[QUOTE=The Flying Dutchman]
I know we Canadians developed the Candu nuclear reactor, but can we be regarded as a nuclear power even if we don’t stockpile the weapons?
How long would it take for us to develop a nuclear weapon of our own? Longer than Iran? Do we already enrich uranium? If not, why then does Iran need to develop technology for enriched uranium for peaceful purposes? If Iran is going for ballistic nuclear capability, should Canada as well? What should our response be if Tehran lobbed a nuclear shell on Thunder Bay?
[/QUOTE]
Canada is not a “nuclear power.” I can’t recall anyone ever claiming it was. A nuclear power is a nation that possesses nuclear weapons.
It’s theoretically possible that Canada could construct nuclear weapons in a relatively short period of time. Depending on how enthusiastic the government was in doing it, of course, but if they were really in a rush, I’d imagine it could be done in under 24 months.
Of course, that’s true of many countries - Australia, Germany, Japan, Italy and others could doubtlessly construct nuclear weapons in relatively short order. They choose not to. If they chose to do so, it would be very alarming indeed, since it would suggest something was awry with their governments.
I don’t want to get into a long discussion of the theory of nuclear war, but to make it short, one of the reasons Canada does not possess nuclear weapons is that there is no real reason to do so; a country that attempted a strategic nuclear attack on Canada - or any other Western country - would suffer a retaliatory strike. It is the nature of the balance of nuclear power than using a nuclear weapon would necessitate a powerful counterattack, because that’s really become the very reason for their existence.
Back during the height of the Cold War, Canada DID deploy nuclear weapons, which a lot of Canadians don’t know. NATO planning at the time accounted for many different variations of limited nuclear warfare, so Canada possessed various tactical and semi-strategic warheads, such as Genie air-to-air weapons and Honest John missiles armed with warheads that had a yield up to 40 kilotons - more than twice the power of Nagasaki. If you believed that nuclear war could be limited, it made sense for Canada to have nuclear weapons because we had specific defensive obligations in Europe, so we needed nukes for the part of the front we’d be fighting on.
Eventually, the doctrine of limited nuclear war fell out of favour, as the nuclear powers accepted the fact that nuclear wars would inevitably balloon into full-scale wars of extermination. The role of nuclear weapons thus became a pure deterrent; don’t nuke me, pal, or else I’ll vaporize your whole country. That’s why the Americans and Soviets suddenly became so willing to reduce their arsenals in the 1980s; they were coming to the realization that there was no reason to have a 25,000-warhead arsenal. All you needed was enough warheads to ensure you could always annihilate the major population centres of whatever country nuked you first. That meant they could carry smaller arsenals, which had two benefits; first, it saved a colossal pile of money (nuclear weapons are astounding expensive) and secondly, it made them both more secure, since they retained the nuclear shield while becoming increasingly confident their their rival would not try to use nukes in a tactical, limited exchange.
In this context, Canada’s collection of borrowed tactical warheads were of absolutely no value; all that mattered were the big ICBMs that threatened any potential enemy with doom if they pulled the nuke card first. So our nuclear capability was phased out because it just did not serve a military interest anymore; NATO as a group was moving away from plans to use tactical nukes, so we went with it.
As it stands, Canada is a NATO ally. There are two NATO countries with the ability to glassify any nation on earth (the USA and UK) and so it is effectively the case that a nuclear attack on Canada would be an act of suicide. Were Canada to suddenly announce its intent to build nuclear weapons that would suggest a very frightening turn of events indeed because it would mean Canada was turning away from its allies; why else would Canada need nukes unless we planned to isolate ourselves from the USA and Western Europe? The very act of building a nuke would be a threatening act. I can’t personally see any reason why we’d need one unless we were afraid of an American invasion, which is nuts.
