Essence of Indecision: Diefenbaker's Nuclear Policy, 1957–1963 (review)

At the beginning of chapter 2 of her new book Essence of Indecision: Diefenbaker's Nuclear Policy, 1957–1963, Patricia I. McMahon writes, 'Governing with a majority did not come easily to John Diefenbaker.' In fact, McMahon points out, Diefenbaker began to change his leadership style shortly after he was re-elected with a lopsided majority on 31 March 1958, taking 208 seats against 49 for the Liberals and 8 for the ccf. Whereas he had recently consulted Cabinet and caucus on most matters, he turned increasingly to making his own decisions, perhaps in consultation with a handful of senior civil servants and Cabinet ministers. At the same time Diefenbaker grew restive sitting atop his huge majority. He began to fear making any decisions that might lose him any of his countless votes, as if he could sit back, do nothing, and hoard them forever.

Patricia McMahon's book traces the history of John Diefenbaker's nuclear policy and his relations with the United States over the period of his governance. This is a story that begins well enough, with 'Honest John' inheriting a significant number of major defence initiatives from the St Laurent government that preceded him. The first of these was the North American Air Defence (norad) arrangement by which a joint Canada/us bi-national command would be created to coordinate and deploy us and Canadian air defence assets in the event of an air/atomic threat or actual attack from the ussr. Diefenbaker assented to the already negotiated arrangement almost immediately – in fact too hastily, according to some critics (McMahon rightly dismisses their complaints) – as opposed to his growing indecision over acquiring nuclear weapons, which McMahon marks as really starting with the death of Foreign Affairs Minister Sydney Smith in March 1959.

Under the Liberals, Canada had never actually negotiated terms and conditions for the use of us-supplied nuclear weapons by the Canadian military. But the Canadian government had begun to seriously consider arming Canadian forces with nuclear weapons at least as early as 1952. In the summer of that year General Charles Foulkes, chief of the Canadian Chiefs of Staff Committee, called atomic weapons nato's single greatest asset in the defence of Western Europe.

McMahon virtually ignores this bit of Canadian defence policy history, which is the one major flaw in the book. If she had not done so, her readers would know that nato – including Canada – began to look seriously at acquiring tactical nukes as early as 1952 as a means of balancing the huge military forces then being amassed by the ussr and the Warsaw Pact. In fact nato finally endorsed the acquisition of tactical nukes in December 1954.

Well before Diefenbaker was elected, therefore, the Liberal government – which of course included Lester B. Pearson as minister of external affairs – had embarked on a nuclear path and was examining a range of nukes to equip the Canadian Forces from depth charges to air-to-air rockets.

This is important because it shows that in freezing this process in 1959/60 'Dief the Chief' virtually paralyzed an eight-year-long process while coming up with no realistic alternative.

Aside from this oversight, McMahon's book is a well-written story, based on prodigious research, of the political side of the struggle that Andrew Richter wrote about in Avoiding Armageddon; Canadian Military Strategy and Nuclear Weapons, 1950–63 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2002). Richter examined the struggle between the foreign affairs and defence mandarins (the latter including the military), and the breech opened between them by the assent to the foreign ministry of Howard Green in 1959.

McMahon traces the story at the Cabinet level but fails to explain why Undersecretary of State Norman Robertson suddenly became a peacenik so late in his career, strongly backing Green's anti-nuclear policy. Richter surely has it right when he chalks it up to the Department of External Affairs' sudden love affair with global...