Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014

by Gwynne Dyer

  Although St. Laurent had no proof at this point that Britain and France had actually plotted the war in secret alliance with the Israelis, he replied at once to Eden saying that the Canadian government did not believe that the Israeli action was justified, and that neither was the Anglo-French decision to send troops to the Canal Zone. The Canadian government also stopped the shipment of arms (including Sabre Jets) to Israel immediately. All the usual suspects promptly emitted the statutory cries of outrage. The Liberal government’s decision not to say “Ready, aye, ready” when Britain was at war caused a great deal of fulmination in certain English Canadian circles, while others saw Pearson’s reluctance to brand Britain and France as aggressors as weakness. And the Americans were so furious at having been deceived by Britain and France that President Eisenhower was refusing even to speak to Eden on the phone.

  At the United Nations, the Security Council was deadlocked both over Suez (British and French vetoes) and the carnage in Hungary (a Soviet veto). But the Anglo-French military arrangements were almost as arthritic as the thinking behind them: their naval task force had still not got their troops ashore on the canal. “It was an amazing miscalculation of forces and circumstances,” said Pearson; “the landings hardly seemed much of an improvement over Gallipoli.” In fact the British were getting cold feet: Ottawa learned that Eden was planning to ask the United Nations to take over the task of separating Israel and Egypt, in whose war, according to the cover story, Britain and France were intervening to protect the Suez Canal. “If the UN were willing to take over the physical task of maintaining peace, no one would be better pleased than we,” Eden told the British House of Commons. Pearson saw his opportunity, and grabbed it with both hands.

  I was with Mr. Pearson at the time in New York. What was on his mind was how on earth to get our dear British and French friends out of a mess, and in particular how to prevent the war from spreading, so that the real purpose of peacekeeping was not the fulfilment of a Canadian ambition.

  At the same time it did suit us.… It came at a time when we were wondering about our place in the world, more and more concerned about being part of an alliance run largely by the major power, and it was comfortable and comforting to feel that there was something we could do.… Something, of course, that the Americans were quite happy for us to do, but they couldn’t do themselves.

  John Holmes, External Affairs, 1943–60

  What Pearson had to do was get enough UN members to agree to his idea for interposing a UN peacekeeping force between the Egyptians and the Israelis (instead of an uninvited Anglo-French force with ulterior motives) before Britain and France were condemned as aggressors. He also had to present it in a way that allowed Britain and France to save face, for otherwise they would block any attempts at intervention by the United Nations. By November 2 Pearson had Canadian cabinet support for his proposal, including the idea of contributing a Canadian contingent to the UN force. Drumming up support within the United Nations took a lot of effort, however, and there were ominous signs of dissension within the Commonwealth: Australia and New Zealand had already come out in support of Britain while India, Pakistan and Ceylon were attacking Britain violently. The Commonwealth was about to divide on racial lines, and Canada was also splitting: the Conservatives felt that Canada should side with Britain.

  By now it was also becoming clear that if the war escalated, Britain and France would be outgunned. The Soviet Union was threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop the invasion if necessary, and the United States had not promised to support Britain and France against any such action unless it occurred on NATO territory—which meant, in effect, that Israel and the Anglo-French forces on the canal were fair game for Soviet nuclear weapons. On the night of November 4, while the United Nations was still discussing Pearson’s resolution, British infantry began landing at Port Said behind a curtain of naval shellfire, while French paratroops landed at the northern entrance to the canal. During the attack, Egyptian blockships were sunk in the canal, closing it for many months.

  Soon afterward the Canadian resolution was adopted by the UN General Assembly, but there remained the practical problems of finding troops for the UN force and sending them there. It soon became obvious that none of the great powers was acceptable. The ideal solution might have been to include only troops from the non-aligned nations in the “UN Emergency Force,” but too few of the non-aligned countries had appropriate forces available and the means to transport them to the Middle East quickly. Besides, Canada had earned itself a place on the team: it had been a Canadian idea. Indeed, UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld felt that a Canadian, General E.L.M. “Tommy” Burns, would make a good commander for the force. “I’d been out there [in Palestine] as Chairman of the Truce Supervision outfit,” Burns later explained, “and as I hadn’t done anything very wrong Mr Hammarskjold apparently recommended me to go ahead. Nobody else was competing for it: one man who’d been in the job before had been assassinated [Count Bernadotte of Sweden was murdered by Israeli terrorists while acting as UN mediator in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948], so it wasn’t really a top desirability.”

  Unfortunately for Pearson, the Canadian contingent was not welcome in Egypt. The regiment Canada planned to send was the Queen’s Own Rifles from Calgary. As if the name weren’t bad enough (the Egyptians had just been fighting the other Queen’s Own Rifles, a British regiment in the invading force), the Canadian uniforms looked very British, and President Nasser objected that this would be confusing for Egyptian soldiers. So General Burns had to tell Ottawa that Canadian infantry were not acceptable to Egypt, although Canadian communications specialists and other technical personnel would be welcome.

  “What we needed was the First East Kootenay Anti-Imperialistic Rifles,” Pearson mused, but although he could see the humour of the situation it was this Egyptian “insult” to Canada and to its British traditions that caught the public’s imagination. It was much more exciting than interminable UN wranglings in language that nobody understood: Pearson, in the view of the Tories and many other Canadians, had let down the Commonwealth and embarrassed the military. It turned out in the end that the highly trained Canadian communications specialists were exactly what General Burns needed: he had lots of infantry, but desperately needed efficient administration and communications. But national honour demanded something more than a “typewriter army,” or so the opposition said.

  During the debate in Parliament on November 26, 1956 John Diefenbaker, the leader of the opposition, bitterly condemned the government for failing to support Britain. St. Laurent forthrightly replied that he agreed with the UN resolution that blamed the Israelis, the French and the British for “having taken the law into their own hands.… The era when the supermen of Europe could govern the whole world … is coming pretty close to an end.” The prime minister was quite right, but this statement merely added fuel to the Conservative fire. The fact that the United States was also condemning the British only made matters worse, and the Egyptian rejection of the Queen’s Own Rifles was intolerable.

  It was a final curtain call for the old pro-British instinct in English Canadians: to the next generation the sentiment would be largely meaningless. But it was also the first sign of hope that Canada and the rest of the world had not completely forgotten what they’d invented the United Nations for. It couldn’t stop the great powers when they ran amok, or even the lesser powers—but the United Nations could provide the great powers with a face-saving way out when they got frightened of the consequences of their actions, and it could actually make the smaller countries stop fighting if it had the backing of the great powers. The peacekeeping force that was sent to Egypt bore no resemblance to the 200,000-man UN standing army Pearson had envisaged ten years before, but it was a more credible sign of life and promise than the League of Nations had ever shown.

  Trying to create an international rule of law, and persuading states steeped in a tradition of international anarchy dozens of centuries old to accept
the restraints of that law voluntarily, are tasks that will take a very long time to accomplish. But there has been progress: the principle is now universally accepted that invasion is an illegal act, and that any territory or advantages gained by it are inadmissible. And ever since Pearson’s brilliant piece of legerdemain in 1956, there have always been multinational UN peacekeeping forces in various of the world’s trouble spots. They rarely solve basic problems, but they save some lives and win some time, and they are a tangible down payment on the promise that the world’s governments will one day accept their collective responsibility for its future. Although Canadians felt virtuous about peacekeeping, however, they had had enough of the Liberals after more than twenty years of them: in June 1957 they voted in John Diefenbaker. Six months later, Lester Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  All my adult life has been spent … in an atmosphere of international conflict, of fear and insecurity. As a soldier I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not. As a civilian during the Second War, I was exposed to danger in circumstances which removed any distinction between man in and out of uniform [the London blitz]. And I have lived since—as you have—in a period of cold war, during which we have ensured, by our achievements in the science and technology of destruction, that a third act in this tragedy of war will result in the peace of extinction. I have, therefore, had compelling reason, and some opportunity, to think about peace, to ponder over our failures since 1914 to establish it, and to shudder at the possible consequences if we fail.

  Lester B. Pearson accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Oslo, December 11, 1957

  By 1957 the alliance system was virtually complete: even the two Germanys were included in it. The Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt had shown that the scope for reform in Eastern Europe did not extend, at least in the strategically important countries, to any kind of non-alignment, and also that the blocs now recognized each other’s borders as permanent: NATO did not lift a finger to help the Hungarians. The industrialized world was frozen in the pattern of 1956 for the next three decades, trapped in a time warp, waiting for the next world war to arrive. And while a succession of peacekeeping missions—in the Congo, in the Middle East, in Cyprus—allowed Canadians to feel they had a distinctive and somehow more “peaceful” role in the world, at least 90 percent of Canada’s soldiers and an even higher proportion of its military spending were always devoted to the purposes of its Cold War alliances, NATO and NORAD.

  EXCURSION 9

  THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE

  Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.

  Bernard Brodie, 1946 The Absolute Weapon

  THE ONLY SANE STRATEGY FOR DEALING WITH THE IMMENSE AND irreversible change wrought in warfare by the invention of nuclear weapons was “deterrence,” and that strategy was defined and elaborated by a small group of American civilian academics within six months of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by U.S. atomic bombs in August 1945. The leading figure was a young scholar who had just joined the Institute for International Studies at Yale University, Bernard Brodie. He brought two key insights to the table. One, fairly obvious, was that there could be no defence against these terrible weapons, because at least a few bombers would always get through, and a few would be too many. British defences against the German V-1 cruise missiles that had been aimed at London in the previous year had managed to shoot down 97 out of 101 V-1’s on their single best day, but if the four that made it through had carried atomic bombs, London survivors would not have considered the record good.

  Brodie’s other insight was that there was a limited number of targets in any country that were worth using a nuclear weapon on: mainly cities and military bases of various kinds. Once those had been destroyed, additional nuclear weapons conferred no additional advantage. “If 2,000 bombs in the hands of either party is enough to destroy entirely the economy of the other, the fact that one side has 6,000 and the other 2,000 will be of relatively small significance.”

  In two conferences in September and November 1945 and in many private discussions and arguments, Brodie and a small group of like-minded colleagues built on these two concepts and arrived at the necessary conclusion: that military victory in total war was no longer possible, and that the only sensible policy was deterrence. Actually attacking an enemy with nuclear weapons would be pointless, since each side “must fear retaliation, [and] the fact that it destroys the opponent’s cities some hours or even days before its own are destroyed may avail it little.” The only condition required to guarantee stable mutual deterrence and the avoidance of a nuclear war was that each country disperse its nuclear-capable bombers in such a way (perhaps even storing them underground) that they could not be destroyed in a surprise attack. (Much later, in a world of “hardened” missile silos and missiles made mobile and invisible by putting them in submarines, this became known as a “secure second-strike capability.”)

  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.

  The theory was that as soon as the other side established beyond a doubt that they were invading, you then let loose the American strategic arm and blasted, incinerated, irradiated enough of the people on the other side to make them stop doing what they were doing, whatever it was. Well, that was the raving of a feverish child, but I lost a lot of friends by saying this, particularly among the airmen.

  General Sir John Hackett, former commander, NATO Northern Army Group

  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 base
s, 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.

  I have heard this thought [of the U.S. never launching a pre-emptive nuclear attack] stated many times, and it sounds very fine. However, it is not in keeping with United States history. Just look and note who started the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Indian Wars and the Spanish-American War. I want to make it clear that I am not advocating a preventive war; however, I believe that if the U.S. is pushed into the corner far enough we would not hesitate to strike first.

  General Curtis LeMay, commander, U.S. Strategic Air Command, 1954

  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.”