My co-worker told me an interesting third-hand story today. He’s from Northern Ontario, and we were talking about the economy of the towns and cities there. We got to talking about the city of North Bay.
North Bay had at one point an important NORAD military base. My co-worker said that it was built as a backup to the main US command-and-control centre under Cheyenne Mountain during the Cold War. As such it received much US military traffic.
Now, Canada has never permitted nuclear weapons on its soil. My co-worker said that, in spite of this ban, the US was able to land planes bearing nuclear weapons at North Bay, because of a treaty that defined the patches of pavement which the planes’ tires were touching to be US soil. Thus, the planes never actually landed on Canadian soil.
Is this true?
It seems awfully urben-legendy, but OTOH stranger things have been done in treaties. I remember reading about the Panamerican Highway and its bridge over the Panama Canal, which was defined as a tube of Panamanian sovereignty passing over the US sovereingty of the Canal Zone. Snopes and the alt.folklore.urban archive are inconclusive on the issue.
I have some experience with this, having carried nukes and all kinds of other “unmentionables” on my aircraft at various times.
What it boils down to is sovereignty, and a military aircraft is treated similar to how ships are treated - ie, the vessel and everything aboard it are the sovereign territory of the country that owns and operates the vessel. This allows the vessel to transit other countries without getting boarded, inspected, etc.
I can’t say if the “tire patch” methodology cited by your co-worker is actually how Canada defines an aircraft’s sovereignty or not. The actual agreement concerning sovereignty is worked out between the two countries, and then each country works out internally how it will “recognize” these agreements. Once again, I don’t know if the “tire patch” rule is true, but I DO know that US military aircraft can transit Canada carrying nukes.
Now, this refers to cargo airplanes carrying nukes as cargo. The weapons are being transported somewhere else. Bombers with live nukes that can be dropped are a whole different story - only a few countries have reciprocal agreements for things like this, and it is used very rarely if at all.
Long before I wondered about how many square inches of U.S. “soil” are wandereding around Canadian air bases, I’d be curious to know the official wording of this Canadian position. Is it law? How is the law written? Is it an expression of preference? How has it been promulgated?
The question is avoided by the US military policy to “neither confirm nor deny” the locations of nuclear weapons. That lets anyone take whichever position is most convenient without ever resolving the issue.
tom, it’s been a while since I read anything about it, but the issue dates back to the late 50s - early 60s. There was a suggestion that the U.S. might want to install missiles in Canada, I think because the range of the ICBMs wasn’t as great then as they subsequently became, and of course the farther north you go, the shorter the trans-Polar flight will be.
The issue came up during another period of extremely poor US-Canada relations, and Prime Minister Diefenbaker eventually got into a pissing match with President Kennedy over the issue. Dief was a Cold Warrior, but he was ambivalent about nuclear weapons. He and Kennedy also had a deep, mutual personal antipathy, Diefenbaker being a Western populist monarchist, suspicious of Eastern elites, and Kennedy, well, he was an Eastern elite, all by himself.
Dief refused to allow the U.S. military to bring nukes north (or told them to take them back home; as mentioned my recollection is fuzzy). The matter became an election issue, I think in the '62 or '63 election, and Mike Pearson, professional diplomat, took a much softer line on the nuclear issue, while playing up the need to improve relations with the U.S. However, even once he got elected, he didn’t change the bottom line.
My understanding is that the policy is just that, a policy, not a legal requirement. The Canadian goverment makes it a condition that foreign military forces stationed in Canada are not to bring nuclear weapons. But there is the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach mentioned by ElvisL1ves - protestors occasionally raise a stink when major U.S. naval vessels make courtesy calls in Canadian ports, but that’s different from the issue of U.S. military personnel actually being stationed on Canadian soil.
The US Military for many years got around this requirement, in Canada, Japan, and other countries by having only nuclear weapon “components” in those countries. That is, pieces of nuclear weapons that were not yet assembled into a weapon.
Of course, the ‘assembling’ required to turn these components into a functioning weapon was sometimes very minimal – something that a weapons tech could do in 60-100 seconds. [Many weapons were designed this way for safety reasons.]
But technically, the US was complying with the legal requirements of the host country. And the host country’s military usually knew about this, and winked at it.
The “tire patch” thing is just plain silly. As you say, countries have treaties laying out these things and, in the absence of treaties, international law and custom prevail. A naval vessel or military aircraft are generally recognized to be under the jurisdiction of the owning power at all times but the host power can put any restrictions it wants and the visiting power can decide whether it wants to visit or not. For example, commercial vessels may be obligated to hire a local pilot in places where foreign naval vessels are exempt but this is merely convention. If country X says all foreign vessels have to get a pilot then naval vessels can get a pilot or not visit… If there is an explicit agreement that nukes will not be brought in then the parties are expected to abide by that. If nothing is said then. . . nothing is said but to say any military vessel or aircraft can freely carry nukes in other countries is silly. Do you imagine the Chinses or Russians would be allowed to bring their nukes into the USA?
I don’t blame those countries which forbid nukes on their jurisdictions as there have been accidents. In the 60s a US plane dropped a hydrogen bomb in the water just off the southern coast of Spain and the are was contaminated by radioactivity. Personally I do not care for radioactive tomatos.
Well, here’s your problem; this is false. Canada has actually POSSESSED nuclear weapons in the past. Canada has, in fact, deployed quite a few nuclear weapons on both Canadian and American planes in Canada, such as the Genie nuclear-tipped AAM, which was deployed out of CFB Bagotville right up to at least 1984. B28 and Mark 43 nuclear bombs were deployed at some bases as well for use on Starfighters. Right up until the 1980s the navy was trying to get ASROC-N depth charges too, but they never did.
No nuclear weapons have been deployed by Canada since 1984.
So anyway, that whole story kind of goes out the window.
I think the basic premise that Canada does not allow nuclear weapons within its borders is flawed. I’ve never heard of such a broad ban. (Of course, the catalogue of things I’ve never heard of is quite extensive.)
Vancouver has signs posted at its city limits which proudly proclaim: “Now entering Vancouver – A nuclear free zone!”
This seems to imply to me that not all parts of Canada outside Vancouver necessarily have the benefit of this distinction. (Whatever that is.)
We’ve had U.S. nuclear submarines in our harbours, of course.
(The board went down for back-up before I could post this last night. I see RickJay has given substance to my vague suspicion.)
As Rickjay says, Canada has had plenty of nuclear bombs on its soil in the past. 446 and 447 squadrons at North Bay had 26 nuclear-tipped Bomarc missiles.
In fact, the Bomarc missiles led to the fall of the Conservative government under John Diefenbaker. The Diefenbaker government didn’t want the nuclear warheads put on the missiles, and lost a vote of no-confidence over it, causing the government to collapse. The Liberals under Lester B. Pearson took power, and approved the nuclear warheads.
Canada had nuclear tipped Bomarcs in the inventory from 1963 until 1969. Canada also specifically designed the CF-104 Starfighter (a Canadian-built derivative of the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter) to carry nuclear weapons.
Incidentally, the Bomarc crisis is also intertwined with the Avro Arrow controversy. It was the Bomarc that killed the Arrow. The Arrow was designed to intercept high-altitude Russian nuclear bombers. The Bomarc was a nuclear ground-to-air missile that would fly into a bomber formation and detonate, destroying them all in one shot. Or at least, that was the theory. The Bomarc had numerous problems in development.
As for the ‘tire contact patch’ theory, I suspect the grain of truth that led to this UL is that the U.S. has a number of bases in Canada that were purchased by the U.S. government and then leased back to Canada on 99 year leases. I used to own a Grumman AA1 that I flew out of CFB Edmonton - Namao. The hangar we used was called the ‘nose dock’, and it was built by the U.S. government for servicing B-52 bombers en route to the Soviet Union. It was called the ‘nose dock’ because it would only fit the nose of a B-52, and was used for maintaining avionics and such. Of course, we could fit about five of our aircraft in it at one time…
CFB Edmonton is a good example of Canada’s nuclear policy. That runway was the largest in the British Commonwealth at about 15,000 feet, and was explicitly built to be that size by the U.S., so that it could handle fully loaded B-52 bombers. Loaded with nuclear weapons. Our Cessnas could do about five touch-and-go landings on it at one time, and its taxiways were larger than most other airport runways in the area.