Headlines, North America

CANADA-U.S.: Defence Pact Safe Under New Missile Plan – General

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, May 13 2004 (IPS) - A top U.S. military officer has contradicted Canadian officials who suggested the Canada-U.S. military alliance might be diminished if Ottawa does not support and participate in Washington’s ballistic missile defence (BMD) system.

"Will that mean the end of NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defence Command)? I don’t believe so," said U.S. Major General Raymond Rees, chief of staff at the headquarters of NORAD and the U.S. Northern Command, after a dinner speech Apr. 15 during a conference on Canada-U.S. security relations.

"NORAD has a significant role to play with ‘air breathing’ threats," Rees added at the event at Duke University in the U.S. state of North Carolina.

Since 1958 about 300 Canadian military personnel have worked with their U.S. counterparts at U.S.-based NORAD to conduct early warning and threat assessment of traffic entering North American airspace. The information is shared with U.S. Strategic Command, which manages the retaliatory U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.

Ottawa has been negotiating with Washington for a year to extend Canada’s role to the land and sea-based BMD, which is designed to destroy missiles fired at the continent from so-called "rogue states". The system is slated to begin working in September.

However, the mixed success of the BMD technology – tests by U.S. military personnel have failed in three out of eight trials – and the possibility down the road that missile defence might lead to the weaponisation of space have helped to generate opposition to the plan in both Canada and the United States.

In a report issued Thursday, the U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) concluded, "the system would be ineffective against a real attack, and that there is no technical justification for its deployment".

"Our technical analysis of this proposed system shows there is no basis to believe that it will have any defensive capability," said Dr Lisbeth Gronlund, a physicist and co-director of the UCS Global Security Programme. "The administration’s claims that the defence will be highly effective are false and irresponsible," she added in a statement.

Despite the technical doubts, in mid-February Canadian Defence Minister David Pratt formally announced that Ottawa wants to participate in BMD. He also suggested that Washington might bypass NORAD and establish a separate U.S. continental defence command if Canada rejected a role in the system.

"Canada’s participation in ballistic missile defence would involve Canada in decisions concerning the missile defence of our country. The alternative would be to allow the United States to make these important decisions on its own, with all of the implications this would have for sovereignty," Pratt said.

BMD would mark a dramatic departure from existing continental defence because early warning and assessment (which now includes Canadian military personnel) would be technically inseparable from the launching in real time of an missile designed to destroy an invading missile.

For the U.S. military to maintain complete control of the launching function "will take political finessing," between Ottawa and Washington, says Ernie Regehr, director of the Canadian peace group Project Ploughshares.

Regehr and other BMD critics are alarmed that some U.S. military planners are proposing to eventually extend the system into outer space. Although Canada, a traditional supporter of international arms control agreements, is opposed to space-based weapons, Ottawa would find it difficult politically to withdraw from BMD once it decided to join, he argues.

Regehr questions why Canada has accepted at face value the Bush administration’s "ideological" fixation on rogue state threats, particularly the "almost exclusive" focus on North Korea as a justification for BMD. "There isn’t a real threat there; some potential threats, but there are better ways of doing it," he suggests.

BMD is a "distraction," says defence analyst Steven Staples at the Ottawa-based Polaris Institute. "Missile defence is going to pull resources away and it is going to pull attention away. The Canadian government is not doing a real assessment of what the security threats are in terms of missile defence."

Staples, who maintains that NORAD would still be needed to monitor commercial aircraft above North America, even if missile defence goes ahead, found an unlikely ally in Rees.

"We are going to have to be able to make some accommodation if the Canadian government is not going to go along with us on missile defence. We’re going to have to come up with some way to proceed so that the United States can conduct missile defence regardless. It is tough and it means we’re going to have to change our way," Rees told the conference audience.

His statements have not been reported in the corporate-dominated Canadian media.

Given the aerial attacks on New York and Washington by terrorists on Sep. 11, 2001 and the geographic proximity of those cities to Canada, NORAD is too important for Washington to neglect, says Michael Byers, a Canadian-born law professor and an organiser of the Duke conference.

What Rees said, he added, "wasn’t a surprising statement, but it was interesting that he was prepared to say it on the record."

Rees did not misspeak, says Joseph Jockel, director of Canadian Studies at St Lawrence University in Canton, New York and a supporter of Ottawa’s participation in missile defence. "Those guys at NORAD are under wraps. They know this is a sensitive issue, and they have careful answers to give to all of things."

To Washington, NORAD represents the concept of Canada-U.S. military co-operation in general, although the arrangement is primarily concerned with the tracking and assessment of potential airborne threats over North America.

"If someone had got up and said to ( Rees), ‘but what about NORAD’s key function?’, they would have gotten a different answer," adds Jockel.

Ottawa’s decision to join BMD does not include any immediate spending pledged by the Liberal Party government of Prime Minister Paul Martin. Nor is Washington seeking to station missile defence interceptors on Canadian soil.

But as BMD’s costs begin to rise to an eventual 10.8 billion U.S. dollars a year, (an amount that will increase annually in phase two and three) Washington might ask Ottawa to help defray a portion of its budget, suggests Byers. "It is difficult to put numbers on any eventual Canadian contribution. But I think one could assume that it would be greater than one per cent of the total cost of the system."