How the Cuban Missile Crisis Unfolded for Canada and Tested a Fledgling NORAD

A P2V Neptune U.S. patrol plane flies over a Soviet freighter during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The crisis brought the world to the verge of nuclear catastrophe. MPI/Getty Images

Commentary 

On the evening of Oct. 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy made a dramatic appearance on television to announce that the Soviet Union had taken the intolerable step of installing offensive missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from the mainland United States. Kennedy’s appearance was followed shortly after 8 p.m. by Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, speaking in the traditional setting, the House of Commons.

It was a harrowing moment—the high drama of which many baby boomers remember because as children they were taught how to shelter under their school desks when the bombing started.

Diefenbaker had intended to wait until the next day. He was miffed about the whole affair, but he was under pressure to say something. “The president’s speech could conceivably give rise to a real war scare in Canada,” one of the PM’s advisers told him (and it did.) Moreover, the emergency, someone from External Affairs taunted him, “might be an analogy with the Suez Crisis.”

The Suez debacle of 1956 was then a fresh memory. Diefenbaker felt Ottawa had failed to support Britain against an upstart Middle East dictator, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had illegally seized the Suez Canal. Diefenbaker believed that by siding with the United States against “colonialism,” the former Liberal government had betrayed the British Commonwealth. And yet, by a horrid twist of fate, Lester B. Pearson, External Affairs minister during the Suez Crisis, had been given a Nobel Peace Prize for breaking ranks and proposing a United Nations emergency force.

In his remarks, Diefenbaker spoke of Kennedy’s “sombre and challenging” news. And he alluded to a half-baked idea from External Affairs that Canada could once again, as in the Suez emergency, invoke a U.N. intervention. But the handling of this advice was botched. External Affairs tried to warn the PM that any such proposal should be discussed with Kennedy before his 7 p.m. speech. Civil Servant H. Basil Robinson had underlined the word “before” by hand, according to his book “Diefenbaker’s World: A Populist in Foreign Affairs.”

One way or another, Diefenbaker got the memo too late. As if to add pressure, Pearson, the veteran diplomat who was now leader of the Opposition, telephoned the prime minister in the evening to urge him to make a statement right away. Having missed the memo but wanting to be statesmanlike, Diefenbaker mentioned the idea of U.N. inspectors.

Historian Graeme Garrard refers to the half-cocked proposal in an upcoming Dorchester Review article: “This well-intentioned, if rather naive, offer was taken by Kennedy to imply that Canada did not trust U.S. claims, which further angered him.”

Diefenbaker was annoyed too. He and Kennedy had met twice in 1961 and there was already bad blood between them. Kennedy had deliberately in his Brahmin drawl pronounced Dief’s name as “Diefebarker,” and later boasted to the prime minister of Australia about it. The president appeared to have better relations with Mr. Pearson, who was of the intellectual class.

At an official dinner at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, Kennedy, seated between Diefenbaker and Pearson, talked to Pearson most of the time, then during coffee and cigars sat with his back turned to the Prime Minister of Canada. (The story is told by the embarrassed U.S. Ambassador, Livingston Merchant.) For his part, the Chief thought Kennedy “brash” and a “hothead.”

Prime Minister John Diefenbaker with U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Ottawa in 1961. CP PHOTOS

Diefenbaker was annoyed for another reason: The U.S. administration didn’t consult Canada, its NORAD partner, during the crisis. In 1957, Diefenbaker had hastily approved the North American Air Defence Command with the United States. (“Air” was upgraded to “Aerospace” in 1981, and maritime security was added when the alliance was renewed in 2006.) NORAD’s mission today remains detecting and “warning of attack against North America whether by aircraft, missiles, or space vehicles.”

Sharing a huge airspace over the northern hemisphere, Ottawa and Washington agreed to joint operational control and integrated command of their air and naval forces, answerable to both countries’ chiefs of staff, in turn under civilian government control.

In a crisis, NORAD was supposed to guarantee “the fullest possible consultation between the two Governments on all matters affecting the joint defence of North America” (emphasis added). This was all negotiated by the diplomats in the 1950s. Canada’s air force and navy already cooperated closely with their U.S. and North Atlantic counterparts.

According to senior adviser H. Basil Robinson, in 1957 official Ottawa had wanted to tie Canada’s final approval of NORAD to one more U.S. assurance of consultation. When Diefenbaker won the upset election that year, Gen. Charles Foulkes, Canada’s chairman of the chiefs of staff, got his old pal, incoming Defence Minister George Pearkes, to obtain Diefenbaker’s fast approval of NORAD during the transition and without the required cabinet study. Bureaucrats piped up that External Affairs and the U.S. State Department were the proper channels for that, not National Defence.

No extra assurance was obtained. Diefenbaker wrote in his memoirs that if officials had wanted to warn him about something, they had not tried very hard.

As the crisis mounted, the White House proceeded as if Canada’s cooperation was a matter of course. Canada had seen the evidence gathered by U-2 spy planes a week earlier and knew what was going on.

“In practice,” Garrard points out, “the U.S. administration never seriously consulted Canada during the crisis, NORAD’s first big test.” Not only had “Kennedy unilaterally imposed a quarantine around Cuba without bothering to consult its partner [Canada],” but he “publicly declared that the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force would interdict the Soviet ships, by force if necessary.”

Given the scale of the events across the Florida Straits, Washington acted alone. The NORAD and NATO militaries worked closely together. Robinson observes that “there had been time for consultation” but “Kennedy and his advisers preferred to act unilaterally.”

A pair of U.S.-built NORAD F-22 fighter jets fly off the wing of a civilian airplane playing the role of a hijacked airliner over a mountainous area of Alaska, on Aug. 10, 2010. AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

There was another wrinkle in the affair. NORAD had formally asked Ottawa to raise the Canadian military’s alert level to the equivalent of Defcon 3 which was “Increased readiness above that required for normal readiness” with air forces on high alert. Douglas Harkness, Canada’s Defence Minister since 1960, thought it obvious that integrated forces should be at the same alert level.

The Royal Canadian Air Force was then a magnificent service of 53,000 full-time personnel and 2,400 reservists, in the midst of replacing nine squadrons of CF-100’s (the Canuck or “Clunk”) with five squadrons of CF-101 Voodoos as the main interceptor/fighter, with many other platforms and an additional eight F-86 and four CF-100 squadrons stationed in France and West Germany. (Even reserve fighter squadrons had F-86 Sabres.) Canada was also about to acquire the F-104 Starfighter. Despite the cancellation of the superlative but exorbitant CF-105 Avro Arrow in 1959, it was a “Golden Age of Canadian Aviation.”

Only the cabinet could make the decision to raise the “Defcon” alert level and so, of course, Harkness had to check with the prime minister. Given Diefenbaker’s peeved state of mind, the decision, which should have been a no-brainer in such a crisis, became a political football in a farcical cabinet meeting.

Diefenbaker came down against raising the alert level, supported by his idealistic External Affairs Minister Howard Green, who said (I think grandiosely), “If we go along with the Americans now, we’ll be their vassals forever,” as Garrard relates. Since they were under the illusion that Canadian refusal could somehow cool the war fever while asserting Canadian independence, the majority in cabinet sided with Diefenbaker and Green.

But how could the RCAF pilots and Royal Canadian Navy crews, who patrolled the airspace and sea-lanes all year round anyway, be expected to stand by while their partners were on high alert in an existential crisis vis-à-vis the Soviet nuclear threat?

Ignoring the odd duck position the cabinet had put Canada in, Harkness quietly allowed the Canadian military to raise its alert status anyway.

According to Garrard, Diefenbaker and Green were troubled by the “supra-governmental relationship between the Canadian military, in particular the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the Pentagon,” something like an unelected deep state that can only be held accountable by savvy and determined politicians.

But Canada wanted a seat at the table, and NORAD was it: an organization that integrated the defence of North America with the superpower that could afford to do it in the lead.

One lesson learned was that Canada should correct the gap in knowledge and understanding between political leaders and the military. Another would be addressing the civilian bureaucratic disarray that resulted in the prime minister not being properly briefed. A third problem was the overall lack of strategy and forward planning, a perennial missing link in the Canadian psyche.

The correct decision in 1962 was obvious—Canada was “consulted” by virtue of its high-ranking presence at NORAD headquarters in the Rockies. Kennedy could have checked in with Ottawa but disdained the Canadian leader. Given that Kennedy’s compelling TV appearance completely won over Canadian viewers, Diefenbaker’s delay in raising the military alert level looked indecisive and amateurish—just what Pearson’s old enemy wanted to avoid.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.