Kanada bleibt Atomwaffengegner, aber sein potenzieller Weg zur Bombe wird immer kürzer
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-remains-antinuke-road-to-bomb-getting-shorter-9.7283194
Kanada bleibt Atomwaffengegner, aber sein potenzieller Weg zur Bombe wird immer kürzer
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-remains-antinuke-road-to-bomb-getting-shorter-9.7283194
6 Kommentare
Canada could take a stronger position on no-nuke policy by refusing to sell uranium in any form to countries that use it for bombs. This kind of moral leadership is urgently needed.
This should never be a thing. Canada doesnt want or need useless expensive weapons of mass destruction. Maybe if we had a no first use policy but even then thats shaky ground we would rather not stand on.
As I understand it, the technical capacity to build a fission device is possessed by a number of nations; Germany, South Korea, Canada, are all countries with significant experience that is sufficiently adjacent to actually building a nuclear warhead that the leap could be made relatively (span of a few years) quickly.
That being said, the existing nuclear powers, and in particular the United States, put a lot of effort into tracking nations that are „that close“ to create their own nuclear deterrents, with the pretty obvious corollary that if they discover some nation might be leaning into building a nuclear weapon, the US is going to do its gosh-darkest to make that not happen.
The Cuban Missile Crisis should tell you everything you need to know about any country in the Western Hemisphere obtaining or hosting a nuclear deterrent not explicitly controlled by the United States.
Interesting article. In short, the design of CANDU reactors makes them good at refining plutonium. And, small modular reactors benefit from using enriched, refined fuel. In a quest for cheaper and more abundant electricity, and building new SMRs, these factors *could* combine to make it easier for Canada to build a nuclear weapon.
I think these energy developments are great; Canada will benefit from loads more electricity with zero GHGs.
Should we build a nuclear bomb? That’s a totally different question. So far, the clear answer is *no*. But the USA has pushed NATO to do far more to share the defense burden; it’s not impossible to imagine this could include, in the future, demanding a nuclear Canada. They’ve asked for it in the past.
And I think it’s worth looking at the deterrence value of having the *capacity* to build a bomb within months. Trump has spoken repeatedly and seriously about invading Greenland, Cuba, and also economically coercing Canada. Meanwhile, he doesn’t talk like that about North Korea. Don’t kid yourselves: having the ability to quickly build a weapon of mass destruction could keep Canada safer.
Oh no, by the logic of our own foreign policy, Israel now has the right to assassinate our head of state, bomb a random elementary school in Canada, kill as many innocent school children as necessary, destroy our gasoline supplies (sending up huge black plumes of poisonous clouds over our cities), bomb our big cities and precious cultural sites at will, kill anyone they see fit, drop random bombs all over the place, destroy our civilian infrastructure, like bridges and power facilities, because that’s exactly what we are supporting Israel doing in Iran by the same logic.
I agree we’re not at that point, yet. But we’re well past the point where we need to start creating options for ourselves, looking 20-30 years down the road, and preparing for worst case scenarios.
We came far closer last winter than anyone seems willing to admit to a forcible American invasion of Greenland. This is not a benign American regime, or one we can trust to only vent its illegal violence on the likes of Venezuela or Iran, and we need to be prepared for it to get far, far worse in coming decades.
What does that preparation look like?
As a start France is already in talks about massively increasing its nuclear weapons arsenal, through a joint European program, to replace American nuclear deterrence on the continent. Canada should be a funding partner, Canadian scientists and technical experts should be overt participants in the modernization and expansion program, and covertly we should try for a Saudi-Pakistan type deal where the French will provide us all the design data if/when we need it.
We also need to have a delivery system ready to go. This was one reason I thought the South Korean subs, with their vertical launch tubes and their Hyunmoo ballistic missiles were the right choice. We’ve now closed the door on a submarine based nuclear deterrent for most of this century.
But there will be other opportunities, and we should take them.
It’s not about pointing a nuke at Washington tomorrow, it’s about preserving options, and keeping doors open to strategic deterrence, as we think about how things with our increasingly erratic and violent Southern neighbours could go very wrong very quickly.