Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (46 page)

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.