Will Canada ever get nuclear weopons?

While Canada has a whack of reactor waste, it lacks the massive industrial infrastructure to refine/enrich it to weapons grade material.

We do have the expertise to produce a potent compact nuke and deliver it gravity fall from a CF18. This lacks an intercontinental range however.

The cost of development, and security would easily pay for more the one nuclear powered, Polar8 ice-breaker. A Cando reactor would shove a polar 8 around with ease.

Tactically high precision, conventional smart weapons are much more effective than crude nuclear area weapons.

Canada will never posses nukes as long as a single politician has a breath of life...
It wouldn't benfit us in the least anyway....

Has it eaver occured to anyone that Canada, may possess a clandestine nuclear arsonal anyhow.

From time to time rumours surface of a Japanese nuclear capability.

Keeping such a situation secret would be difficult and possibly impossible----step one would be to keep ANY government out of the loop.

For a pure cost effectiveness standpoint, nukes are probably the least effective weapon ever designed, simply because you spend BILLIONS of dollars developing and deploying them but you never actually use them (Of course that is a good thing... :wink:

). Unless of course you argue that the vast inventories each side had in the Cold War prevented a major conventional war.

For a mid-sized nation like Canada, nukes are a waste of time. The vast amounts required to develop them and their delivery systems could create a very substantial army, navy and air force, which we actually use on a near daily basis, be it peacekeeping, in Afghanistan or for domestic uses (like shovelling snow in Toronto).

Of course not.

Don't be silly.

We already have a nuclear weapon. Behold!!!

Canada, Nuclear Weapons?

No.

Should we?

No.

I say we make armoured moose and get them hopped up on drugs and then airdrop them into hostile territory.

Radioactive materials in a nuclear weapon have a half-life. That limits their shelf life. A nuclear arsenal gets stale, you have to tear it apart and rebuild with new materials and new everything every so often. Canada moved nuclear missiles out in 1971. There were nuclear air-to-air missiles kept at American air force bases that would be mounted on Canadian Voodoo fighters if nuclear war broke out, but that deal was ended and Voodoo fighters decommissioned in 1984 when the CF-18 entered service. Any nuclear warhead from 1971 wouldn't be good anymore, the nuclear trigger thingy would have decayed to the point it couldn't set off a nuclear explosion. Any nuclear weapons kept at American air force bases would be kept by Americans. So even if some military guy decided to violate orders from the Prime Minister to send all nuclear weapons back to America, such a weapon wouldn't work any more. Besides, considering how effectively the army cut-up the Avro Arrow when the Prime Minister ordered it destroyed, how likely is the military to violate orders and keep a nuclear warhead? I don't think so! To put it mildly.