Canada in the Cold War

Canada emerged from the Second World War as a world power, radically transforming a principally agricultural and rural dominion of a dying empire into a truly sovereign nation, with a market economy focused on a combination of resource extraction and refinement, heavy manufacturing, and high-technology research and development. As a consequence of supplying so much of the war effort for six long years, Canada's military grew to an exceptional size: over a million service personnel, the world's third largest surface fleet and fourth largest air force. Despite a draw-down at the end of the war, the Canadian military nonetheless executed Operation Muskox, a massive deployment across the Canadian Arctic designed in part to train for a ground and air war in the region. Canadians also assisted in humanitarian efforts, and sending observers for the United Nations to India and Palestine in 1947 and 1948.During these early years of the Cold War, Canada became established in its own right on the international stage but also fell in under the protective aegis of the post-war allies, namely France, Great Britain and the United States. The Canadian-American defence relationship is and has largely been one of mutual assistance in all continental defence matters though with different geo-political goals in terms of each nation's foreign affairs. Under the post-war dominance of the Liberal Party of Canada, several prime ministers, including Mackenzie King, Louis St-Laurent, Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Trudeau forged ahead on a path independent of NATO's over-focus on large troop concentrations in Western Europe to instead supporting foreign intervention, peacekeeping, diplomacy and support to Non-aligned Nations.Canada's military history during the Cold War is characterized by a focus on international cooperation and foreign intervention with the UN as a 'third way' approach to maintaining the delicate international balance of power. Canada was a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) in 1958 and played a central role in United Nations peacekeeping operations - from the Korean War to the creation of a permanent UN peacekeeping force during the Suez Crisis in 1956. Subsequent peacekeeping interventions occurred in the Congo (1960), Cyprus (1964), the Sinai (1973), Vietnam (with the International Control Commission), Golan Heights, Lebanon (1978), and Namibia (1989-1990).Concomitantly the Canadian military maintained a standing presence in Western Europe as part of its NATO deployment - including long tenures at CFB Baden-Soellingen and CFB Lahr, in the Black Forest region of West Germany. Additional CF military facilities were maintained in Bermuda.From the early 1960s until the 1980s, Canada maintained weapon platforms armed with nuclear weapons - including nuclear-tipped air-to-air rockets, surface-to-air missiles, and high-yield gravity bombs principally deployed in the Western European theatre of operations as well as in Canada. These weapons were almost exclusively tactical in nature and were employed as part of a larger conventional military design, one which necessitated a standing army of nearly 100,000 personnel throughout most of the era. Canada did not acquire nuclear warheads; they remained the property of the United States and were guarded by US forces.Another key element of Canada's military history during the Cold War was Unification, recommended in the bold 1964 White Paper on Defence, and put into action in 1968. Unification formally ended the existence of the three separate military services, the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army, and the Royal Canadian Air Force, and reorganized the respective personnel and equipment into subordinate commands within a singular Canadian Armed Forces with the aim of streamlining the Canadian military into one all-service force akin to the United States Marine Corps.