Address by Leonard V. Johnson, Canadian Pugwash Group

Ottawa, April 2, 2007

--

Ladies, Gentlemen, Mesdames et Messieurs, bonjour and good morning.

My topic is Canada, NATO, and nuclear weapons.  I joined the Canadian Army Reserve in January, 1944, at age 14, and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and Canadian Armed Forces from 1950 to 1984. In those 63 years, I’ve witnessed the end of the Second World War, the Cold War, and the entire history of the present age of nuclear weaponry, including the terrifying days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962.

 As a serving officer and student of war, I learned that warfare among modern states cannot be waged without destroying the values it is intended to defend. In war cemeteries, I saw that the names on the headstones are of young men who could have been my sons or brothers. And I realized that the true cost of war is paid in lives not lived or not lived fully. We must not let that happen again.

When I visited the Soviet war cemetery in Berlin I saw a statue of Mother Russia grieving over mass burial fields with tens of thousands of unmarked graves.  When I met with former Russian and other generals of the Warsaw Treaty Organization, I met fathers and grandfathers who fought Hitler in the Second World War and I saw how desperately they wanted to live in peace with us. Together, we built trust that helped to end the Cold War.

Some of we elders remember that Canada had the capacity to develop nuclear weapons but chose not to do so. But Canada became an associate nuclear power instead, through helping to protect American nuclear bombers against a Soviet surprise attack and through participation in a nuclear armed military alliance.  At the height of the Cold War, Canada had nuclear-armed strike aircraft in Europe, prepared to obliterate targets in countries of the Warsaw Treaty Organization led by the Soviet Union. You have to be drawing old age security to remember those days, but the weapons remain – at least 27,000 mostly new models of all kinds and more to come. States are preparing for a war President Reagan said cannot be won and must never be fought.  So why do we prepare for war?  There is a simple answer to that question.  War is profitable and a source of political power.

What brings us here today is the fact that Canada is still a member of a nuclear-armed military alliance whose leaders justify nuclear weapons to deter “nuclear blackmail” by North Korea or some other “rogue” state. Their argument is specious in the face of overwhelming conventional weapons superiority.  Nuclear weapons would not be needed to swat flies.

Nuclear proliferation thrives on fear. While NATO nuclear weapons may stimulate proliferation through imitation, the fear of conventional attack is a more potent factor.  Like the Six Gun in the Wild West, nuclear weapons, though suicidal if used, may be seen as the great equalizer of last resort  India went nuclear to deter attack by China; Pakistan fears India, and the United States is perceived as a threat by both Iran and North Korea. The NATO military-industrial complex is not the world’s only fear monger, not the only military profiteer.

Canada is still an associate nuclear power, and we want the Canadian government to lead the charge against nuclear weapons in NATO.  Without a plausible threat to justify them, it would seem to be self evident that NATO would agree without much argument, but that is unlikely to happen.  Nuclear weapons are unusable in war and so there is no conceivable military necessity for them, But  NATO’s nuclear weapons are part of the global arsenal of tens of thousands of such held by the five Great Power permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, by Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and perhaps, soon, Iran. These powerful weapons are all part of a single system of global terror that feeds on fear.

The nightmare now is that terrorists will get their hands on “loose nukes” from the ramshackle arsenals of the former Soviet Union or manufacture their own from black market materials.  Think Hiroshima at Ground Zero in New York. Nuclear weapons provide no defence against terrorism but are instruments of terror that inspire fear and lead to loss of civil liberty, including arbitrary imprisonment and even torture.  Those who brandish nuclear weapons and threaten their use are terrorists themselves, their power dependent on the fear their weapons inspire.  That, I believe, is why the nuclear powers keep them, and why they spend billions developing new ones.  Ostensibly intended to deter enemies from attack, the myth of the so-called nuclear umbrella under which we supposedly huddle maintains public support for the vast military-industrial complex that feeds on it.  To the considerable extent to which we buy into the myth that our security depends on nuclear weapons, to that extent are we complicit in what may be our own eventual destruction.  We are the unwitting victims of nuclear terrorism.

While the denuclearization of NATO is a worthy objective, it isn’t enough.  After six decades of nuclear terror, it’s time we stopped denying that there is a threat of nuclear catastrophe, as so many do; it’s time we cast off our blinders and saw the issue as one of social control in the hands of a terrorist military-industrial complex that wields illegitimate wealth and political power.

Some argue that abolishing the weapons of the nuclear weapons states would leave matters in the hands of rogue states, like the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.  Others think it naïve to dream of global nuclear abolition, that the horse has left the barn and proliferation is inevitable. The first step is to withdraw our consent to nuclear weapons in NATO, beginning with the ministers, diplomats, and generals who represent us on the NATO Council. The only way to reach that first step is for Canada to insist that NATO’s nuclear weapons policy must be on the agenda at the NATO ministers meeting on April 26 and 27.  Canadian Pugwash calls on the Government of Canada to do this, and to use its considerable influence to get other nations in NATO to also promote this just cause. 

Sir Joseph Rotblat and Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for helping to empower Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War, for which he won the Nobel in 1990. People do make a difference.  With the leadership of a few courageous statesmen and women the nuclear terror could soon become a footnote to the story of a miraculous escape from human folly.  It’s up to us, the victims of nuclear terror, to liberate ourselves and our  children from the threat of omnicide, the death of all living things.

Dr Leonard V. Johnson, CD, LLD

Major-General, (ret.)

Westport, Ontario

(613)273-3000