Keywords Nuclear Energy

The most controversial part of the study details where U.S. nuclear weapons were deployed outside the continental United States during most of the Cold War. Based on a declassified Pentagon history, it shows that some 12,000 weapons and components were stored in at least 23 countries and five U.S. territories - sometimes without the knowledge of their hosts. Washington deployed weapons in such sensitive places as Japan, Taiwan, Iceland and Greenland, a territory of Denmark. Those countries all disavowed nuclear weapons and, publicly at least, did not even allow them to be stored on their territory. The United States also deployed nuclear bombs in Morocco in the mid-1950s without telling the French government, Morocco's colonial master at the time. And it stored nuclear-capable depth charges at its base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from 1961 to 1963 - a period that covered the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Much of what the Pentagon document confirms was already known or widely assumed by experts. But it adds many details to one of the murkiest chapters of the Cold War, showing that Washington spread its nuclear arms to scores of bases all over the world. The policy was known as "forward deployment" - basing weapons close to the Soviet Union and China so they could be used more effectively in case of all-out war. Robert Norris, senior research analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington and co-author of last week's study, says the documents underline the scale of the U.S. effort to place key weapons around the world. "There were 38 weapons systems in two dozen countries," he says. "It's quite staggering."

For Canada, though, the Pentagon documents add little new to what researchers had already pieced together about the country's 35-year history with nuclear weapons. The first were the Mark IV air-dropped atomic bombs deployed for use by Strategic Air Command bombers at Goose Bay, starting in 1950. In 1964, the most famous nuclear weapons were stationed in Canada after a bruising public debate during the 1963 federal election campaign. John Diefenbaker's Conservative government accepted Bomarc surface-to-air missiles from the United States, but then hesitated about equipping them with nuclear warheads. The Liberals under Lester Pearson announced that they would acquire the warheads, and won the election.

Soon after, in 1965, the Canadian air force installed Genie air-launched missiles on its CF-101 VooDoo fighters based in British Columbia and Quebec, and Falcon air-to-air missiles on other aircraft. In 1968, it deployed anti-submarine nuclear depth bombs for two years at Argentia Bay, Nfld. At the height of Canada's involvement with atomic weapons in the late 1960s, according to Ottawa researcher John Clearwater, between 250 and 450 warheads were available to Canadian forces.

Clearwater, author of a study published last year entitled Canadian Nuclear Weapons: The Untold Story of Canada's Cold War Arsenal, notes that Ottawa said as little as possible about its nuclear weaponry - partly because of fear that it would be criticized for being part of the Pentagon war machine. "In the mid-1960s our military put more money and resources into nuclear programs than into anything else," says Clearwater, "but you couldn't talk about it." Only the Prime Minister, the defence minister and a few senior military planners, he adds, knew how extensive Canada's program was: "Virtually all of the cabinet was in the dark."

Canada's involvement also attracted little public attention because most Canadians simply didn't want to know. "In the Trudeau era, we generated this myth that Canada was quasi-neutral, a nation of peacekeepers," says Sean Maloney, who teaches national security at The Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont. "We've created this image that Canada is more moral than the Americans, and nukes don't fit into that." Maloney says his research shows that Ottawa was prepared to develop its own weapons if Washington did not give it access to nuclear arms. In 1955, he says, the government of Louis Saint-Laurent commissioned a study on whether Canada could build its own bomb. "The answer was, 'Sure we could,' but we never had to make our own," says Maloney. "It was cheaper to get them from the Americans."

Canada's nuclear involvement ended in 1984, when its Genie missiles went out of service along with the obsolete CF-101 fighters. Even more remarkable, say the authors of last week's study, is the virtual elimination of U.S. nuclear weapons outside the United States with almost no fanfare. Since 1992, after the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon has withdrawn or destroyed almost all the nukes it had abroad. Now, the authors conclude, it has only about 150 weapons in seven foreign countries - a tiny fraction of an arsenal that once covered the globe.

See also ARMAMENTS; BOMARC MISSILE CRISIS.

Maclean's November 1, 1999

Author ANDREW PHILLIPS in Washington