University of Manitoba professor James Fergusson, a government adviser and Canada’s foremost space-weapons researcher, says the picture is perfectly clear: DND has long seen space weaponization as the inevitable outcome of missile defence. “Although the government may not have been aware of what it was signing off on” when the 1994 White Paper was released, Fergusson says, “it opened the door.”

In 1998, DND adopted a Space Policy calling for “comprehensive space capability” for “effective force projection” and emphasizing a “strong bi-national space relationship,” requiring DND to focus on “opportunities for space co-operation with the United States” including “potential roles” in missile defence. In a presentation on missile defence to the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans’ Affairs in 2000, Lieutenant General George MacDonald, then Canada’s top officer with norad, emphasized Canadian forces’ dependence “on a day-to-day basis on the capabilities that exist in space.”

Meanwhile, technical programs aimed at integrating Canadian military space objectives with U.S. ones have been under way ever since 1995, when a Joint Space Project was launched, Fergusson says. He points to Canada’s involvement with the U.S. in the milsatcom project, in which DND funds Canadian researchers to try to refine radar technology to track military targets from space. How closely this is linked to a space-weapons-development program is hard to tell, says Fergusson: “It’s a very fine line to draw.” He does say, however, that the Canadian government is being “disingenuous” if it doesn’t admit NMD will lead to space weapons while there already exists a budget for testing space weapons within NMD. Canada’s DND, Fergusson says, is fully aware that NMD will put weapons in space; so is the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (dfait).

DND has taken every opportunity to promote and pursue missile defence and space militarization, Fergusson says, even while Department of Foreign Affairs diplomats were fanning out across the globe promoting a ban on space weapons. “By and large it was assumed in Foreign Affairs [that] it wasn’t going to happen,” Fergusson says about missile defence and space weapons. “They were deluding themselves.”

That’s not a charge he levels at DND, where missile defence has long been seen as a project that needs political as well as technological support. In 2001, DND told the media that its most recent annual poll, conducted by pollara, showed that 76 percent of Canadians supported missile defence. In February (just before Parliament was set to debate the matter), the National Post ran a headline above a story about a pollara poll stating that “Canadians want missile defence: poll,” even though the pollara poll was based on questions about attitudes toward North American military integration, which made no mention of missile defence whatsoever. The Post’s interpretation was promptly repeated, unchallenged, in an opinion piece in The Globe and Mail. Although pollara chairman Michael Marzolini says spinning the poll about integrating Canada-U.S. security efforts into a vote for missile defence was a “mistake,” he nonetheless says, “Canadians see missile defence as something the Americans are inevitably going to do, so they want to be part of it.” Zealous as it is in getting its missile-defence messages into mass circulation, DND’s Directorate of Space Development knows where to draw the line: it refused to answer even written questions for this article about such basic matters as budgets and research programs. According to Collin Pierce, an official in DND’s Directorate of Strategic Communications, the Directorate of Space Development is “not an organization that has any interface with the press.”

Canada is not the only country struggling with the implications of American space weapons. Among the U.S.’s allies, Canada, Germany, France, and Italy have steadily supported diplomatic efforts to prevent an arms race in outer space and have voted for numerous UN efforts to ban space weapons. At the same time, it’s not easy to dismiss the lucrative defence contracts on offer. As Evan Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to France, told U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the key is to convince European defence contractors there’s money to be made. “If we established an opportunity for them to participate,” Galbraith told the Washington Post about his message to Rumsfeld, “we could have them lobby their governments to have the right to participate.” Galbraith now manages U.S. efforts to win European participation in NMD. In Canada, a delegation of U.S. military officials arrived in Ottawa on March 16 to meet with Canadian defence-industry executives. According to a well-timed report from the Canadian Defense Industries Association, missile-defense contracts could create as many as ten thousand jobs and a billion dollars’ worth of business.

And then there are the countries that are not being courted. As Bill Graham, the current Minister of Foreign Affairs, pointed out while serving on the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans’ Affairs in 2000, the pursuit of missile defence will almost certainly spark “a new arms race.” As if to prove Graham’s view – or at least the view he held before joining Cabinet – Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov warned in 2002 that NMD will lead Russia to rebuild its missile and space forces; Russian analyst Major-General Vladimir Slipchenko stated that the U.S. missile defence system’s aim is to establish military superiority in space; Colonel General Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, recently described massive nuclear war games in Russia as part of an effort to develop the means to penetrate missile defences. And in February of this year, after the U.S. Air Force released plans for a space-based radio-frequency energy weapon, described as a constellation of satellites that would “disrupt/destroy/disable a wide variety of electronics and national level command and control systems,” Russian President Vladimir Putin warn-ed that “in conditions where there is a quantitative and qualitative growth in the military potential of other states, Russia needs a breakthrough in order to have weapons and military equipment of a new generation.” Speaking at a missile launch site in northern Russia, Putin described a new generation of Russian missiles specifically designed to evade missile defences. “These systems can destroy targets on other continents, moving with a hypersonic speed and great accuracy, and with high manoeuvrability in both the vertical and horizontal planes,” he said. “I should say that every word of what you have just heard is significant.” Meanwhile, in China, the military recently launched its first astronaut into space as part of its own decade-long push for a military role in space.

In the angry estimation of Bill Graham’s predecessor, Lloyd Axworthy, the pursuit of missile defence by Paul Martin’s government is shredding sixty years of international-disarmament tradition. That tradition began in the 1950s, with Lester Pearson’s Nobel Prize-winning efforts to defuse a Sinai War, followed by Prime Minister Trudeau’s efforts to open relations with China while campaigning for nuclear détente with the Soviets in the 1970s and 1980s, and Axworthy’s success in getting 121 nations to sign a treaty banning land mines in 1997. Civilian disarmament leaders include the Nobel Prize-winner John Polanyi, who went to Moscow in 1960 to back a nuclear-weapons ban just around the time he co-invented the chemical laser – and who is now watching in horror as the fruit of his labours is being transformed into a $2.1-billion airborne missile-defence weapon.

Axworthy, who continued to lead an international campaign for a space- weapons ban until leaving to pursue academic and international-mediation work in 2000, says there “was always some tension between dfait and DND” over missile defence. As that tension persists, the biggest problem with Canadian disarmament efforts today, says Axworthy, is “credibility”: while Canadian diplomats are in Washington negotiating a deal on NMD participation, the Canadian diplomats at the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva – where discussion of a ban on space weapons has been stymied by partisan bickering since the mid-nineties – are being cut off at the limb,” Axworthy says. Currently, the only legal restraint against space weapons is the Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967. But while the OST bans weapons of mass destruction in space, on the moon, or on other celestial bodies, it doesn’t ban the kind of weapons systems now being developed in the U.S. Meanwhile, following U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty, which prohibited developing, testing, or deploying space-based missile-defence systems, the U.S. has declined to support a Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space treaty, despite strong international support for it.

A four-hour parliamentary debate on missile defence did indeed take place on a frigid Ottawa evening last February. The to-and-fro was vigorous enough to unravel a few of the government’s contradictions on the topic, though Prime Minister Paul Mar-tin was not there. Foreign Minister Bill Graham led the government’s presentation with a speech describing the link between missile defence and space weapons as “an hallucination.” Reversing the statement he made in 2000, Graham said missile defence “will not lead to an arms race.” Although he didn’t mention Canada’s decades-long effort to ban space weapons, he argued that “the trend” in Washington was “moving away” from space weapons. Rather than representing a shift in Canadian disarmament policy, Graham said, Canadian support for missile defence is part of a sixty-year tradition of Canadian and U.S. military integration. Echoing the pollster Michael Marzolini’s thesis, Graham concluded by noting missile defence “is going to happen whether we participate or not.”