But what if it was just a little one? 
Ahem. I think the easy answer is that No, Canada is not a nuclear power, but we could be if we really wanted. Which we don’t. (We, being the collective we. I’m sure there are at least a few crackpots - most likely living close to me - that would be delighted for Canada to have nuclear weaponry.)
I used to work for Canada’s official nuclear watchdog agency, so as the politician once said “Listen up because I know what I am talking about for once!” 
Canada has had a nuclear industry since the 1930s (yes you read right, we used to process radium for airplane dials and watches that glow in the dark). Canadian scientists had a lot to do with the development of the atomic bomb, and today Canada produces the vast majority of nuclear medicine isotopes used in the US. We also manufacture and export many other nuclear or radioactive devices such as exit signs that stay on during power outages in public buildings.
We also have about a dozen nuclear generating plants. And we are blessed with one of the world’s greatest sources of uranium in the world in Saskatchewan. It is soooo rich and radioactive that robots are increasingly used in mining it for safety purposes. Since we have so many rivers that can be dammed, however, nuclear supplies only a small percentage of all our electricity.
Now about nuclear weapons. Canada could easily have produced nuclear bombs anytime from 1945 to the present. But we were the first country on Earth who **could ** have built nukes but agreed not to do so. Many other countries that have renounced nuclear weapons are just making necessity a virtue, but I am proud to say Canada made a genuine choice in the matter.
Well, yeah, because it was too expensive. Instead we just got our nukes from the United States, since they already had a nuclear weapons production capability.
The notion that Canada opted not to have nuclear weapons out of some sense of honor is ridiculous. The Canadian Armed Forces deployed nuclear weapons for two decades and got rid of them largely because they were no longer a cost-effective expenditure.
Thank you, RickJay, for stating something I’ve known for years, thanks to a few buddies in the Canadian Forces, but which most of my civilian friends refuse to acknowledge: we had nukes.
I don’t know how true this story is, but for what it’s worth I’ll post it: one of my friends in the Forces told me that yes, Canada had nukes. Thing was, they were marked with US Air Force markings. But the Americans who delivered them to my buddy’s Canadian Forces Base basically said, “Here you go, Canadians. Use them if you need to.”
That story may have been a little too casual; and indeed, it usually came out after my buddy had had a few too many beers. But the point remains: at least one of my buddies who was in the Canadian Forces had been trained in arming nuclear weapons to be launched somehow from Canada. The how, and the why, and the “under what circumstances,” he never elaborated on. No matter how many beers we got into him.
I can dig up a cite, if needed, but those were marked with USAF markings because they were USAF nukes. As I understand it, the ones based in Canada were under a dual control system. Neither the Americans nor the Canadians could use them unilaterally. The Canadians had one key, the USAF had the other. Both were needed for use.
Canada could make a working nuke pretty fast. They have all of the required industrial equipment, technology, etc. I’m sure they’ve got the all of the experimental data and blueprints left over from the Manhattan Project (Canada was a partner in it). Building a uranium bomb might be tough, because of the energy intensive enrichment process, but they could build a plutonium bomb at the drop of a hat (plus gov’t bureaucratic delays)- a year or five.
No cite necessary, at least not for me. That seems to be more reasonable and sensible than the way my buddy put it. Thanks for the info!
And of course this leaves aside the more fundamental issue (as usual passed up in the knee jerk Der Trihs anti-Bush/US rantage)…how would you sell this to the American public? Unless we are speculating about a fundamentally changed US where there is a totalitarian government in charge, how would a Mad President™ sell an invasion of Canada both to Congress AND to the American people? Because if the president couldn’t sell it to the people AND to Congress it would be kind of moot.
It wasn’t all that easy to sell the US public and Congress on invading Iraq (even Afghanistan wasn’t a slam dunk)…and really, Saddam isn’t exactly what I’d call cute and cuddly. There was (as you pointed out) a whole history, with the requisit propaganda dating back 2 earlier presidencies that GW was able to exploit in his sell job. There was the UN violations and pattern of back and forth hostilities between the US and Iraq all through the Clinton presidency…and of course that whole shooting war thingy during Bush’s daddies reign.
And with all that, with the UN spankings/resolutions, AND with the 9/11 attack fresh in the publics mind (yeah, I know Iraq had nothing to do with it Der :p…it still made the public more receptive to military options ), it STILL took months for the administration to sell both Congress AND the public on it. I don’t think that if Canada came down and kicked Lady Liberty in the crotch we could get enough support to use bad language against our Canadian bretheren…let alone authorization and support for an invasion.
All this is going to fly right over Der Trihs though. Don’t bring up reality…it only gets in the way of a good rant.
-XT
Might even be able to pop off one or two uranium bombs – if we still have that HEU in the back forty: Unsupported database type
I could be a nuclear power, if I had 45 kgs of weapons grade uranium, a few pounds of RDX, some steel tubing and a decent machine shop.
The hard part about making a uranium bomb is enrichment. The hard part about making a plutonium bomb is knowing exactly how to set up the implosion, and the precision required to carry it off (the plutonium is relatively easy to obtain- it can be separated out from spent fuel chemically).
If they’ve got 45 kgs of weapons grade HEU, the only delay would be political/ bureaucratic.