Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (48 page)

The notion of a limited nuclear war allegedly “reinforced deterrence.” The American threat to blow up the Soviet Union in response to a Soviet attack on Western Europe got hard to believe once the Soviet Union could also blow up the United States, but it seemed plausible that the Americans would start using nuclear weapons in Europe. But since that would probably start an uncontrollable pattern of rapid nuclear escalation, you would still get your nuclear war between the superpowers out of it in the end. So the basic American threat to blow up the Soviet Union if they laid a finger on Western Europe was still effective after all.

I apologize for the baroque logical processes on display here, but that, stripped of the jargon, is what the strategists of the time said the doctrine of limited nuclear war in Europe was actually for. Governments can believe this sort of thing, but you can hardly expect ordinary people to swallow it, so the move to a limited nuclear war strategy caused
serious political problems in Europe. It required basing U.S. nuclear weapons on European soil, getting many of the European allies to accept them for their own armed forces and getting everybody to accept the probability that those weapons might end up being used on their own territory in a war. So the whole business of spreading nuclear weapons through most of NATO’s armed forces and preparing for a limited nuclear war in Europe was almost comically furtive.

Most
NATO
countries quietly bought the appropriate equipment for delivering “tactical” nuclear weapons, and the appropriate agreements were signed to make American nuclear warheads available. In theory the Americans remained responsible because these weapons could only be armed by an American soldier (plus a soldier from the country where the weapons were located—the so-called “dual-key” system), and this enabled the European governments to pretend that it was a purely technical matter best left to the soldiers. However, Canada’s increasingly obvious refusal to accept its quota of nuclear weapons was not helping at all. In the aftermath of the Cuban crisis, Washington was determined to shift its reluctant ally on the nuclear weapons issue, and the pro-nuclear faction within the Conservative cabinet, led by Defence Minister Douglas Harkness, was equally determined to push Diefenbaker to a decision:

General Norstad, retiring as supreme commander of
NATO
in Europe, was invited to call at Ottawa on January 3, 1963, on his way
home to the United States. It was widely assumed that he would be a presidential candidate in the next election, so anything he said in public would carry considerable weight in Canada. He had lunch with Harkness and the Canadian Armed Forces Chiefs of Staff—and at the end of it they told him about the press conference.

The impact of Norstad’s remarks in Canada was enormous: for the first time, a senior American official had implied in public that Canada was not a reliable ally. The effect was even greater because his visit came only ten weeks after the Cuban crisis, which had scared Canadians half to death. A widespread initial reaction to that experience in Canada had been to conclude that American nuclear weapons were, after all, good for you. In effect, a great many Canadians followed their armed forces’ example and defected from the government to the Americans: by December 1962, 54 percent of Canadians believed that the country should accept U.S. nuclear weapons. The landslide that would sweep Diefenbaker away was beginning to move: just a week after Norstad’s visit, Lester Pearson announced that the Liberals now favoured accepting the nuclear warheads.

On January 25, 1963 Diefenbaker claimed in a speech in Parliament that it would be inappropriate for Canada to accept nuclear weapons at
that time. Among other things, he said that the United States and Britain had recently discussed moving the whole
NATO
alliance’s strategy away from nuclear weapons at a summit meeting in Nassau. This was not even a half-truth, and on January 30 the U.S. State Department issued a press release correcting what Diefenbaker had said about the Nassau summit and all but calling him a liar. It added tartly that “the Canadian government has not as yet proposed any arrangement sufficiently practical to contribute effectively to North American air defence.” Diefenbaker replied by recalling the Canadian ambassador from Washington—the only time that has ever been done.

Diefenbaker soon got his election: the cabinet was torn almost daily by chaotic disputes as Harkness pressed his demand that the government accept nuclear weapons. On February 3, 1963 Harkness resigned, and the following day he read out his resignation letter on national radio and television, explaining that it had been explicitly over
the nuclear issue. The government lost a vote of confidence in the Commons on February 5, and Parliament was dissolved the next day.

If Harkness really believed it was worth resigning to get nuclear warheads onto Canada’s Bomarcs, he was desperately out of touch with military realities. The day after Diefenbaker’s government fell, U.S. secretary of defense Robert McNamara was testifying about air defence to a subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations of the House of Representatives. He was not having an easy time of it: the whole concept of North American air defence had been taking a beating over the previous few years in the United States, as American strategists slowly came to terms with the looming reality of unstoppable ICBMs. In due course the congressmen got around to their favourite topic.

On March 29, 1963, in the last week of the Canadian election campaign, this testimony was released in the United States, and Diefenbaker leaped on it with glad cries. Conveniently forgetting that his own government had installed the Bomarcs in the first place, he told an enthusiastic crowd in Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto that “the Canadian people would not approve of useless Bomarcs being used as missile bait in Canada.” In the days that followed he accused Pearson of making Canada into a “decoy duck in a nuclear war” by agreeing to arm the Bomarcs, and asked if it was Liberal policy to “make Canada into a burnt sacrifice.”

Pearson was clearly unhappy about his U-turn on nuclear weapons, but he stuck it out and promised the voters that a Liberal government would take and keep the nuclear weapons Canada had signed up for “as long as they are useful for defence.” The fact that some of these nuclear weapons, at least, were manifestly not useful for defence, and had just
been so described by no less an authority than the U.S. secretary of defense, didn’t matter, because the electorate wasn’t interested in details.

If the election had really been about
NORAD
and the nuclear weapons that came with it, Diefenbaker could hardly have lost, for
NORAD
was a strategic irrelevance almost from the day it was created. The first successful Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test took place only one month after Diefenbaker agreed to join in mid-1957, and by early 1963 the U.S. Department of Defense had been reduced to justifying the Bomarcs as targets to soak up Russian firepower. But Diefenbaker was constrained from discussing the full and brutal truth about
NORAD
in public by the rules of secrecy covering strategic information obtained from the Americans, and also by the fact that he himself had signed the
NORAD
treaty. So the election campaign rapidly moved on from a muddled argument about nuclear warheads to a straightforward loyalty call: Diefenbaker’s vision of Canada (whatever that might be) versus loyalty to the alliance, and especially to the Americans. But he got the wrong answer from the Canadian people.

Canadians, it turned out, trusted and admired the U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, more than they did their own prime minister. The Liberals won the election in April 1963, forming a minority government that inaugurated another twenty-one-year run of Liberal rule with only one brief interruption. Five months later, Prime Minister Pearson signed the agreement with the United States, accepting nuclear warheads for Canada’s forces at home and in Europe. And within another few years, Canada’s short and hectic ride as strategically important territory was at an end.

M
ORE THAN HALF A CENTURY AFTER IT WAS CREATED, NORAD
still soldiers on, picking up what work it can, but its survival owes much more to institutional interests than strategic logic. By the mid-1960s, as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) took over the main deterrent task, bombers were demoted to the third leg of the “triad” of strategic nuclear weapons systems. The bombers probably wouldn’t even retain that status if air forces were not run by pilots, and they certainly pose no measurable threat to North America.

More to the point, since ICBMs and SLBMs really could not be stopped, or successfully eliminated in a surprise attack, the mutual deterrence first envisaged by Bernard Brodie almost two decades earlier really began to operate for the first time. The United States formally abandoned its doctrine of “massive retaliation” under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the early years of the Kennedy administration, replacing it with a strategy of “flexible response” that emphasized conventional weapons and proportional (rather than “massive”) responses to provocations. Nuclear weapons were still there in large numbers, but the new strategy was straight out of Brodie’s playbook: the most important part of
deterrence was ensuring that one’s own weapons would survive a first strike and be able to retaliate—and so long as that was true for both sides, first strikes were suicidal and to be avoided at all costs. McNamara even introduced into the thinking about deterrence strategy the further subtlety that it was important not to confuse or frighten the opponent too much, for fear of driving him into irrational behaviour.

This strategic shift not only made the world a good deal safer, but it also drained the passion and the sheer terror out of the American-Soviet relationship, and that had the further effect of allowing a new era of negotiations over the very weapons that had previously poisoned the relationship. Nuclear test ban treaties, negotiated limits on nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles, non-proliferation agreements and a variety of other arms control measures calmed matters further. Rivalries persisted between the superpowers and there were strong reactions to events like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” project in 1983, but on the whole the relations between the superpowers were civil. All of which made it difficult to understand why the forces and commands that had been built up in the panic-stricken early years of the Cold War persisted virtually unchanged down through the placid final two decades of the confrontation. But they did.