The Missile Defence Deadline
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By John Clearwater
In October of this year, the United States will begin operating the first of several interceptors for its planned national missile-defence system. With the clock ticking, Washington says Paul Martin has to get with the program now.
Worse still, pro-Star Wars Canadians are lining up to say the sky will fall if this country fails to jump on the missile-defence bandwagon.
Think-tanks, arms dealers, retired officers and various commentators and newspapers are sounding the siren-call for Canadian participation.
In fact, this campaign is just a load of soft thinking by so-called analysts too lazy or dull to think about the real world, and who seem to know almost nothing about Canadian politics and history. Their only goal is to please Uncle Sam with obedience.
When the United States first proposed the deployment of an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system in the 1960s, Canada said no. We said no so clearly and loudly that the rejection was incorporated into the 1968 renewal of the NORAD treaty. Canada added a clause stipulating that we would not become involved in the missile-defence plans and operations then being promulgated in Washington.
While the anti-ABM clause was fatefully deleted by Pierre Trudeau in 1981, Canada still refused to participate directly in Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars missile-defence scheme. In 1985, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney announced his decision to decline the U.S. invitation to participate in the research stage of the Strategic Defense Initiative.
There are several other examples of Canada refusing to take a role in questionable U.S. defence plans. In the late 1980s, Mulroney and his Conservative cabinet repeatedly said no to U.S. requests to test the advanced cruise missile in Canada. This went on for years until eventually just two ACMs were flown. In 1993 and 1994, the Chrétien Liberals asked the U.S. to refrain from making any more cruise-missile requests, and the testing ended. When the U.S. asked to test the Pershing II ballistic missile in Alberta, the government flat-out said no. The irony here is that scare-mongers now delight in warning that Canada would be abandoning the West, destroying deterrence, giving up our military, aiding terrorists and turning our backs on NORAD if it fails to join the Bush adminstration’s scheme. This last claim is, of course, the strangest and least supportable argument. When we turned our backs on the ABM system in 1968, it was done through the NORAD treaty. NORAD still exists 36 years later, with Canadian and U.S. troops continuing to work side-by-side.
The plain fact is that Canada can say no to Washington and still be part of NORAD and NATO.
The even more outrageous argument that NORAD’s very survival depends on Canadian participation in missile defence is pure drivel. Years ago, the United States began the process of separating the missile-defence functions of NORAD into Space Command and ultimately into the new Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. There is no logical or operational reason why NORAD would have to close if Canada did not participate in missile defence, just as there was none in 1968.
But there are even stranger statements coming from the government itself. Chrétien and Martin have both said that weaponization of space is a deal-breaker, and that Canada would not participate in any scheme which placed weapons in orbit. However, to make the project move along, Ottawa has repeatedly denied that there is any space-weapons component at all. This comes as a great surprise to the Pentagon, which has been budgeting for space weapons since George W. Bush took office and actually has funding for the deployment of the first generation.
Chrétien’s defence minister, John McCallum told Canadians in May, 2003
that Canada would enter talks with the U.S. on participation in missile
defence. Martin’s now-defeated defence minister, David Pratt, signed a letter-of-intent with the Pentagon on Jan. 15 of this year, confirming
Liberal government interest in discussions on cooperation in the area of ballistic-missile defence of North America. Although Pratt said no decision had been taken on participation, it was a hollow statement given that he was holding the signed deal in his hands.
Since then, the government has worked to ensure Canadian involvement
becomes almost mandatory through sheer force of structure. To this end, Pratt and Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham directed that a new clause be added to the NORAD agreement giving Canadian NORAD personnel access to critical missile-defence planning information until the system’s deployment in October. So, although there is no operational necessity for this, Ottawa is working to ensure we participate in missile defence — in an organization not tasked with missile defence.
The cheerleading section for all this has been led by U.S. Ambassador Paul Cellucci, who warned Ottawa the day after the election that “the government has to make decisions and move forward, and we expect that is what the government will do.” But Cellucci’s exhortation has nothing to do with the actual timetable of the missile system — which has never been proven to operate in real-world conditions and has never been tested as a whole — but instead with the Bush re-election timetable.
Heading into November, the president needs all the support he can muster for his defence initiatives, increasingly seen as very risky by his own electorate. Convincing Canada to jump aboard the Bush missile-defence bandwagon would lend credibility to another silly and expensive scheme.
Moreover, when Cellucci talks about missile defence, he is usually really talking about military spending. The ambassador’s most common complaint is that Canada does not spend enough on the military, and that our relations with Washington will suffer dire consequences if this continues. The scare-mongers love this argument, and repeat ad nauseam that Canada is failing to pull its weight in a military world because of its dangerously low defence budget.
How paltry are Canada’s defence expenditures? Well, it turns out that we already have the sixteenth-highest military budget in the world, and the sixth-highest in NATO after the U.S., UK, France, Germany and Italy. In fact, with last year’s $11.83 billion outlay, Canada now spends as much as it did during the last part of the Cold War, when we had to defend ourselves against the USSR. That amounts to $382 for every Canadian, or more than twice the world average.
Possibly the strangest and most out-to-lunch assertion from Ottawa is that Star Wars participation will give Canada “meaningful involvement in the system as it develops.” What slow student concluded Canada would have any say at all in how the U.S. — already known to ignore allies and close partners — will build, structure and operate its new defence system?
Will we really win the holy grail of Canadian-American relations, a ‘seat at the table’, if we join the program? Will we really influence have influence in the Bush White House and the Pentagon over missile-defence decisions? Be realistic: not a chance.
Besides, what exactly is the rush on missile defence? The first interceptors — not expected to actually function — are to be deployed by October in Alaska.
What is it that Canada will be missing?
Is there something about the air in the Prime Minister’s Office, National Defence and Foreign Affairs which makes for fuzzy thinking?
Dr. John Clearwater is a strategic analyst and author of books and articles on nuclear weapons. He lives in Ottawa.
da710@ncf.ca
Reprinted from Winnipeg Free Press
July 18 2004
@ July 20, 2004