Avoiding Armageddon: Canadian Military Strategy and Nuclear Weapons: 1950-1963 (review)

The University of British Columbia Press has been rapidly establishing a solid reputation as one of a handful of presses in English-speaking Canada that provides a warm welcome for Canadian defence and security titles and Canadian military history. This book joins a recent collection that will only enhance that reputation.

Andrew Richter has undertaken a daunting task in a mere 163 pages of text: to recount the signal role that nuclear weapons played in Canadian foreign and defence policy and the evolution of the Canadian military from virtually the dawn of the Cold War to the beginning of the Pearson era. Not only that, but he brings his analysis forward virtually to the recent war against Saddam Hussein. He does that to demonstrate his main conclusion - that since the late 1950s at least, Canada has pursued two contradictory policy goals to the detriment of both.

What were those goals? They were to be a good ally of the United States and NATO on the one hand, but to cover Canada's basic and instinctive alliance to the western cause on the other, with outward manifestations of neutralism and pacifism. Indeed, on the very last page of his text Richter proclaims his purpose: 'It is my belief that Canada cannot identify a security policy for the new century unless it fully understands the choices made in the one just ended. Rather than continuing to accept assumptions about Canadian security that have gone untested for decades, the challenge facing students and observers of Canadian defence is to re-examine established dogmas and the truths that result from them.' This book is his contribution to the debate.

The story Richter tells is basically this: although Canada had no nuclear military ambitions of its own coming out of the Second World War, it recognized the importance of developing realistic foreign and defence policies that would complement the nuclear retaliatory capabilities of the United States. Some Canadians - the late R.J. Sutherland being the best example, but not the only one - also endeavoured to ensure that those policies were not simply faint echoes of the thoughts of American nuclear strategists, but were instead Canadian in conception and aimed at serving Canada's distinctive policy goals.

Richter shows convincingly that the government of Louis St Laurent (1948-56) understood that Canada's chief role in a nuclear armed world was to help the US Strategic Air Command sustain its task as the West's nuclear umbrella. No one in the government loved nukes - there were no Canadian Dr. Strangeloves - but realism and an understanding of the rapidly developing nuclear power balance drove them to difficult conclusions. The hardest was that deterrence was the only defence against attack, and that the emergence of a system of mutually assured destruction ( MAD) gave at least some hope that a sanity born of terror might prevail as long as the Cold War lasted.

In spite of his strong analysis, Richter is not able to avoid the occasional omission, and no one could expect such a relatively short book to cover every aspect of Canadian nuclear policy, but Richter might have also mentioned the enthusiasm with which the government began to embrace the nuclearization of NATO in the mid-1950s. Although the government was rightly concerned about both the substance and the means of announcement of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' doctrine of 'massive retaliation' in early 1954, it had no qualms about adding the first generation of 'tactical' nukes to NATO arsenals. Like the other NATO partners, Ottawa saw that the alternative seemed to be to build a military force-in-waiting that would have roughly equalled what General Dwight D. Eisenhower had under command in western Europe in the spring of 1945.

After John Diefenbaker assumed office, however, Canadian policy began to go off in another direction. Richter shows convincingly - even if he does not quite explain - that Dief and Minister of Foreign Affairs...