Former chief of defence staff Wayne Eyre says Canada should maintain flexibility on the question of whether to acquire nuclear weapons.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Allison Macfarlane is former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and current director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. Hugh Gusterson is Professor of Anthropology and Public Policy at UBC and the author of Nuclear Rites and People of the Bomb.
On Feb. 2, Canada’s former chief of the defence staff, retired general Wayne Eyre, said that our country needed to be open to nuclear weapons. “We will never have true strategic independence, absent our own nuclear deterrent,” he said, adding, “Let’s just have the conditions in place so that if we decide to go that way, we can do it in shorter order than some other countries who have no nuclear enterprise.”
Mr. Eyre makes it sound as if having “the conditions in place” is a simple matter – like having food in the fridge in case you invite people over for dinner last-minute. We want to make clear it would, in fact, put enormous strain on Canada’s financial and reputational resources and potentially pose serious environmental risks.
Canada should ‘keep our options open’ on acquiring nuclear weapons, former defence chief says
There are two kinds of nuclear weapons: those with plutonium cores and those with uranium cores. Plutonium and uranium are both available to this country: Canada’s CANDU reactors produce plutonium, and Canada has a lot of natural uranium in the ground. A uranium bomb is fuelled by the uranium isotope U-235, but natural uranium is over 99-per-cent made up of U-238. That ratio is changed through a dirty and expensive process called “enrichment.” While a crude, inefficient nuclear weapon would work with lower levels of U-235, weapons designers generally aim for 90 per cent or better. The more enriched the uranium, the lighter and more efficient the bomb.
To acquire nuclear weapons, Canada would have to first have a site where it could produce either uranium or plutonium for a bomb. If it went the uranium route, this would require an enrichment facility; the plutonium route would demand a reprocessing facility.
Then, it would have to construct highly secure factories to shape the uranium or plutonium for a bomb and assemble the weapons.
Third, it would need to find a remote site, geologically appropriate and owned by the government, where a nuclear weapon could be tested. After all, there is no deterrent if you don’t show the world that it exists and works. No nuclear weapon has been detonated above ground since a Chinese test in 1980, so a Canadian test would presumably be in a deep shaft in which measuring instruments were placed. Over time, further tests would be required, too.
Finally, it would require investment in new delivery systems. Nuclear weapons can be dropped from planes, but they are relatively easy to shoot down, so Canada would probably seek to develop missiles capable of reaching the U.S., Russia and China. Such systems would take years to develop.
Canada has no interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, Defence Minister says
None of this is cheap. To give some sense: the URENCO enrichment facility in New Mexico cost US$5-billion, and the reprocessing facility in Japan has cost more than US$25-billion. The U.S. government estimates that, if it resumed nuclear testing, each test would cost US$132-million to US$146-million.
Then there is the environmental risk. The Rocky Flats site in Colorado, where plutonium triggers were made, left 1.3 million cubic metres of waste and 16 million gallons of contaminated water, as well as soil heavily laced with plutonium. The clean-up cost more than US$7-billion. Clean-up of the Hanford plutonium facility in Washington State is projected to cost a half-trillion U.S. dollars. According to a former senior official in the U.S. Energy Department, “It’s roughly comparable to the Apollo moon program in cost and risk, except there’s no moon.”
Finally, there is the issue of reputational harm. Canada has an image as an internationalist country; developing a nuclear weapon would radically rebrand it. Canada would have to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, putting it in the company of only five other countries: North Korea, Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Sudan. Do we want to be more like North Korea than, say, Australia and New Zealand?
During the Second World War, Canadian scientists helped develop the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and contributed uranium to the bomb project, but Canada did not develop its own nuclear arsenal. It definitively forswore nuclear weapons when it signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, though it did allow the U.S. to base nuclear weapons in the country until 1984. If Canada backtracked now and built the bomb, its example might encourage other middle powers such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Germany to do the same.
Maybe this is the cost of “true strategic independence.” But would Canadians really feel safer then?