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What Happened to Canada’s Cold War Relics?


Recently, I made several trips to Diefenbunker, the underground complex in the village of Carp, Ontario, which – assuming everything goes according to plan – will defend the political and military leadership of the country. Canada when nuclear warheads fell from the sky. Those plans, as I wrote in an article published this week, are based largely on wishful thinking.

[Read: Inside a Nuclear War Bunker Built to Save Canada’s Leaders]

Some historians suggest that the Cold War that led to the creation of Diefenbunker began in Ottawa. A few weeks after World War II ended, Igor Gouzenko, a cryptographer at the Soviet embassy, ​​defected with a bag of documents showing his country was spying on their wartime allies. Initially, he was dismissed by newspaper editors, officials and police. But after two days on the run from Soviet agents, Mr. Gouzenko was granted asylum and his documents ended the alliance with the Soviet Union.

In the years that followed, Mr. Gouzenko was perhaps best known to Canadians by appearing on TV shows such as “The Front Page Challenge” wearing a pillowcase with a hole in his head to conceal his appearance. before Soviet agents, whom he feared might assassinate him. .

The fear that the country might be consumed by a thermonuclear fireball was once common in Canada. And the Cold War led to some of the largest and most expensive infrastructure programs in the country’s history. But today, Diefenbunker is one of the few places in Canada that commemorates the decades-long Cold War in Canada.

“I don’t understand,” Brian Jeffrey said of the scarcity of relics. He runs virtual museum dedicate for dew stream, a chain of 63 radar bases primarily in the Canadian Arctic. “I think it’s because of Canada’s indifference as a general rule and we also take the view that that can’t happen here,” he said. “That’s probably some of the reasons why we don’t seem to be taking this issue seriously.”

Jeffrey advocates preserving Cold War history stems from personal experience. He quit his job as a technician at the National Research Council in 1960 to take a well-paying civilian job at various DEW line radar bases in the Arctic, along with two other radar lines further south. , watched the sky for signs of a Soviet attack on the North. America.

His three years included at least one very harrowing moment.

“I sat in the room with another person throughout Cuban Missile Crisis, tracked and talked to the B-52s as they headed north on their path and sent them ‘go’ or ‘no go’ messages,” he told me. Of course, “Go” meant asking the US Air Force bombers to enter the Soviet Union to drop their nuclear payloads.

The DEW line, or Remote Early Warning, cost about $7.5 billion to build with today’s money. When it was decommissioned between 1988 and 1993 and replaced by automated radar stations, nearly everything was destroyed, although some of the structures remained, Jeffrey said. Thus, the only artifact his museum currently possesses, apart from photographs and documents, is a control panel for a diesel generator from a station. (Dismantling and cleaning stations built without consulting the natives and with little regard for the environment, worth 575 million Canadian dollars.)

The Canadian Civil Defense Museum is based in Alberta is the third museum to preserve the history of the Cold War. In 2018, it purchased the remaining radar dome and buildings of Canadian Forces Station Alsask, located in the community of the same name that straddles the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Fred Armbruster, executive director and founder of the Canadian Civil Defense Museum, told me from his home in Red Deer, Alberta, that he was interested in the Cold War memorial when he stumbled across a deck -ke small while hiking in Edmonton a few years ago.

Mr. Armbruster is passionate about how the Cold War changed Canada.

“The Cold War created the future,” he said. “Without the Cold War, we wouldn’t have the technology we have today. We’re going to be a decade or more behind in technology because we won’t have anything to push us forward.”

The Alsask Radar Dome is part of the Pinetree Line, the southernmost of the radar network. It exists largely because, after the military discontinued it, it was adapted and used for civilian air traffic control for many years.

Right now it is Only open for public tours on five weekends of year. But Mr. Armbruster has ambitious plans to turn the four-story building on the site into a Cold War museum.

Mr. Jeffrey now lives in Carp and is a longtime volunteer guide at Diefenbunker.

Much will depend on volunteers like him, he said, to keep the memory of the Cold War alive.

He told me: “The military in particular is not very good at history, nor is it capable of doing that. “They don’t have enough money to arm themselves properly. So why would they want to maintain a building for historical purposes?”


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A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has covered Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.


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