Luckily, hardly anybody listens to retired Canadian General Wayne Eyre these days. That's just as well because otherwise we may be tempted to take his advice on pursuing a home-grown nuclear weapons program, just in case, "if we decide to go that way", as he says. He says that Canada will never have true strategic independence without it own nuclear deterrent.
Boy and their toys, eh? Eyre clearly didn't spend too much time thinking about what would be involved in such an undertaking. Others have, and it's not pretty.
To acquire nuclear weapons, Canada would need a site for enriching uranium or (more likely) reprocessing plutonium, and build hightly secure factories there. Then, it would need huge investment in delivery systems (missiles), and a remote, geologically appropriate place to test the weapons, without which it would not be a credible deterrent. All this would costs hundreds of billions of dollars, and take many years, a project comparable to a moon landing program according to one American senior official.
But that's not all. Canada is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has a global reputation as an internationalist peace-keeping country. Pulling out of the NPT and developing nuclear weapons would radically re-brand the country, and put it in the company of countries like North Korea, Israel and South Sudan. Its reputation would never recover.
So, thanks for your input, General, but maybe in future, just keep it to yourself. And please, stay retired. Thankfully, Defence Minister David McGuinty was quick to dismiss Eyre's suggestions, and most other commentators seem to agree.
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