by Gwynne Dyer
The Soviet Union, of course, had already been living with the grim prospect of those “awesome consequences” for over a decade. What caused numbers of Canadians to begin questioning the West’s nuclear-oriented strategies was the growing probability that the West itself would suffer those same consequences. A policy that had been seen as a regrettable strategic necessity when it implied immolating tens of millions of Soviet citizens became a great deal less acceptable when it also involved the prospect of unstoppable Soviet ICBMs aimed at North America, and millions of Canadians dead. And in June 1959 Robertson got a new minister who shared his thinking: Howard Green.
This was the time when the frozen silence between the two great alliances was hesitantly starting to give way to semi-permanent (if glacially slow) arms control talks—and Howard Green devoted a great deal of time and effort to promoting various proposals to lessen the danger of nuclear war. He insisted that Canada’s ability to take a lead on these issues would be undermined if at the same time it was equipping its own forces with nuclear weapons.
Mr Green was passionately committed to two things. One is that he was against war: he had been a veteran who was wounded in the First World War, and like most people who have seen the horrors of war at first hand he was not a great enthusiast about repeating it for other generations.
The other thing was that he was a tremendous believer in the United Nations.… He was not a great enthusiast about NATO, and an essential part of security as he saw it was arms control and disarmament.
George Ignatieff
The great issue during Green’s time in office was a nuclear test ban, which was universally seen as the indispensable condition for any other arms control or disarmament measures. And things were falling apart: the moratorium on nuclear tests that had been agreed by the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain in 1958 had not led to a treaty on account of differences about “verification,” and the Soviet Union had finally denounced it. In October 1961 the Soviets tested the biggest bomb ever, the “Tsar Bomb”—fifty megatons—and in early 1962 the Americans also began testing again in the atmosphere. But Green never lost heart.
Green felt it necessary to keep up a public facade of optimism which led many to call him naïve, but in fact he was an adroit operator who knew how to exploit Canada’s prestige, especially among the non-aligned states, to get proposals on the agenda that could break the logjam. In October 1962, for example, his close ally General E.L M. Burns, Canada’s representative on the UN Disarmament Committee, put forward (much against the wishes of the United States) the amendment that finally made a limited test-ban treaty possible: it separated underground tests from all the others, and proposed banning all the rest. And it was Green himself who first brought up, at the eighteen-nation Geneva Disarmament Conference, the idea of a ban on all weapons of mass destruction in outer space. That annoyed the Americans even more, but it too produced a treaty in the end.
The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and the ban on nuclear weapons in outer space in 1966 are monuments to Howard Green’s persistence, and it was quite true that Canada’s influence among the neutral countries was very important to these results. But Green’s constant argument that Canada should shun nuclear weapons in order to retain its influence among the non-aligned nations was probably deliberately overstated: the Indians and the Egyptians weren’t really worried about nuclear warheads on Bomarcs in North Bay, or even slung beneath Starfighters in Germany.
The truth is that Green thought the whole nuclear game was insane, and used any argument he could find to keep Canada out of it. From 1959 on, Canadian defence policy was a battleground in which External Affairs, under Howard Green and Norman Robertson, fought against the Department of National Defence to win Diefenbaker’s support for radically divergent policies, with the nuclear weapons to be acquired from the Americans as the main focus of the argument. Most people in Ottawa still subscribed to the orthodox credo about Western defence policy, but there were a couple of wild cards operating in Green’s and Robertson’s favour. One was that Diefenbaker, unlike most politicians, had no faith in opinion polls. Instead, he read his mail—and Canadians active in the peace movement wrote him a lot of letters. Diefenbaker became persuaded that an anti-nuclear stance was popular with the Canadian public.
Dogs know best what to do with polls.
John Diefenbaker, November 1, 1971
The other wild card was Diefenbaker’s nationalism. He was not reflexively anti-American, but there were signs of strain even when President Eisenhower was still in office.
In spite of all the flowery exchanges between “Ike” and Mr. Diefenbaker, he was already brewing up for trouble with the United States because he thought they were getting above themselves: “They think they can lead the world and shove us all around.”
Q. Was there a reason for Mr. Diefenbaker’s feelings?
Well, yes, of course. It was the great moment of American imperialism at its height, when they really felt they had the answers to everything in the world, and had dozens of alliances, and were willing to move into any cabbage patch anywhere in the world and fight against Communism or feudalism or anything which didn’t go with the American way of life. It was rather overpowering.
Charles Ritchie, ambassador to Washington, 1962–66
It was this coincidental combination of things—Diefenbaker’s conviction that there was a powerful groundswell of anti-nuclear feeling in the Canadian public, his growing inclination to resist American pressures on every subject, and a small band of determined partisans of nuclear disarmament at External Affairs headed by Green and Robertson—that inexorably led the Conservative government into confrontation with the Americans over nuclear weapons. And Diefenbaker’s legendary capacity for dither, delay and indecision defined Green’s and Robertson’s tactics for them.
By the time Green became secretary of state for external affairs, it was too late for the government to make a principled rejection of the whole idea of nuclear weapons for Canada: the basic agreements to acquire nuclear weapons systems for the Canadian forces both in Canada and in Europe had almost all been signed. So Green simply produced innumerable objections to the terms of the agreements that had to be negotiated with the Americans for the custody of the nuclear warheads.
I was given the task of negotiating these agreements. So, working with the people in National Defence and others, we worked out a draft agreement and sent it up to Mr Green and it sat there for six weeks and nothing happened. Finally General Pearkes, who was the Minister of Defence, got hold of Mr. Green and said: “We’ve got to get moving on this, Howard.” And so Mr. Green called me in and said: “This is not tough enough. Go back to the drawing board.”
And over the loud objections of National Defence, we went back to the drawing board, and the same performance was repeated at least three times. By then I had drawn the conclusion that Mr. Green had no intention of having such an agreement concluded. At that point I decided this was no place for me, so I succeeded in negotiating my way to another assignment.
Q. Were the armed forces very upset by all this?
I think they just sort of despaired, you know.… They eventually reached the sort of numbed stage where they felt they would do anything they had to to get the agreement.
Bill Barton, External Affairs, 1952–70
Diefenbaker dealt with this guerrilla warfare between his ministers and advisers by simply stalling on the nuclear warheads—for years. The acquisition of various nuclear-weapons carriers went ahead as planned, Canadian servicemen were sent to the United States for courses on how to handle and use nuclear warheads, and Diefenbaker never said he wouldn’t accept them in the end. But he didn’t actually do anything about arranging to take them, either, and after John F. Kennedy became the president of the United States in early 1961 U.S.-Canadian relations went from bad to worse. It was loathing at first sight.
Kennedy thought that Dief was a mischievous old man who was a nuisance, and I think Dief thought
Kennedy was, as he used to say, an arrogant young pup. And then their styles were completely different: that sort of Harvard veneer on top of the Irish politician, and the social mix, and the Camelot bit—it was completely antipathetic to Dief, who was a real populist. He had no use for any of that sort of thing.
And I think that Kennedy wrongly saw Dief as someone from the sticks, and so they were temperamentally … it was very unfortunate.
Charles Ritchie
But despite fraying tempers and an ever-lengthening delay on the outstanding question of accepting nuclear warheads for all of Canada’s new weapons, relations between Ottawa and Washington staggered along without an open break until the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Then they fell apart.
I knew that President Kennedy was still smarting over the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco.… I also knew that the President thought he had something to prove in his personal dealings with Khrushchev after their unpleasant Vienna meeting, where Khrushchev had treated him like a child, referring to him as “the boy.” I considered that he was perfectly capable of taking the world to the brink of thermonuclear destruction to prove himself the man for our times, a courageous champion of Western democracy.
John Diefenbaker, One Canada, vol. 3
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 headq
uarters 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.