Front Burner - Should Canada have nuclear weapons?

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

The final remaining agreement constraining U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons expired last week.The New START treaty was established by President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in 2010. And since then the treaty has governed much of the global landscape concerning nuclear weapons and non-proliferation. Reporting suggests both sides remain in talks.Yet as the U.S. threatens annexation, attacks nations abroad, and threatens to re-emerge as a colonial power in the Western Hemisphere, some are asking whether nuclear weapons have become a necessity for countries hoping to guarantee their sovereignty. Canada’s former defence chief Wayne Eyre has said we should “keep our options open” on acquiring nuclear weapons.For more on the future of this landmark treaty, and the possibility of a nuclear arms race, we’re joined by George Perkovich. He is the author of a number of books on nuclear weapons and non-proliferation and Senior Fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. Hey everyone, it's Jamie. Late last week, the final remaining agreement constraining U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons expired. It's called the New START Treaty, and it was established by President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, in 2010. And for the last 16 years, New START

has governed much of the global landscape concerning nuclear weapons and non-proliferation. Last month, when asked about the future, of the nuclear treaty, Donald Trump told the New York Times, quote, if it expires, it expires. And turns out he was prepared to do exactly that. The reporting suggests both sides remain in talks. But in this moment, as the U.S. threatens annexation, attacks nations abroad and threatens to reemerge as a colonial power in the Western Hemisphere, have nuclear weapons become a necessity for nations hoping to guarantee their sovereignty.

Canada's former defense chief has said that we should keep our our options open on acquiring nuclear weapons. So for more on nukes, the future of this landmark treaty and the possibility of a nuclear arms race, I'm joined by George Perkovic, author of a number of books on nuclear weapons and nonproliferation, and senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dorat, hi, it's a real pleasure to have you on Frontbringer. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. So the new START treaty, could you just tell me what exactly the treaty is, what some of its rules are,

guidelines and oversight measures have been and how it has functioned over the years? Yeah, I mean, the New START Treaty was so far the last in a series that began in the 1970s, actually, so more than 50 years ago. And the idea behind them starting with what was the anti-ballistic missile treaty and the Salt 1 Treaty in the early 1970s was between the United States in the Soviet Union to limit the number of missiles and nuclear weapons they could attack each other with. And to do that in a way that not only avoided a further arms race, but took away incentives in a crisis for one of them to hit the other before the other could hit it.

So to make it stable, in other words. And so there were a succession of treaties. New START was ratified in 2010, and it committed the U.S. and Russia to have no more than 1,550 countable strategic weapons. Now, that sounds like a lot. One thousand five hundred and fifty is a lot. We're trying to keep Iran from getting one, but it was a lot less than they had had in prior decades. And the idea, again, was because they were both constrained, they would worry less about the other one inventing some great new weapon that it could quickly produce in numbers to then kind of dominate against the other. So it was stabilizing because we had a common number.

Right. And I mean, my understanding is it created this inspections, data, exchanges, and transparency system, right? Yes. And what changes once that visibility disappears? Well, a number of things disappeared. As you say, there were inspection mechanisms, data exchanges, all of which were, again, to give each side confidence that the other wasn't going to sneak out and get some big advantage that would enable, let's say, Putin to dictate to the United States or Europe saying, I'm taking Estonia, which is a NATO ally, or I'm going to attack Canada, and there's nothing you can do about it, because now I have a thousand more nuclear weapons than you do. The treaties mechanisms prevented any confidence

and you could cheat and sneak out ahead like that. And because there was a common limit, it took away the idea that one would have a big enough advantage to start something. I just want to try to better understand with you here the potential implications if they don't end up hashing out some kind of deal. The New York Times described this as having, quote, return to an era without limits, when arsenals can reach unconstrained heights,

and noted that the bulletin of the atomic scientists, a kind of watchdog of nuclear war, has moved its metaphorical doomsday clock closer than it ever has to midnight. Every second counts, and we are running out of time. It is a hard truth, but this is our reality. It is now 85 seconds to midnight. This is the closest. And so how would you describe the implications? of all of this? Well, the doomsday clock, that is really bad. I have to say there's a little

solace, but not much in the sense that what the doomsday clock now measures is how close kind of all of our technologies combined are getting us to doomsday. So they're adding climate change, artificial intelligence, as well as nuclear war. So the slight comfort, there's, it may not all be nuclear war. It's all the other stuff that we can do to kill each other. bad. Yeah. I've got to say that gave me no additional comfort. Yeah, I know. That's, you work in this field and you get perverse comfort from like things that, you know, you shouldn't. I get it. But so that's the dooms, that's the doomsday clock. Yeah, the worry is there aren't any limits. China has been increasing its nuclear force. And there's a lot of rhetoric about that. It's true.

There's a lot of rhetoric about it in the U.S. But people. People don't generally say China has started from a much, much lower number. So China's, quote, doubled its holding of nuclear weapons. That would get it up to 600. As I already mentioned, the U.S. and Russia under New Star had 1,550. So China's not even halfway to where we were. But if the U.S. and Russia don't have limits, they can obviously raise what they're doing. China, it would be expected would then maybe try to keep up.

And so you do have the prospect of these countries adding to their arsenals. Russia has five new types of nuclear weapons that it's testing and starting perhaps to deploy. And several of those are particularly alarming. The U.S. has said it will add nuclear warheads, the explosive part, to our existing submarines, add numbers. And there's no prospect right now of the three big players, the U.S., Russia, and China, getting together to say, okay, let's go back and try to stabilize this. Right. I sort of pick up on this idea that the treaty limited the number of nuclear weapons of these countries would have. But I feel like we've been programmed our entire lives, really, to think about nuclear war as an apocalyptic event, that it would conceive.

take just like a few attacks to end life as we know it. And just given that, what if these treaties actually accomplished by bringing down the number of nuclear warheads from 70,000 at one point, right, to 12,000? Like, what is the material difference between 70 and 12,000 warheads? No, it's a great question. And there are people in the governments involved, they call it a priesthood, whatever you want to call it, who do the war games and model and figure all this stuff out. And then historically presidents, including in Russia, have come in and said, like, this is crazy.

What are you guys talking about? But it is what happened. So you have 12,000 nuclear weapons. You figure out 12,000 targets you can blow up with them. Whereas if you use one or two of them, it changes the world forever and can destroy a city. So there's a big disconnect between what the people whose job is to figure out how to fight and win wars with these things do. and what normal people would think about is enough. And new start and its predecessor treaties kind of brought us closer to a more normal kind of

reality about like how much should be enough to deter. It was a much lower number. It was still a really big number. And the idea how those numbers got so big is the U.S. and Russia were mainly aiming all those weapons at each other's nuclear weapons. So if they had a thousand, we needed more than a thousand to hit their thousand. And that's nuclear war fighting, which no president has really wanted to do. So you could arguably do with a lot less, which is what China had done for decades.

For decades, China had like 24 nuclear weapons that could hit the U.S. when the U.S. had thousands. Because the Chinese leadership said, if we blow up, you know, five of their cities, that's going to end America as they know it. No president's going to fight us. and take that risk on. So I think there's some wisdom to that, but how you get the political leadership to move towards that direction is anybody's guess. This ascent isn't for everyone.

You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500, hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca.com. Why BDC for my business? The timing's right. Everything's in motion.

Economy's changing. It's all about automation, AI. So I said to myself, take the plunge. Yes, I need a loan, but I also need a hand from a partner who's, truly working with me, helping me, no matter what comes next. Not later. Now. Get ready for what's next. With BDC, you get financing and advice adapted to your projects. Discover how at bDC.ca.ca.ca. Advising. Know-how. Fear of nuclear fallout was such an active part of people's lives. I'm thinking of the Cuban missile crisis, right? At the time, the ownership and proliferation of nuclear weapons was essentially unregulated, as recently as 1986, for example, there were, we've been talking about

70,000 nuclear warheads around the world compared to the 12,000 that we've been talking about today. And can you talk to me a little bit more about the attitude or conception the general public had toward the idea of nuclear weapons in the 60s, 70s, or 80s compared to today? Well, yeah. I mean, it was a lot different when I was very, very young, countries were still blowing up nuclear weapons above ground. The U.S. was doing it in Nevada. France was doing it, you know, in the Pacific Islands. Russia was doing it in the Far East and in Kazakhstan, actually blowing up nuclear weapons into the air and the radioactive fallout was going all over the place. And a lot of scientific studies that talk about a great number increase in leukemia

around the world. So that was, you know, the 60s, then the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a high of the Cold War in the 60s and 70s. So, you know, no politician could run for office without having some familiarity with nuclear strategy, some sense of what the risk of nuclear war was. You know, kids used to practice, I remember ducking under the desk. They call it duck and cover, drills in case there's a nuclear war. Fortunately, the Cold War ended, to everyone's surprise, in 1990. one without an armed conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union or NATO and the Soviet Union. The weapons didn't go off. That's a great thing. It's a wonderful thing. It wasn't predicted.

But one of the consequences over the ensuing 35 years, you know, your kids, thankfully, don't think and talk and worry a lot about this. Politicians have come and gone, not being very versed in this topic because we thought things had stabilized and that leaders understood, you don't fight a war with another nuclear-armed state that could escalate to nuclear war. That had been the hope. That had been the case. And it started changing. And arguably, you know, the Ukraine war, both in 2014 when Russia took Crimea and then obviously in 2022, brought back into people's consciousness, you know, you really could have a nuclear war, because here was Russia aggressing against another country. It wasn't a NATO member, so Canada and others of us didn't pledge to, you know, fight

as much as it was required to fight for Ukraine, but we have come to their assistance. And the nuclear risk has gone up. There's a worry that China might do similarly with Taiwan. And you can get nuclear war that way. So it's coming back. But political leaders in the U.S., certainly, you can't find more than a handful of senators or congressmen who know anything about this topic, just to give an example. How would you characterize Donald Trump's general attitude toward nuclear, as I believe he just called it, called it, or his knowledge about this? Yes.

Yeah. And to what degrees has he been in line with or departure from the U.S. government's traditional position on the issue? Yeah, he calls it the N-word, the other N-word. We can't let people throw around that word. I call it the N-word. There are two N-word, and you can't use either of them. And, frankly, if it does get to use, we have more than anybody else. We have better, we have newer.

But it's something we don't ever want to even have to think about. But when somebody mentions it, that's... It's interesting. He was very interested in nuclear weapons in the 1980s and wanted to be named by Ronald Reagan to be the negotiator of arms control with Russia. So he's been quite fascinated by nuclear weapons all his adult life. He has said a number of time he wants to denuclearize. He wants to not get rid of all nuclear weapons, but denuclearize and move in that direction.

I'd like to see a denuclearization. President Putin and I agreed that we were going to do it in a first. very big way. There's no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many you could destroy the world 50 times over, a hundred times over. One of the things we're trying to do with Russia and with China is denuclearization. And it's very important. He talks quite often voluntarily about how horrible nuclear war would be. with the number one nuclear power, which I hate to admit, because it's so horrible. We have to hope we never have to use it because the power of that is so incredible.

I see things. I don't think they'd show it to you. I really want them to show it to you. But when you see the result of what's left, you never want to use that. Never, never, ever. So that's kind of on one hand. On the other hand, in his first presidency, his secretary of state, a man named Rex Tillerson, who had been the CEO of Exxon, famously called him a blank moron. And that was said as they were leaving a briefing at the Pentagon about nuclear weapons.

When Trump looked at a graph, and you mentioned how there had been 70,000 nuclear weapons in 1986, Trump looked at the graph and said, why can't I have that man? which prompted Tillerson to say to somebody next to him, he's a blank moron. So he's got both sides. And the word wasn't blank, just to be clear. No, sorry, and F and end with a G. Is it true? Did you call him a moron? Jay, because I indicated earlier, when I was asked about that, I'm not going to deal with

that kind of petty stuff. I mean, this is a... And so he, like with many things with this president, he wants to be heroic and heroic in saving the world from nuclear war. On the other hand, he wants to be seen as stronger than everybody and richer than everybody. And so anything you can count, he wants more than the next person has. And so how you reconcile those two things is yet to be seen. He doesn't understand the details by all accounts of people in this area who've worked with him in prior terms. He doesn't read. He looks at pictures. And so whether he could actually implement or conduct, you know, a negotiation and a

complicated process to reach an agreement with Putin or President Xi in China remains to be seen. But his impulses are not all bad. Well, let me ask you the same question for Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. How would you describe their particular attitudes when it comes to nuclear weapons? So Putin is quite versed. When you read his speeches and statements, I've done him writing a book on nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war. I've read a lot of what he said. He really knows the details. He's been the leader of Russia for, you know, more than 20 years. He knows the stuff. He is very willing to seem to make threats to try to intimidate people. Russian political culture is all about intimidation, Russian internet. national politics all about intimidation. Nuclear weapons are frightening and intimidating, and so he manipulates fear of nuclear war quite readily, which Western leaders haven't done, for example.

That doesn't mean he's reckless. So in the Ukraine war, he's said a number of things people regarded as nuclear threats. But when you look carefully, they weren't really threats. President Putin summoned his military chiefs and gave them an order. Top officials of leading NATO countries are making aggressive statements about our country. Therefore, I'm ordering the Minister of Defense and the chief of the general staff to put the strategic nuclear forces on special alert. So there was only once in October of 2022, where there was a worry that Russia was losing

so much so quickly that he might detonate so-called tactical nuclear, weapons to try to stop that. So he's versed and sometimes potentially desperate. And so you could imagine him using nuclear weapons. President Xi and China, we don't know. He is almost never said anything about his view of nuclear weapons. The buildup that we're talking about now of Chinese nuclear forces was unannounced by China. But they still, President Xi has never come out and given the speech saying, here's why we're building up. Here's where we're prepared to stop or not stop. Here's what we want from the U.S. or Russia or anybody else in order to limit what we'll do. It's a mystery at this point. Now, Chinese leaders have not made nuclear threats. She has not

made nuclear threats. China has always had a policy of no first use, which means they won't use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. They have them to respond if the other side is attacking them with nuclear weapons. That needs to be clarified, and China still hasn't done that, and that's something that you would hope would happen soon. In other words, if the U.S. attacked China's nuclear forces with non-nuclear weapons, we use normal missiles to attack China's nuclear weapons. Would China use its nuclear weapons in response? We don't know. These are the kinds of things that you would hope when President Trump and she meet in April that they would put on the agenda for their experts to address so we could clarify what right now is a lot of ambiguity from China.

You know, I want to talk to you a little bit more about this idea of nukes as deterrent, that having nuclear capabilities has been the most surefire way to guarantee your own sovereignty and security. From the threat of invasion or outside attack, you hear, a lot about mutually assured destruction, essentially the idea that once you have nukes, you now presents the threat of retaliatory destruction, as you just were talking about. This has been the argument made by countries like Iran, for example, for many decades now. What do you make of this notion of nuclear weapons as a deterrent and of mutually assured destruction? There's a lot of controversy. There's thousands of pages been written on that, so we can debate it.

my own view after working in this field for almost 50 years and studying a lot is there is a deterrent effect of nuclear weapons that if you have, your country has nuclear weapons that somebody else can't destroy before you use them. So they're survivable. You're confident you can use them. people are very, very reluctant to threaten you in a way that would be so devastating to you that you'd be willing to risk nuclear war. So you're not going to get invaded, for example. Terrorists may still attack you, like 9-11 in the U.S., but no country, Canada's not going to invade the U.S. as long as the U.S. has nuclear weapons.

Let me bring this conversation to Canada for a few minutes. So we have just seen the U.S. bomb Venezuela and take its president. And Donald Trump has expressed a colonial-style interest in both Greenland and Canada, as well as a broader interest in having kind of an outright dominion over the entire Western Hemisphere. Our own former chief of defense staff, Wayne Eyre, said recently, quote, We will never have true strategic independence absent our own nuclear deterrent. in this moment, have nuclear weapons become a necessity?

Or do you see them as a necessity for nations hoping to guarantee their sovereignty, even though it's a bit of a complicated picture? It's a great question. And I think you're hearing this question not only about Canada, but Germany and Poland and South Korea, other states. And what's been missing in the discussion so far is how do you get to? get from here to there. So let's say it would be a good idea for Canada. And that's very debatable. I'm not saying it would. We could debate it. But how do you get there? For example, how long would it take Canada to acquire the highly enriched uranium, the plutonium, the special materials that you need for nuclear weapon, to make nuclear weapons themselves? And what happens in the meantime? Which

countries sanction you. By law, the U.S. would have to sanction Canada in various ways. I think many European states, because of the nonproliferation treaty and surrounding legislation, would have to sanction. All right. So you say it takes 10 years to have a significant arsenal. What happens in the meantime? For Canada, probably not much because you have so much geographic separation from your adversaries except the U.S. And frankly, Donald Trump will be gone long, you know, long before there's a viable threat of that. But for Germany and Poland and South Korea, there's a much greater worry that if they were

trying to acquire nuclear weapons, that Russia would attack to keep them from doing that. Right, right. Russia would assassinate their scientists like Israel has assassinated Iranian scientists and engineers. And so you have to examine what happens to your society as you're trying to get nuclear weapons that might in the end actually provide you a deterrent, but you've changed the nature of your society in the process. Well, let me ask you directly here. I mean, you mentioned this debate. Our defense minister really shot down this idea, saying that Canada has no interest in

inquiring nuclear weapons. Canada is a signatory to international treaties with precludas, number one. Canada has been a non-nuclear proliferation state for a long time, worked on previously as a lawyer. The point is that we are going to continue to build conventional weapons. We're going to continue to rearm. We're going to continue to reinvest. But like, do you think that Canada should seriously consider and have a real conversation about acquiring nuclear weapons? No, I can think of So many advantages Canada has in the world or could have in the world that come from what we used to call, you know, soft power, the wonderful university system in Canada, especially as the U.S. is turning people away from its universities and doing other things that make the U.S. a much less attractive place to go. If you have a place where very talented people from around the world really, really want to go, that's a huge. form of power compared to 10 nuclear weapons whose existence is to never be used, basically,

and where it's not clear who would be invading Canadian territory or waters in a way that would ever make it viable that you would use those weapons. And there's so many other things Canada can do to be seen as globally powerful and important. And if the worry is the United States for Canada. Yeah, I mean, that's what I was going to say. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if that's the worry, a few nuclear weapons aren't going to, like, change that reality, really.

There's lots of other things to do that I think would make Canada more impregnable economically and otherwise. But the main thing is, you know, to be such an attractive place that people here are, you know, would say, as I think they would say, what are you crazy? We're not going to invade Canada, which they're already saying about Greenland, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. George, just before we go,

like, I wonder if you could kind of play this out for me a little bit more. Like, if the treaty isn't resigned, if there isn't some kind of deal reached. Like, what is the most likely scenario here? Yeah. Look, some presidents within this decade, I will predict, will get back to agreements to limit nuclear competition, especially between the U.S. and Russia. And then it's a bigger challenge with figuring out how to bring China into that. It will happen.

It may not be treaties because the U.S. political system is largely broken. and to get a treaty, you need two-thirds of the Senate to consent to it. That's very, very hard to do. But you can still get executive agreement. So the heads of state can agree and abide by an agreement and still build confidence. I think that's going to happen because ultimately these governments want more stability. Ultimately, they're worried about the other side, seeking an advantage and trying to be offensive to them.

They're not thinking about their own offensive. And so you need a negotiation to limit the offensive weapons as well as missile defenses. And I think we'll have that, not least I would add, because the U.S. industrial complex that makes nuclear weapons is largely broken. So the U.S. is actually not in a good position

to engage in an arms race with Russia and China right now from a technical point of view or a manufacturing point of view. And I think the next president, if not this president, will understand that. Poon's not going to live forever. And I think Russia has also economic interests and other interests to constrain its production. So I think if as we can get the Ukraine war of state, I would think you would go fairly quickly to some kind of limits between the U.S. and Russia and then have China cooperate and saying, we won't do anything to make you guys have to build more. Okay. This was really interesting.

George, thank you so much for this. Well, thank you. All right. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.