Mother, do you think we’ll get the bomb?

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Until last week, the idea that Canada would develop an arsenal of nuclear weapons was completely unthinkable, dead and buried lo these past fifty-plus years. But suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the zombie of nuclear war is alive and being discussed again, just as President Donald Trump exudes maximum desperation and unpredictability.

To some embattled Canadian citizens these days, after a year of having sand kicked in our underdeveloped face by the White House bully, the notion of Canadian nuclear weapons has some Charles Atlas bodybuilding appeal.

On Monday of this week, General Wayne Eyre (retired), Canada’s chief of defence staff until 2024, declared that “we will never have true strategic independence, absent our own nuclear deterrent.” He was followed by former prime minster Stephen Harper: “We have to be able … to defend all of our lands, seas and skies without the support of allies.” Those bombshells were preceded by revelations that our Armed Forces have mocked up insurgency tactics in the event the U.S. military invades and occupies us. And all this loose talk occurs as the 15-year-old New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (a.k.a. the New START) expired this week. The treaty limits the number of nuclear missiles, launchers and warheads Russia and the U.S. can stockpile (the total is north of 10,500). Russia suspended the treaty in 2023.

The provocation that seems to have kicked off all this nuclear bristling is a widely noted article last November in Foreign Affairs by Moritz Graefrath and Mark Raymond, two international relations professors at the University of Oklahoma.

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The United States, the professors declare, should “encourage a small set of allies – namely Canada, Germany and Japan – to go nuclear.” Doing so would make us less vulnerable to Russia and China and “a United States less committed to its traditional alliances.” Despite majority public opposition to the idea of nuclear proliferation and, like, wiping out human civilization, “blanket opposition to the further spread of nuclear weapons obscures the significant benefits they can bestow.” The Oklahomans believe these include the revitalization of the old (i.e. stable, postwar) order.

New nukes in Germany alongside existing weapons in Britain and France would – this is their theory – fill in America’s faltering support for NATO and bolster Europe’s rebuke to a newly ambitious Russia. Nukes in Japan (where the idea is both unpopular and politically divisive) would give the world an added threat to keep North Korea and China in line (say, if China decides to disrupt the semiconductor supply out of Taiwan). And a Canadian nuclear weapon program, the professors insist, would be a highly visible recommitment to NORAD, NATO and continental defence. Canada’s nuclear force couldn’t equal the American, Russian or Chinese arsenals, but it would add an extra layer of response to aggression from Russia and China before America had to step in with the big guns.

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Meanwhile, Japan, Germany and South Korea are already engaged in a more serious version of the same debate. The approach in South Korea – where America has a pervasive military presence – has been described by Lami Kim, a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, as “everything but the bomb,” in which the infrastructure of a nuclear arsenal (power reactors, missiles, submarines, delivery systems) is fast-tracked and developed first, awaiting only the warheads. Gen. Eyre’s comments suggest he wants Canada to take a similar approach. Incidentally, David McGuinty, the Minister of Defence, dismissed the prospect of nuclear weapons out of hand the day after Gen. Eyre’s utterances.

But the radical notion of Canadian nukes is still filtering down to my level via the ever-expanding number of kaffeeklatsches I attend the older I get. (Seriously, it’s a trend.) A recent one featured a couple of retired lawyers, a brace of business types, a smattering of journalists, even a former politician or two – your basic Laurentian elite nerdfest.

One of the older lawyers said he’d been talking to some genius of his acquaintance who had the solution to The Problem – the problem being the only one anyone can talk about at this nadir in history, the threat of Mr. Trump invading Canada and/or subjugating us economically.

“My friend thinks we should build an atomic bomb,” the lawyer said. “Because countries that have the bomb don’t get invaded.” It would have been more accurate to say they tend not to get overtaken and overcome; Israel and Pakistan are attacked all the time, despite their nuclear weapons. But never mind that.

I thought everyone would laugh the lawyer out of the room. But then one of the politicos chimed in. “Yeah. We could have had them, but we gave them up.”

And bingo: a dead idea came to life again.

It’s not as if Canada lacks the expertise or means to create a nuclear arsenal. During the Second World War, Britain’s nuclear research labs at Cambridge were moved, for security reasons, to Montreal and to Chalk River, 183 kilometres northwest of Ottawa.

There, British, French and Canadian researchers developed new bomb designs and new ways to produce plutonium and enriched uranium in what were some of the world’s most powerful experimental nuclear reactors. (The CANDU reactor was their offspring.) A portion of the uranium in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was mined in Canada and the Belgian Congo and refined by the Eldorado Mining Corp., a Crown corporation in Port Hope, 105 km east of Toronto. (The town for many years sported a sign claiming it “radiates happiness.”) Those activities lasted well beyond the end of the Second World War. Until the mid-1960s, fissile material in the U.S.’s steadily expanding nuclear weapon arsenal originated in Canada’s stockpiles in Chalk River and Port Hope. By the end of the war in 1945, Canada had the second-largest nuclear weapon production capability on the planet.

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And yet: prime ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau and their successors decided not to develop a Canadian nuclear arsenal. Instead, we signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1970 and became the world’s first and leading proponent of nuclear disarmament. If Mark Carney’s recent re-seizing of the global moral high ground at Davos rings a distant bell, that’s why. “When Canada became the first country with the ability to build an atomic bomb but chose not to,” Dr. Jeremy Whitlock, a Canadian nuclear physicist and former member of the International Atomic Energy Agency pointed out in a paper a few years ago, “it charted a path of leadership in non-proliferation that it followed into this century.” Canada was and still is a paragon of nuclear restraint.

Changing that reputation would come at immense cost. “Were Canada to want to pursue nuclear weapons,” I was told by Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, an American scholar at the Munk School who has studied non-proliferation for the Bush administration, including at the International Atomic Energy Agency, “Canada would have to withdraw from the NPT, giving three months’ notice before it could act to pursue a nuclear weapon. That’s assuming that Canada, a rule-based country, would follow the rules.” The NPT has been signed by 191 countries; the only one that has pulled out is North Korea. There would be plenty of protests, possibly on both sides of the issue.

Would a cascade of less dependable countries (Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria) follow suit and seek nukes of their own? Scholars are divided on that question. But a slew of others remain. Would the U.S. approve of Canada having its own nukes? Or would it insist we re-host theirs, a habit we finally kicked in 1984? Could we even afford to build them? The U.S. Congressional Budget Office recently estimated the U.S. will spend $1-trillion over the next decade to modernize its atomic arsenal. Why spend that kind of money when we’re already protected by American intercontinental missiles that protect us in the course of protecting the U.S.?

Opinion: In Canada’s threatening new neighbourhood, the nuclear option remains no option at all

Or is it a U.S. nuclear attack we’re dreaming we might head off? That’s a ridiculous idea. “If the source of our insecurity right now is Trump’s erratic nature,” Caleb Pomeroy, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, told me, “by the time we had nuclear weapons to balance against that nature, he would theoretically be out of office.” And if it’s a U.S. invasion (of any kind) that we hope to ward off, nuclear weapons aren’t the answer. As Prof. Pomeroy pointed out, “something like 800,000 Canadians live in the United States. It would be hard for Carney to credibly threaten to strike the United States, knowing that so many Canadians would also be placed at risk. And second, we know from previous nuclear testing and from computer modelling that wind can very easily carry the radioactive fallout from a nuclear blast 350 miles [560 kilometres]. So a threat to use a nuclear weapon against the U.S. is essentially going to nuke ourselves.”

And let’s be real: if the Americans want to invade Canada, Fen Hampson, a well-known professor of international relations at Ottawa’s Carleton University, insisted, “they could do it very easily. They’ve got the 10th Mountain Division in Fort Drum, which is about three hours south of Ottawa. And they could head into Ottawa very handily.”

One of the few practical functions a Canadian nuclear arsenal could serve, in the opinion of Dani Nedal, another Munk scholar, is that it would “improve our ability to be part of the conversation and determine security policy in a way that not having those weapons doesn’t allow you.” Nukes give you skin in negotiations, and make a potential invader think twice about wiping out your country, because the cost of doing so might be catastrophic. Even then, weapons aren’t the only route to such recognition. Canada, a country with uranium, increasingly sophisticated nuclear power reactors and nuclear expertise, could instead become a more committed (but still nonproliferating) military partner to middle powers that do have nuclear capabilities – if only to have what Prof. Nedal calls “strategic autonomy,” that is, a viable but non-American voice at the table regarding NATO and the defence of the North Atlantic sphere.

And then there’s the final problem with nuclear warheads, one that never goes away: Human beings aren’t as rational as detente assumes they will be, or anywhere near as careful. The U.S. has admitted to at least 30 “Broken Arrow” incidents where a nuclear device went missing, or went amok, unexpectedly.

At least two incidents occurred in Canada in 1950: a nuclear-equipped bomber that crashed in B.C., and a bomb that disintegrated over the St. Lawrence River near Rivière de Loup in Quebec.

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The most famous case is the 1983 incident when a Soviet missile warning system went haywire and mistakenly reported that five nuclear missiles had been launched at the USSR from the U.S. Miraculously, Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in the Soviet Air Defense force, disobeyed protocol and did not launch a counterattack, thereby averting a holocaust. One reason he thought the alarm might be false was that there were only five incoming missiles: he had been instructed that the attack, when it came, would be massive. But he was only guessing; he didn’t know for sure. It was later determined that the misfire was probably caused by – are you ready for this? – an unusual reflection of sunlight off some high-level clouds, which was then misread by a surveillance satellite.

Nuclear weapons don’t even need to leave the ground to be dangerous. In 1980, a U.S. Air Force mechanic dropped a wrench socket down an underground silo in Arkansas and punctured the ballistic missile’s fuel tank. The rocket’s fuel ignited eight hours later and the missile exploded in its silo – luckily without the nuclear warhead on its tip going off as well. As AI – non-human and powered by algorithms – becomes more prominent in military decisions, the odds of losing human control of the nuclear decision-making process are even greater.

All of this, of course, is classic nuclear diplomacy talk, which in many ways resembles religion and advertising: it’s relevant, if true. I have come to the more earthbound conclusion that Prof. Hampson is right: the most immediately available arsenal to defend ourselves against an increasingly imperialist America is a staunch resolution to stop being an economic vassal of the United States.

In the meantime, the conversation at my breakfast chats has moved on. The latest fun topic is, what will you do if the Americans invade? My answer is always the same, and I’m not the only one: I’ll immediately join the resistance. Whereupon some wag asks if the resistance really needs a 72-year-old with a trick knee and decrepit hearing. To which I reply, who knows? It might be the perfect cover. It’s better than nothing. And it’s a better place to start than nukes.