NATO and the Bomb: Canadian Defenders Confront Critics

J.L. Granatstein, Distinguished Research Professor of History Emeritus,
York University, served as Director of the Canadian War Museum from 1998
to 2000. He is the author of Who Killed Canadian History? and co-author
of The Canadian 100: The 100 Most Infl

“In the past,” Erika Simpson writes, “political scientists and
historians who wrote about NATO were obliged to use secondary sources or
rely on personal experiences.” This is simply untrue, for scholarly
access to government documents on nuclear policy has been possible and
useful to a substantial number of historians for a quarter-century and
more. Political scientists ordinarily do not use the works of
historians—or government records—and perhaps that explains this
comment.

On the other hand, historians do not ordinarily rely on typologies to
explain the past. Prof. Simpson, however, studies Canadian NATO nuclear
policy by dividing the world into two belief systems: defenders and
critics of Canada’s nuclear policies. This organizing principle (and
her all-but-open sympathy for the critics) forces her to ram square pegs
into almost round holes with regularity and simply fails to allow for
the shades of gray, not the simplicities of black and white, that always
form around any contentious issue. Her case study centres on the
Diefenbaker government from 1957 to 1963 and, I believe it fair to say,
she adds very little to what we have known about The Chief’s
vacillating approach and fuzzy thinking. The Tory government certainly
had true believers on both sides of the nuclear debate, but it had far
more ministers who either didn’t understand or didn’t care about the
issue—until it brought down the regime into a morass of
anti-Americanism and confusion. To be sure, there are some new details
here that will be of use to scholars, but this unfortunately is a volume
that seems destined to gather dust on the shelf reserved for published
but unread Ph.D. dissertations.