Learning to Love the Bomb: Canada's Nuclear Weapons During the Cold War Sean M. Maloney, PhD 
  
My Magnum Opus: The first comprehensive historical (or otherwise) treatment of Canada’s nuclear weapons story. Despite attempts by Canadian bureaucratic and cultural mavens to downplay or even suppress the historical facts, Canada’s armed forces deployed a dramatic array of nuclear capabilities during the first half of the Cold War. Indeed, by 1964, Canadian strike aircraft could deliver megaton-yield hydrogen bombs onto their targets in eastern Europe if the Cold War went “hot”, and at least five other Canadian nuclear systems were deployed to defend North America. Though information on technical bits and pieces has leaked out over the years, exactly how and why Canada nuclearized has never been examined to the level of detail in this work. Learning to Love the Bomb explores, using vast amounts of declassified material, Canada’s subtle and at times nearly covert attempts to build a nuclear capacity in the face of radically shifting alliance nuclear strategy, technological change, and domestic political turmoil. From Canadian involvement in nuclear testing, to influencing NATO strategy for national purposes, to examining the possibility of constructing her own nuclear weapons and even surreptitiously modifying Canadian aircraft to deliver American nuclear bombs, the emergent picture is one at odds with the current mythology which is today influencing the Canada-US relationship. The reality is that Canada was at one time an influential power and had an extremely close partnership with the United States: this relationship rested on the need to deter and if necessary defeat an imminent Soviet nuclear attack on the continent and in Europe. And, most importantly, the role of nuclear weapons was the bedrock of this relationship. The climax of Learning to love the Bomb delves into new information on Canada’s secret role in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. “By directly challenging the main thread of Canadian nuclear history, Dr. Maloney provides an important counterpoint to the majority of Canadian historians who paint Canada as a peaceful, anti-nuclear power. Instead, he points out that Canada deliberately went about obtaining nuclear weapons, an idea that the Canadian public supported, and that Canada was by no means an irrelevant power during the Cold War, but was an integral part of the NATO alliance system.” From a review by Stephane Lefebvre in Air Power History Summer 2009: "This is history at its best. Leaving no archival and other primary sources unturned, Maloney has written the new reference standard on Canada's national security policy for the period 1948-1968...." From the Introduction: On a warm night in June 1964, a C-124 Globemaster transport belonging to the United States Air Force (USAF) landed at Royal Canadian Air Force Station Zweibrucken in West Germany. The four-engined machine taxied to a cluster of concrete bunkers surrounded with coils of barbed wire and protected by sentries armed with submachineguns and vicious guard dogs. USAF security guards armed with assault rifles leaped from the belly of the aircraft into the glare of arc lights while Canadian and American armourers used special lift trucks to remove the C-124's deadly cargo. All the activity was conducted with a professional sense of urgency. Soon six low-slung aluminum silver CF-104 Starfighter jets emblazoned with Canada's Red Ensign on the tail, "RCAF" on the fuselage, and maple leaf roundels on the wings would stand ready at Zweibrucken next to those forbidding concrete and sod bunkers, ready to take off at a moment's notice. Aircraft no. 12839 would have a 13-foot long bomb attached to its underbelly while stern sentries kept a vigilant watch. This mechanism, sometimes called 'a bucket full of sunshine' by those who worked around it, would be one of four types of nuclear bombs made available to the RCAF in Europe. In its smallest configuration, the 'gadget' could explode with a yield similar to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. In another configuration, it could yield one Megaton or 67 times the power of the weapons used against Japan. In short order, eight Canadian Starfighter squadrons in West Germany almost a quarter of the aerial nuclear-strike force, possessed by NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe would have access to firepower greater that that used by all Canadian forces during the First and Second World Wars. Every bridge, rail junction, missile site, airfield, and command bunker behind the Iron Curtain would be a smoking, radiating ruin if the command came from SACEUR to execute the Nuclear Strike Plan. On the other side of the world, in the forested environs of Lamacaza, Quebec, RCAF officers checked the special communications circuits between the twenty-eight BOMARC missiles and the advanced Semi Automated Ground Environment computer direction system. The ram-jet- propelled BOMARC, loaded horizontally in its 'coffin' launcher, looked like something from a Buck Rogers science fiction serial. This cruise missile was a deadly hunter of bombers, bombers which, if they got through, would in minutes kill or injure through radiation exposure some seven million Canadians, the same number of Jews and Poles killed by the Nazis over several years during the Second World War. If the isolated radar crews on duty conducting the long polar watch in the Canadian north gave the alarm, BOMARCs would be ripple-launched in a swirl of smoke. Controllers huddled over green scopes deep underground in a bunker in North Bay, Ontario would direct the missiles to their targets. A BOMARC's electronic brain would come alive, orbit the target area, home in, and vapourize enemy bombers with a flash of energy half the size of the Hiroshima explosion. If necessary, Canadian Army rocketeers from 1 Surface-to-Surface Missile Battery in West Germany would attach nuclear warheads to their Honest John rockets and fire them over the border into East Germany at the Communist forces formed up to storm this bastion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Over northern Ontario, squadrons of CF-101 VooDoo interceptors would vapourize intruding aircraft or fry the Soviet crews and bombs with radiation generated by MB-1 Genie rockets. Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) Tracker and RCAF Argus patrol aircraft would drop sonar buoys into the cold, dark depths of the North Atlantic to find Soviet missile submarines, which they would in turn crush and sent to a watery grave, with nuclear depth charges similar in yield to the Nagasaki bomb, before those submarines could launch missiles against Halifax, Montreal, and New England. B-52 bombers of the USAF's Strategic Air Command would attach themselves to their KC-135 tankers in an aerial ballet over their bases in Alberta and Manitoba before proceeding to targets in the heartland of the Communist menace, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. So much for the myth of Canada as the inoffensive, irrelevant and neutral peacemaker. Why, exactly, did Canada pursue a nuclear strategy and acquire such means to implement it? |
