NATO and the Bomb: Canadian Defenders Confront Critics (review)

In the mid 1950s the Canadian military contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including Canadians units stationed in Europe, constituted a respectable portion of the forces deployed by the alliance. Thereafter, West European economic recovery and rearmament, as well as a long, steady decline in the Canadian defense budget, degraded Canada's military importance in NATO. By 1969 the new Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, could point out that his country's military presence in Europe was intended not so much to scare "our potential enemies" as to "impress our friends."

Nor were Canadian military efforts at home essential to the country's physical security during the Cold War. Canadians were sheltered directly under a U.S. military guarantee. This guarantee, however, did not come cost-free, and Canadians worried about potential infringements of their sovereignty by U.S. forces operating in Canada. After Canadian and U.S. air defense forces were placed in 1957 under a single North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) headquartered in Colorado Springs, additional concerns arose about national autonomy. The biggest worry, though, was that nuclear deterrence might fail and that Canada, because of its contiguity with the United States and its involvement in North American defenses, would suffer the calamitous nuclear consequences.

In short, although Canada, like the United States, maintained security interests and commitments in both North America and Europe during most of the Cold War, Canada was always a lesser power bearing little of the direct military burden. Canadians therefore had plenty of opportunity to fret and debate their country's policy. As Erika Simpson puts it in NATO and the Bomb: "During the Cold War, Canada's stance toward . . . [NATO] was one of shifting commitment. Canadian leaders often contemplated changes in the level of Canada's commitment to the military alliance, and at times made them, often abruptly" (p. 3). Most famously (in Canada at least), this occurred with respect to Canada's commitments in the late 1950s and early 1960s to equip the Canadian military in Europe and North America with U.S. nuclear weapons.

Simpson focuses her book on the Canadian nuclear weapons debate in 1957–1963, especially the controversy that arose during the tenure of Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, whose government ultimately was brought down by the issue..This was a daring step on Simpson's part. The nuclear weapons question has received far more scholarly attention than any other issue in Canadian defense policy since 1945. Nonetheless, Simpson pulls it off and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the nuclear debate as well as of Canadian defense policy more broadly during the rest of the Cold War and into the early 1990s. She does this by arguing that Canada's defense policy was shaped by a continuing debate within the most senior levels of the Canadian government between adherents of two broad belief systems: the "defenders," whose most important belief "was that the close ties among the allies would be threatened unless Canada maintained or strengthened its NATO defence commitments" (p. 41); and the "critics," who "were suspicious about the likelihood and possible consequences of the allies drawing Canada into an armed confrontation and had doubts about NATO undertakings, particularly strategic objectives" (p. 72). These two schools are close to what Glenn Snyder has referred to as the two "alliance dilemmas": fear of abandonment and fear of entrapment.

Simpson skillfully deploys her simple but useful model, allowing the reader to follow who over the years argued what and with whom. She identifies the longevity in Ottawa of both ways of thinking, as well as clusters of decision-makers (cabinet members and senior bureaucrats) within both schools. Fortunately, she is aware of the limitations of her model. She points out in particular the difficulties of accommodating the approaches to defense policy taken by Canadian prime ministers. One of the most important conclusions she reaches is that "contrary to conventional wisdom, senior officials in the Diefenbaker government, including the...