the next year he secretly marked the most incriminating documents that the Soviet spy ring in Canada was collecting. The ring had been operating for years, and in the course of the war its focus had changed from radar and high explosives to the research on uranium and atomic energy that was being carried out in Montreal. One of its chief informants was Allan Nunn May, an English physicist working with the National Research Council. In spite of the extreme security precautions protecting the project, Nunn May (code name “Alek”) was able to send the Russians detailed information about the work, and even samples:

  Facts given by Alek: (1) The test of the atomic bomb was conducted at New Mexico. The bomb dropped on Japan was made of uranium 235. It is known that the output of uranium 235 amounts to 400 grams daily at the magnetic separation plant at Clinton.… (2) Alek handed over to us a platinum leaf with 162 micrograms of uranium 235 in the form of oxide in a thin lamina.

  Telegram from Nikolai Zabotin, Soviet Military Attaché in Ottawa, August 9, 1945

  In early September 1945 Gouzenko gathered up all his marked documents, made a run for it and asked the Canadian government for asylum. He was instructed to return to the Soviet embassy with his documents, even though he was threatening to kill himself rather than go back. Prime Minister King wanted nothing to do with him. He didn’t want to believe Gouzenko, because the information he brought, if true, would utterly poison relations between the Western powers and the Russians.

  We learned later that the Russian man had left saying … that there was nothing but suicide ahead of him. I suggested that a Secret Service man in plain clothes watch the premises. If suicide took place let the city police take charge and … secure what there was in the way of documents, but on no account for us to take the initiative.

  My own feeling is that the individual has incurred the displeasure of the Embassy and is really seeking to shield himself. I do not believe his story about their avowed treachery.

  The Mackenzie King Record, September 6, 1945

  The Soviet embassy sent a team to break into Gouzenko’s apartment, but he and his wife and two-year-old son survived by hiding with the neighbours in the apartment next door until the Ottawa police arrived. Meanwhile Sir William Stephenson, a Canadian who headed British intelligence operations in the western hemisphere, dropped by Norman Robertson’s apartment for a late drink and learned what was happening. The two men decided that the potential implications of the case were serious enough to override the prime minister’s instructions, and arranged for Gouzenko to make a statement to the RCMP early the next morning. Late on the seventh Robertson came to see the prime minister with details:

  He said he had got particulars of what the police had and that everything was much worse than we would have believed.… They disclose an espionage system on a large scale.… Not only had [U.S. secretary of state] Stettinius been surrounded by spies, etc. [Alger Hiss], and the Russian Government been kept informed of all that was being done from that source, but things came right into our own country to a degree we could not have believed possible.…

  In our Research Laboratories here at Ottawa, where we have been working on the atomic bomb, there is a scientist who is a Russian agent [Raymond Boyer]. In the Research Laboratories in Montreal where most of the work was done there is an English scientist who is pro-Russian [Nunn May] and acting as a Russian agent.

  The Mackenzie King Record, September 7, 1945

  Eleven Canadians were eventually convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, and the “Gouzenko Affair” was widely used as evidence that Moscow was planning to attack Western countries. But the Soviet espionage effort proved nothing except the ancient truth that no great power will willingly accept strategic inferiority to a potential rival. If the American atomic-bomb project had been a number of years behind the Russian, no American president would have refrained from mounting a comparable espionage operation against the Soviet atomic-weapons programme. But this sort of comparison almost always eludes harried decision-makers in the moment.

  On September 30 Mackenzie King visited President Truman in Washington (it was their first meeting) to brief him about the Gouzenko Affair, and then went on to London to meet Prime Minister Clement Attlee and his foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin. By now Allan Nunn May was in London and being shadowed, but King found the British curiously relaxed about the whole business of Soviet espionage.

  [Bevin] was inclined to think that an arrest or two or three might be made here and he assumed that we would adopt a similar course. I told him that I had seen the President on the way through and that Truman was strongly of the view that all three countries should meet together and decide the course they should take.…

  I begin to feel that what Russia perhaps is aiming at is to get outside of the United Nations altogether just as Germany and Japan and Italy did in the League of Nations in the years preceding the last war. They are determined to let the rest of the world know that what they are capable of doing is to go back into power politics and with greater vengeance than ever.

  The Mackenzie King Record, vol. 3


  Stalin was a monster, but he was not a lunatic. The Soviet Union’s industrial resources were vastly inferior to those of its American, British and Canadian allies. Much of the Soviet Union had been occupied during the war and dozens of its cities destroyed, while in the West only Britain had suffered even moderate damage. At least twenty million Soviet citizens had been killed in the war, while no more than a million British, Canadians and Americans had died. At the end of the war, the Americans had nuclear weapons, while the Soviet Union was still years away from possessing them. The Soviet Union could not possibly win a war with the West, so it was most unlikely to start one.

  Yet King, like others in the West, was moving toward the view that the gravely crippled Soviet Union was about to embark on a career of military expansion. Moreover, in the absence of effective international controls, the Soviet Union would be bound to build and test its own nuclear weapons eventually. For Canada, this raised the frightening prospect of a future in which it would be the no man’s land between two nuclear-armed giants who were rapidly turning hostile: the “fireproof house” was becoming a tinderbox.

  Russia was very near to Canada. Could bomb us from across the North Pole.… Her route to the States would be through Canada, and if the Americans felt security required it, [they] would take peaceful possession of part of Canada with a welcome of the people of B.C., Alta., and Saskatchewan who would become terrified.