Opinion: We live in perilous times, but Canada remains silent on the proliferation of nuclear weapons

Ernie Regehr is the founding executive director of Project Plowshares. Douglas Roche is a former senator and Canadian ambassador for disarmament.

President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine. China is rapidly developing its nuclear missile arsenal. In response, the United States signals its intention to increase the number of deployed nuclear weapons.

Nuclear disarmament agreements have collapsed and a new nuclear arms race is underway (although the “nuclear club” of states in possession of these weapons calls it “modernization”). An existential nuclear crisis of frightening proportions is unfolding.

Nine countries currently possess around 12,000 nuclear weapons, 90% of which are held by Russia and the United States. In total, some 2,100 nuclear weapons are kept on high operational alert, meaning they can be fired with 15 minutes’ notice. Just one such weapon would cause far more damage than the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which together killed about 214,000 people.

In 1970, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was created. Now comprising 191 countries, it obliges states to pursue global negotiations in “good faith” towards the elimination of nuclear weapons. At the 2000 NPT Review Conference, all states pledged to “unequivocally commit” to achieving total elimination. But instead of negotiating, the nuclear states renounced their legal obligations under the treaty and ignored a unanimous ruling by the International Court of Justice in 1996 that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons by a state is generally illegal and that negotiations on nuclear disarmament must be concluded.

Two successive meetings of the NPT parties, in 2015 and 2022, failed. The New START treaty between the United States and Russia, which limits the deployment of strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 on each side, is the only remaining bilateral nuclear disarmament agreement, and it expires in 2026. Negotiations aimed at extending The New START treaty failed, with each side blaming the other for the impasse, and thus the world entered a nuclear jungle. What do the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada say about all this?

The answer is nothing. You can search all day, but you will find that neither has made a single speech or a single substantive statement to Canadians on this most serious crisis – the threat of a global humanitarian catastrophe – that the world is facing. faced since the Second World War.

Canada, as a member of the Manhattan Project as well as the NPT, clearly has the power and duty to speak out on this subject. But Ottawa’s deafening silence is only broken when it affirms NATO’s Orwellian characterization of these weapons of mass destruction as the “supreme guarantee” of our security. Canada refuses to join the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which prohibits the possession of nuclear weapons by those who sign it (70 states have so far ratified the treaty). And he ignored UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ desperate call in March for concerted action by all countries to reduce the risk of nuclear Armageddon.

In this desperate global situation, Canada must demonstrate the same determination it has demonstrated on other occasions regarding nuclear weapons. Canada showed leadership when Lester Pearson sent a UN peacekeeping mission during the Suez Crisis in 1957, as Nikita Khrushchev threatened to fire nuclear weapons on Western Europe. We demonstrated leadership when Pierre Trudeau proposed a strategy to “stifle” the nuclear arms race in 1978; when Brian Mulroney refused, in 1985, to participate in the American “Star Wars” anti-missile space program; and when Jean Chrétien kept Canada out of the Iraq War in 2003 due to dubious claims about “weapons of mass destruction.”

The current nuclear crisis demands a bold reassertion of Canadian leadership. Both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs have a moral and political duty to speak directly and regularly to Canadians about the nuclear crisis facing the world, to develop Canada’s position in response to this crisis, and to outline the measures and policies that it has been and will continue to pursue in international contexts to mitigate it.

At a minimum, Canada should be a leading voice urging nuclear powers, including the NATO nuclear alliance, to make mutual commitments to never be the first state to use nuclear weapons and to withdraw all nuclear weapons from high alert status. Canada should push for and monitor progress toward a New START treaty and should promote intensified strategic dialogue among major powers.

This leadership must start with the Prime Minister. The failure to publicly address the nuclear crisis is a shocking failure of leadership – one that these perilous times cannot afford.