Storms of Controversy

Graeme S. Mount is a history professor at Laurentian University.

Campagna offers a fascinating thesis: the Diefenbaker government
capitulated under pressure from the Eisenhower administration and
cancelled the Avro Arrow, despite its reasonable costs and the benefits
it would have brought Canada. His reasoning is as follows. The
Eisenhower team included such rabid anti-Communists as Richard Nixon,
John Foster Dulles, and Allen Dulles, who headed the CIA. They feared
the Arrow for two reasons; it was the only aircraft in the world that
could approach the high-flying secret U.S. spy plane the U–2, and
Canadians might inadvertently leak enough information to Soviet spies to
enable the USSR to manufacture its own Arrow. To prevent such a
development, Canadians must cease production, torch all existing Arrows,
and destroy the blueprints and any other relevant documentation.

Eisenhower was in a position to pressure Diefenbaker’s government.
Canada did not want to receive foreign aid. Without aid, Canada could
afford the Arrow (even without sales to the U.S. Air Force), but not
both the Arrow and the Bomarc. Unless Canada agreed to host Bomarc
bases, the U.S. government would locate them south of the Great Lakes.
Given the limited range of Bomarc missiles, the Bomarcs would then
intercept their targets over Canada’s population centres. Aware that
interceptions were preferable over the sparsely populated north, the
Diefenbaker government scrapped the Arrow to accommodate the Bomarc.

Campagna relies on circumstantial evidence and on documents,
declassified in accordance with the 30-year rule, primarily from the
files of the Department of National Defence (RG 24) at the National
Archives of Canada and, to a lesser extent, from the Eisenhower Archives
in Abilene, Kansas. Several pictures of the Arrow and reproductions of
key documents strengthen the author’s argument.

Campagna’s case is not watertight (many critical documents are still
classified), but it is a serious possibility. Every reader must join his
lament over the loss of research-and-development jobs that resulted from
the Arrow’s cancellation.