Nuclear war would turn Canada into one of the worst places on the planet. And scientists fear we are inching closer

Alan Robock, a pioneering researcher in the science of nuclear devastation, provides the terrifying picture.  

“Countries like Canada — you think you’re safer because you’re a member of NATO and (American) nuclear weapons will protect you. But you’re actually not,” he says over the phone from New Jersey, where he is a professor at Rutgers University. 

“If they’re ever used, you’re all going to starve to death.” 

Robock is talking about the “nuclear winter” scenario, a hypothesis he helped create in the 1980s through computer modelling that has only grown more sophisticated in the decades since. The basic premise is that, in a nuclear war, belligerent states would lob bombs at each other’s cities and strategic military installations. This would fuel massive infernos that not only incinerate people on the ground, but belch out gargantuan plumes of smoke that cascade into the air and envelop the globe in a cloak of soot that blocks out the sun. 

As Robock explains, the scale of the ensuing apocalypse varies along a continuum. The more nukes get blasted, the more soot clogs the atmosphere, the more widespread the suffering and the death. At the grimmer end of the spectrum is what Robock calls “instant climate change” — a catastrophe that models included in a 2022 paper that Robock co-authored predict could “lead to the collapse of world agriculture and starvation of billions of people even in regions that were not involved directly in the war.” 

The paper has a world map in which countries are shaded different colours depending on how many residents recent modelling projects would die. Even in calculations where 250 nuclear weapons are launched (a small minority of those currently available), Canada appears in the darkest brown. Thanks to our northern clime, and with assumptions such as the end of international trade and use of half of livestock feed for human consumption, 95 to 100 per cent of the population can be expected to starve to death. 

Such carnage seems a remote prospect, perhaps extremely so. But Robock is among a host of scientists, activists and nuclear deterrence experts who worry the unthinkable is creeping closer to the realm of the possible. 

The warning signs are myriad. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, alongside competition between U.S.-led Western democracies and China, has heralded the return of great power tensions in a world where American dominance is no longer a given. Sabre-rattling in Europe has seen Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin claim his country is ready for nuclear war if pushed by the West. Conflict in the Middle East, where Israel possesses nukes and Iran has aspired to build them, is at risk of spreading. And Beijing, which recently colluded with Russia to fly strategic bombers in the Alaskan Arctic for the first time, is undertaking a “rapid nuclear expansion” that the U.S. defence department expects to double China’s arsenal of operational warheads by 2030. 

Meanwhile, observers like NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have shared worries that the system of inspections and arms control that was created in response to fears of nuclear annihilation is disintegrating. Russia suspended the New START treaty last year, effectively halting its participation in the Obama-era agreement with the U.S. that limits each country’s deployment of ready-to-use nukes. And satellite images first reported last September by the American broadcaster CNN show construction activity at sites previously used for nuclear testing in Russia, China and the United States, prompting concerns that explosive trials could be undertaken. 

The famous Doomsday Clock created by the group of scientists who designed the first atomic bombs during the Second World War has been at ”90 seconds to midnight” since 2023 — an indication that humanity faces “an unprecedented level of danger” with the risk of a “three-way nuclear arms race as the world’s arms control architecture collapses,” according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists behind the initiative. 

Taken together, the dangers posed by nuclear weapons today should put questions of their spread, their potential use, and efforts to limit their risks at the front of political discourse, says Carleton University’s Alex Wilner. 

But they’re not. 

“Anybody born in the ‘80s and beyond has spent virtually no time thinking about nuclear weapons,” says Wilner, an associate professor of international affairs who specializes in nuclear deterrence theory and national security policy. 

“People are sleepwalking.”

For Wilner, the emerging nuclear reality is troubling for a few reasons. The first is geopolitical uncertainty. Tensions, wars, countries like Canada re-arming to deter feared aggression in the future — according to Wilner, it all threads into an incentive for countries to build up nuclear stockpiles, or acquire nukes for the first time, to ward off enemies that might attack. 

“The more states feel threatened,” he says, “the more nuclear weapons appear useful for deterrence, for national defence.” 

Nine countries are known to possess nuclear weapons — the U.S., Russia, France, United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Alongside China, which the U.S. accuses of rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, the U.K. has also signalled it is willing to increase its nuclear stockpile from 225 warheads to no more than 260. And although the U.S. stockpile — according to declassified stats released in July — stands at 3,748, far below its Cold War peak, the country is ”modernizing” its arsenal with newer warheads, intercontinental ballistic missile systems, submarines, bomber planes and more. 

This is an example of the technological leaps that cast further uncertainty onto the nuclear assumptions established during the Cold War. Wilner also points to improved missile defence systems, hypersonic missiles that are harder to intercept, and advances in artificial intelligence. Such changes are challenging assumptions about how nuclear-armed states might respond in a crisis, and could shrink the amount of time a country might have to respond to a suspected nuclear attack, he says. 

“We’re opening up the aperture for misinterpreting what adversaries are up to,” he says.

“You’re speeding up the escalation ladder.” 

Matt Korda, associate director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, says the world is now facing “multi-polar nuclear crisis dynamics” — a complex web of relations between the nine countries with nuclear weapons in which any change in posture can trigger a “domino effect.”

This can risk tipping over into danger, Korda says, especially with the advent of new weapons systems like MIRVs, which are missiles that contain multiple warheads that can split off and hit different targets. Adversaries will worry about the potential of such systems in a first strike against them; they’ll also see the systems located in another country as a “juicy target” for their own strikes, Korda explains. 

That prompts the concern, he adds, that such systems could create a new incentive for countries to launch weapons “very quickly” in the event of a crisis. 

Canada’s long-standing position is that nuclear weapons should not spread and that existing stockpiles should be reduced and ultimately eliminated. But as Korda and Wilner point out, Canada is an original member of NATO, a 32-country alliance that sees its nuclear arsenal — primarily thanks to the U.S., but also France and the U.K. — as the ”cornerstone” of its defence pact. Ottawa has not signed the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which pledges its 93 signatories never to develop, test, acquire, manufacture or possess nuclear weapons. At the time it was created, a federal government official described the treaty as “well-intentioned” but “unfortunately premature” since it didn’t — and still doesn’t — include any nuclear-armed countries. 

For now, under international pressure to keep dramatically increasing its defence spending, Ottawa plans to bolster its military presence in the Arctic, promising new icebreaker ships and early warning patrol aircraft. It has also promised to spend almost $40 billion over the next two decades to upgrade its radar and sensor systems as part of the NORAD partnership with the U.S., and is looking at how to improve its defence against long-range ballistic missiles.  

“The Arctic remains a key avenue of approach for threats like advanced long-range cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons,” said Lieutenant Commander Linda Coleman, a spokesperson for the Department of National Defence, in an emailed statement. 

“Russia in particular continues to modernize and build up its military presence in their Arctic, investing in new bases and infrastructure. It is highly capable of projecting air, naval and missile forces both in and through the broader Arctic region.” 

But for Robock, whose career has been dedicated to popularizing awareness of the calamitous potential of nuclear weapons, Canada could do more. It could act as a bridge between nuclear states and those more aggressively trying to eliminate them. Even Fidel Castro, whose collaboration with the Soviets who wanted to place nukes in Cuba fuelled the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, came around on that question. He invited Robock to Havana and met him twice to discuss the risks of nuclear war, in 2010 and 2011. 

“It’s something that really threatens Canada, too,” Robock says. “And so it would be in Canada’s interest to get rid of nuclear weapons, as well as the interest of the rest of the world.”