Why isn’t Canada ready to detect nuclear attack?

I have previously written about the 1960s’ Soviet technology that North Korea could use against North America: fractional orbital bombardment systems and electromagnetic pulse. I emphasize “North America” because numerous Canadian pundits think that somehow if the feces hit the rotating wind-making device, we’ll be left out of proceedings because we’re nice guys/girls/trans people.

Ostrich-type thinking will not save us, however, not if this current situation goes the distance. We share a land mass with the primary target. North Korea has not done enough missile testing to reduce the circular error probable — that is, the circle in which 50 per cent of the launched missile’s re-entry vehicles will land.

Each missile, when launched, has a “footprint” in which it may land. It looks like an elongated egg when superimposed on a map. A variety of factors affect how small or how large that footprint is. These include the Coriolis effect, where the location of the target is further away distancewise from the original point of missile launch because of Earth rotation; and the effect of the Earth’s irregular shape which in turn produces variable gravitational fields that affect ballistic missiles. In northern hemispheres, these forces can deflect missiles and re-entry vehicles to the left. Guess where we live?

There is a sophisticated military strategy whereby one keeps an opponent distracted with ostentatious moves, then clubs him from an unexpected direction. So ...

Kim Jong-un owns around 22 Romeo-class ocean-going dieselelectric submarines and a handful of Whiskey-class subs. Romeos and Whiskeys are Cold-War-era submarines but unlike their nuclearpropelled counterparts, they are comparatively quiet and more difficult to detect.

Romeos are each equipped with eight 21-inch torpedo tubes and 14 torpedoes. In 1957 a Soviet retest of a nuclear 21-inch torpedo called the T-5 yielded 10 kilotons. By 1961, the Soviets were able to boost the yield to 16 kilotons, close to the yields of the weapons used by the Americans against Japan in 1945, and were working on a megaton-yield torpedo by adding a secondary stage to the T-5’s existing primary.

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty kicked in in 1963 and we could no longer monitor Soviet developments in this field. The T-5 was standard equipment every time a Soviet submarine set to sea during the Cold War: One such weapon was armed during a confrontation with an American destroyer during the Cuban missile crisis, and a Whiskey carrying T-5s grounded while trespassing in Swedish waters in 1981.

Nuclear weapons have been “miniaturized” since the late 1950s. If Dr. Evil’s scientists can reduce the size of a thermonuclear warhead so it can fit in a ballistic missile, they can modify a torpedo to carry a nuclear weapon. The Soviets did, 60 years ago. A single sub equipped with such weapons could destroy Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego by detonating nuclear weapons underwater, thus producing a radioactive base surge onto land.

Canada and the United States used to have underwater listening systems to track Soviet submarines, and we used to have maritime patrol aircraft, some capable of employing nuclear depth bombs to ensure a kill against a nuclear-armed target. None of these systems exists today.

If Kim decided to send submarines this way and fire nuclear torpedoes or drop nuclear mines opposite Vancouver in Bangor, Wash., where the U.S. Trident missile-carrying submarines operate from, shouldn’t Canada have the ability to detect and engage such intruders? — Sean M. Maloney is a professor of history at the Royal Military College of Canada.