by Gwynne Dyer
General Curtis LeMay certainly didn’t. In 1955, for example, an academic strategist called Albert Wohlstetter tried to persuade the SAC commander that his bombers could be destroyed on the ground in a Soviet surprise attack unless he developed policies for dispersing them and built shelters for them. General LeMay was profoundly unimpressed, and gently confided to one of Wohlstetter’s young assistants that SAC already had a policy on shelters. “Really?” the eager young man asked. “What is it?” “Piss on shelters,” replied General LeMay.
LeMay wasn’t worried because he knew that if anybody’s bombers were going to be caught on the ground, it would be the Soviets’. And that was the unspoken context in which the whole saga of North American air defence developed and Canada got dragged into the world of nuclear strategies: NORAD was designed not to cope with a Soviet surprise attack but to deal with a ragged retaliation by the relatively few Soviet bombers that survived an American first strike.
CHAPTER 10
THE SPACE BETWEEN
If you look at our position on a global projection, you will see that we are the land, or rather the sky, where the exchange will take place … where the battle that consists of an exchange of inter–continental missiles carrying nuclear warheads will be fought, and we are obliged to foresee that we would be the victims whether we were involved or not.
Hon. Léo Cadieux, minister of national defence, 1967–70
CANADA WAS NEVER STRATEGIC TERRITORY THAT MATTERED IN the great-power game before 1945—and it isn’t now—but for a brief period, from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, we really did matter, because Canada lay on the shortest air route between the Soviet Union and the United States. Indeed, in terms of aircraft ranges at the time, Canadian airspace was the only non-stop route between the two countries.
You’d look up and you’d see a plane of some sort going overhead with a red star on it. The Americans would bring the planes up as far as Edmonton, and the Russians would come, I presume, over the Pole practically, and the planes would be handed over to them.
A large proportion of the Russian planes were piloted by women. It was quite a sight to see them on the street in their uniforms—of course they were tremendously bulky uniforms, because they would be going back over the Pole. And an awful lot of vodka suddenly appeared in the town.
Naomi Radford, Edmonton
The United States and the Soviet Union were allies during the Second World War, and the planes flying over Edmonton with Soviet markings were American-built fighters and bombers on their way to serve in the Soviet Air Force. But it was already clear that something was happening to Canada’s strategic geography. As early as April 1944 Major-General Maurice Pope of the Canadian Joint Staff Mission in Washington was warning Ottawa:
Sometime in the future the United States, from their (ideological) dislike of Russia, may find their relations with that country somewhat strained.… In such circumstances our position would be a difficult one. To the Americans the defence of the United States is continental defence, and nothing that I can think of will ever drive that idea out of their heads. Should, then, the United States go to war with Russia they would look to us to make common cause with them and, as I judge their public opinion, they would brook no delay.
A month later Mackenzie King’s government set up a “Working Committee on Post-Hostilities Problems.” Its initial assumption was that there would be at least ten years of peace between the United States and the Soviet Union, but General Pope warned urgently from Washington that the U.S. armed forces did not share that assumption. The Pentagon had plans for a very large postwar military establishment, Pope pointed out, and it would need congressional support to get it. That meant that the Pentagon needed an external threat big enough to justify such a huge force—and although the Soviet Union was still an American ally in 1944, it was the only plausible candidate for a future enemy that filled the bill.
If the Canadian government rejected the view that a Soviet-American confrontation was imminent, General Pope warned, the U.S. armed forces would be extremely unhappy, for if a persuasive Canadian counter-argument “ever reached the ears of Congress, the hopes [the Pentagon] now cherished and planned to achieve would be dashed against the rocks.” The report on “Post-War Canadian Defence Relations with the United States” concluded:
Canada, lying across the shortest air routes from either Europe or Asia, has now become of more direct strategic significance to the United States.… In the circumstances, the United States may be expected to take an active interest in Canadian defence preparations in the future. Moreover, that interest may be expressed with an absence of the tact and restraint customarily employed by the United Kingdom in putting forward defence proposals.… [and] the pressure on Canada to maintain defences at a higher level than might seem necessary from the point of view of purely Canadian interests might be very strong.
Department of External Affairs, January 23, 1945
First impressions are often best, and External Affairs’ view of Canada’s new strategic situation before everybody there had been marinated in Cold War assumptions for a decade or so are probably more reliable than the views held by the same people in the 1960s. Canada’s real strategic situation in 1960 was just about what had been forecast in 1945—but by then all sorts of nuances of justification and rationalization had been added to the basic description of Canada’s strategic dilemma, in a perfectly human attempt to demonstrate that what had happened was also what should have happened or at least what had to happen.
By 1946 Mackenzie King was warning his cabinet that the American bases and facilities in the north must be bought out by the Canadian government as soon as possible because “the long-range policy of the Americans was to absorb Canada.” It was duly done, but it made no difference to what was really happening: King was barking up the wrong tree. The time of the homesteaders was long past, and the postwar generation of Americans was no longer interested in the physical possession of Canada’s territory. What they wanted now was the free use of Canada for strategic purposes—in a nuclear war.
Canada “Another Belgium” in U.S. Air Bases Proposal Washington Insists Dominion’s Northern Frontier be Fortified “Atomic Age Maginot Line” is Feared
Financial Post headlines, June 29, 1946
In November 1945, only three months after the war’s end—long before there was an open split between the United States and the Soviet Union—the American military representatives on the Permanent Joint Board on Defence (PJBD) brought up the question of a war with Russia. What they wanted was a Canadian agreement on continental air defence. The American air force experts reckoned that by 1950 the “enemy” (the Soviet Union) would be in a position to launch an air attack on North America, and therefore the two countries must cooperate in creating a network of early-warning radar stations and fighter bases in Canada, as far north as possible from populated areas. However, it turned out in the end that the American airmen on the PJBD were not actually expressing U.S. government policy. They had just been overstating the case for continental air defence in the hope of getting a Canadian commitment, which they could then use (“our allies demand it”) in order to further the U.S. Air Force’s interests in the perennial inter-service battle for resources in the Pentagon.
In fact, Canada’s awkward geographical position as “the space between” the Soviet Union and the United States took time to mature into a real strategic concern. In the 1940s neither the Americans nor the Russians had bombers capable of flying literally over the Pole. For the moment all the Americans wanted was staging bases through which their nuclear bombers could pass on their way to their forward deployment bases in Europe, the Middle East or the Far East, from which they would then fly onward to obliterate the Soviet Union. In that context, the only foreign base in North America that really interested the Pentagon was Goose Bay in Labrador, which a U.S. Air Force spokesman described to a top secret meeting in Ottawa in late 1946 as “the most important all-round strategic air base in
the Western Hemisphere.”
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.
I went to Air Defence Command in 1951, and by then the early [Canadian-U.S.] talks had taken place—the general structure of the warning system, the utilization [of Canadian airspace] by American aircraft, all those items were discussed and agreements reached. From then on it was really refining those agreements: knowing what could be done from a given base and that sort of thing. After that it was not a matter of principle; it was a matter of mechanics.
Air Vice Marshal Claire Annis, RCAF
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.
The reason for this flood of propaganda is not so much the increased fear of attack by Russia as growing fear of the hostility of the electors when it becomes apparent that the Republican Party’s promises to balance the budget and cut taxes while strengthening their defences has not got the slightest chance in the world of being carried out.… Apparently the Administration has it in mind that the anger of the electorate may be flooded out in a wave of fear of atomic attack.
Brooke Claxton to Prime Minister St. Laurent, September 23, 1953
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.
My reaction as a NATO desk officer [at External] was to see dangers in this for Canada.… I mean a NORAD outside NATO meant that … we were dealing perforce with only one partner, and that in a framework of disparity of power that could not in any way be modified. I raised the question of associating NORAD in some way with NATO, if not bringing it within NATO, but that did not prove possible.
John Halstead, External Affairs, 1946–82
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.
Nobody saw a thousand-bomber raid coming against North America, but it could be big enough that some of them would get through unless it was an air-tight defence.
Air Chief Marshal Frank Miller, RCAF, vice-chief of the Air Staff, 1953
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 b
alance 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).