by Gwynne Dyer
Our potential enemy—our principal, our most powerful, our most dangerous enemy—was so far away from us that we couldn’t have reached him with our air force. Only by building up a nuclear missile force could we keep the enemy from unleashing war.
Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers
The Russians built only enough long-range bombers to have some sort of strategic insurance policy if their missile programme failed utterly: their “Long-Range Aviation” amounted to 145 bombers in 1960, and peaked at 195 in 1965. Meanwhile, most of their resources went into developing missiles—against which NORAD provided no defence whatever. Although the actual numbers of strategic weapons and aircraft in the superpower arsenals were closely guarded secrets in the 1950s, it would not have been beyond the wit of a moderately competent Canadian intelligence officer to draw the appropriate conclusions about U.S. strategy simply from the facts that were available to him—including the conclusion that NORAD would soon become redundant.
Traditionally, no strategic thinking was done in Canada. We were doers but not thinkers. In the Second World War we provided the fourth biggest force on the Allied side, yet we had no influence whatsoever in the conduct of the war because we did not think independently, strategically. And here again we simply took over something which was worked out elsewhere.
John Gellner, Canadian defence analyst
The secret of NORAD was that it just might have succeeded in protecting the United States from Soviet nuclear weapons between about 1957 (when it went into operation) and 1963 (when enough Soviet ICBMs became operational to make anti-bomber defences quite pointless). But it would only have worked during that period if the United States had struck first and destroyed most Soviet bombers on the ground. The darker secret was that it would have been Canada that paid the price for this success, which would be measured by how many of the surviving Soviet bombers were shot down over Canada before they reached the United States—and the defending planes would use nuclear missiles to destroy the attacking bombers (which would all be carrying nuclear weapons themselves).
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.
He said he wasn’t going to be told by eggheads from External Affairs how to plan joint defence, nor could he satisfy the Pentagon that the release of this kind of information would be without peril. And so we were absolutely stalled.…
The difficulties I was encountering, of course, were reported to the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State, and the clerk of the Privy Council, Bob Bryce, called a meeting at which he hoped to resolve the difficulties, but General Foulkes was absolutely adamant. What he said, in fact, was that the real security of Canada depended on his personal relation with “Rad and Brad”—that was Admiral Radford, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, and General Omar Bradley, who was Chief of the General Staff and an old friend of Foulkes from the war.
He said that the information which he derived through that channel personally was what was required for the security of Canada.… And that was the end of that particular effort. Soon after that I was sent off to Yugoslavia, out of the way.
George Ignatieff, External Affairs ambassador to Yugoslavia, 1956–58
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.
General Foulkes had served under General Pearkes, and on the old boy network had intimated to General Pearkes that, you know, this had been under discussion for a long time, that it had gone to the previous [St. Laurent] Cabinet, and that all that was really required was the Prime Minister’s signature on something that was regarded as acceptable. He didn’t explain that there was some hesitation on the part of the preceding government. I mean it had been to Cabinet, yes, but it had been postponed. But he intimated that it was simply a matter of they were too busy or whatever it was. Anyway, the full implication was not explained.
George Ignatieff, External Affairs, 1940–60
From the moment I took over, [Foulkes] pressed the urgency of getting a decision. He certainly gave me the impression that it was all tied up by the Liberal government, and promises had been made that it would be signed immediately after the election.… I do know that they [the Canadian military] were under almost daily pressure from the military in the United States.
General George Pearkes, VC, minister of national defence, 1957–60
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.
Oh hell, I don’t even know if he read it. It came out of there so … signed so suddenly. We were prepared to make a presentation to cabinet and so on.
Q. It just came back signed, sealed and delivered?
Yeah.
Air Chief Marshal Frank Miller, deputy minister of national defence, 1957
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, Diefenbak
er 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.
It was very traumatic. All of us were fired on a loudspeaker on February the 20th, 1959 at eleven o’clock. The shock of it within the plant was very great.
Q. Could there ever be another Canadian fighter?
I would hope that there could never be another.
Syd Young, chief engineer, McDonnell Douglas of Canada Ltd. (formerly A.V. Roe Canada)
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.
There was no discussion whatsoever, as I recall, about changing the role of the overseas forces to atomic carriers, because that wasn’t in Canada, it wasn’t at home here. It didn’t pollute Canada with this nasty business—although it put us right in the middle of the bombing business.
Air Chief Marshal Frank Miller, chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, 1960–64
General Foulkes was an excellent man, but.… It must have been in 1957. I was on the Directing Staff of the RCAF Staff College here in Toronto and he came and gave a lecture and he said: “We are going along because we want to be in the Big League.” The Big League! That’s why we got the nuclear weapons.
John Gellner
By mid-1959 there were no fewer than nine different proposals for placing nuclear weapons on Canadian soil or in the hands of the Canadian forces, and half of them had been approved (in principle, at least) by the Canadian government. Everything was proceeding smoothly—and then the tide began to turn.
Should Canadian forces be armed with nuclear weapons? Our own answer is a flat unqualified no.… Nothing can justify nuclear war.… The first step towards preventing it is to stop planning to wage it.
Maclean’s, September 10, 1960
Canada … can play a noteworthy role in the efforts for peace and disarmament, but this r
ole would be reduced practically to zero if we were a nuclear satellite of Washington.
Le Devoir, September 23, 1961
In June 1959, the same month Canada made the Starfighter deal, Norman Robertson, just back from two years in Washington as ambassador and now once again undersecretary of state for external affairs, sent Prime Minister Diefenbaker a clipping from the previous month’s copy of the British magazine the Spectator. The author of the article, Christopher Hollis, argued that the thermonuclear weapons had changed the nature of war: destruction would now be so great that even if the West emerged from a nuclear war as the nominal victor “there is no chance that the pattern of our own national life … would still survive when we emerge from it.”
Hollis’s article went on to argue for nuclear disarmament and a buildup of NATO’S conventional forces: in effect, a reversal of the Western decision to rely on cheap nuclear firepower rather than expensive soldiers that had been taken at a time when the West had a near-monopoly of nuclear weapons. There was, after all, no objective reason why the West could not rely on its superior numbers, wealth and technology to deter the Soviet Union with non-nuclear weapons, if it were willing to pay the cost. However, Hollis didn’t only want the West to stop threatening to use nuclear weapons against a Soviet conventional attack. He advocated unilateral Western nuclear disarmament—no matter what the Soviets did. And attached to Hollis’s article was a memo to Prime Minister Diefenbaker from the undersecretary: “Mr Robertson wishes you to know that his views coincide with those of the author of the article.”
Norman Robertson had hitherto held quite orthodox views on the question of nuclear weapons for Canada, but recently they had begun to change. In March 1959, having just been briefed by some External Affairs officers who had visited SAC and NORAD headquarters, he remarked that “the whole philosophy of [nuclear] deterrence had been developed at a time when conditions were vastly different from those existing today.… Our minds should be turned instead to the tremendous political effort that needed to be undertaken to avoid the awesome consequences of nuclear warfare.”