Canada’s atomic legacy
Anton Wagner
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would do well to listen to appeals that world leaders act to abolish nuclear weapons to save humanity.
The appeal to the world by this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, that nuclear weapons cannot coexist with humanity is a call for Canadians to remember our own country’s nuclear legacy.
Canadians have forgotten the pivotal role Canada played in the development of atom bombs that now threaten the very existence of human civilization.
During the height of the Second World War in 1942, prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King agreed to provide the British and Americans with Canadian uranium to develop an atom bomb. A secret Order in Council allocated $89-million in 2024 dollars to take control of Eldorado Gold Mine’s uranium mine in the Northwest Territories and uranium refinery in Port Hope, Ontario.
When Mackenzie King hosted the first Quebec Conference with then-United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt and United Kingdom prime minister Winston Churchill in Quebec City the following year, the two leaders invited Mackenzie King to integrate atomic research in Canada and our uranium supply with the Manhattan Project established by the Americans to manufacture atom bombs. In 1944, Mackenzie King’s Cabinet War Committee approved an expenditure of up to $126-million in 2024 dollars for the construction and operating costs of a heavy water nuclear reactor as a joint American-British-Canadian project.
Mackenzie King recorded his conviction that “the atomic bomb has changed everything” in his diary. He knew that if Russia were to attack the United States, Soviet planes would have to cross Canadian territory. “This country would be the battlefield and everything we value here would be obliterated,” he wrote. Canada would be forced to seek protection under the American nuclear umbrella.
Mackenzie King considered advocating giving the secret of the new weapons to Russia two months after the Americans dropped a uranium atom bomb on Hiroshima and a plutonium atom bomb on Nagasaki in August 1945. He was intrigued by the suggestion that the sharing of scientific knowledge regarding the atomic bomb by all scientists might prove sufficient to prevent any one country taking advantage of the immense destructive power of the new weapon.
At the beginning of the Cold War in 1947, Mackenzie King asked Churchill how the United Kingdom and the U.S. could prevent Russia from capturing Western Europe with its much larger conventional armed forces. Churchill informed him that the Americans would threaten to attack Moscow and other Russian cities and destroy them with atom bombs from the air. This came as a revelation to Mackenzie King who had not known that such planning was already in existence for an atomic war against Russia. “From Churchill’s words,” he recorded in his diary, “it would seem as if his inside information was to the effect that America was expecting that she might have to act in a short time and has made her plans accordingly.”
Canada did seek shelter under the American nuclear umbrella. It became a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949, and has always supported NATO’s nuclear weapons first-strike policy. We sold 250 kilograms of plutonium created by our NRX nuclear reactor at Chalk River to the Americans for the production of nuclear weapons between 1955 and 1976. The U.S. and Britain manufactured 20,000 nuclear bombs made principally with Canadian uranium by 1965. Canada supplied India with the CIRUS nuclear research reactor, based on Canada’s NRX reactor. It produced the plutonium for India’s first nuclear test, “Smiling Buddha,” in 1974.
Lost in this long history of Canada’s involvement with the production of nuclear weapons is Mackenzie King’s awareness that the atom bomb could end it all. Eleven days after the Americans staged the first atomic test explosion in New Mexico in July of 1945, he wrote in his diary: “I feel that we are approaching a moment of terror to mankind, for it means that, under the stress of war, men have at last not only found but created the Frankenstein which conceivably could destroy the human race.”
On Dec. 10, the House of Commons resolved unanimously that the House encourage the government to take concrete steps to honor Nihon Hidankyo for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and that the House affirm that nuclear disarmament is a crucial step towards ensuring global peace and security. The unanimous motion also called on the government to engage with the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and to engage with civil society to advance the cause of nuclear abolition.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would do well to listen to the House of Commons’ and Nihon Hidankyo’s appeal that world leaders act to abolish nuclear weapons to save humanity.
Anton Wagner is one of the directors of the Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition in Toronto. His Mackenzie King biography, The Spiritualist Prime Minister, was published in 2024 by White Crow Books in the U.K. in association with the Survival Research Institute of Canada. His photo exhibition, “Canada and the Atom Bomb,” opened inside Toronto City Hall in August and continues online on the Toronto Metropolitan University Image Arts website: https://hiroshima.imagearts.torontomu.ca/canada-and-the-atom-bomb/
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