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Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2000
Ottawa hid truth about A-bomb
On the quiet fall afternoon night of Nov. 10, 1950 residents in the
Lower St. Lawrence River town of St. Andre-de-Kamouraska heard
an incredibly loud bang and saw a huge orange flash in the sky
above the river. It rocked the village.
Federal government authorities told them it was nothing more than a U.S. B-50 bomber blowing up a "practice" bomb. The government said nothing serious had happened. In Washington, DC, the U.S. military issued a news release saying an aircraft had jettisoned a load of practice bombs to reduce the load of the aircraft after it had developed engine trouble. It described the aircraft as being "on a routine training flight from Goose Bay to Tucson, Arizona." Despite repeated denials from military and government authorities over the years, a lot of people in Kamouraska have believed over the years that the government hid something from them. Now finally after half a century, the truth has come out. Defence Minister Art Eggleton has released the secret military documents under the half-century rule on secret documents. It turns out that what really happened that day in Kamouraska was the explosion of several "unarmed" nuclear bombs deliberately blown apart over the St. Lawrence River by the pilot of an American Air Force B-50 bomber. Even though the Canadian government kept denying it, the Americans had equipped their bombers at Goose Bay with nuclear weapons. It was the U.S. military practice to fly their nuclear bombs back to the United States every six weeks and replace them with new bombs. That's what happened that day over the water. Three MK IV nuclear bombs, all of them "unarmed" after their plutonium cores had been carefully removed back in Goose Bay, were being flown back to the U.S. The U.S. Air Force pilot was having mechanical trouble with his aircraft at 10,000 feet. Apparently two of his four engines conked out on him. According to his military orders, he had to blow up his nuclear weapons to lighten the load of his stricken aircraft in case he had to eject from the aircraft. The idea was that in the event of a crash, no nuclear bombs would fall intact into possible enemy hands... or in this case, cause a monstrous political stink since the Canadian government was denying at the time there were any nuclear weapons aboard U.S. Air Force bombers at Goose Bay. So the B-50 pilot looked down to make sure there were no boats below him on the St. Lawrence River, then he dropped his nuclear bombs, and pressed the emergency destruction button, and they all blew up with a tremendous explosion about 2,500 feet above the water. There was never any possibility of a nuclear explosion because the bombs were all "unarmed." The debris landed in the water below and nobody was the wiser... except maybe for the beluga whales. In the end, the pilot didn't have to eject. He was able to correct the engine problems and fly on to the U.S. To admit the truth about how three "unarmed" nuclear bombs had been blown up on purpose, would have meant, admitting there were American nuclear weapons in Canada, that they were being ferried overhead, and that at times, something could go wrong. Back then a lot of people wouldn't have made the distinction between an "armed" and an "unarmed" nuclear weapon. They would have thought the Americans had dropped a nuclear bomb on Canada. The anti-nuclear movement was only starting to gain popularity in Canada. The Liberal government of Louis St. Laurent thought it best to lie to the Canadian people so as not to scare them or create a political problem. And successive federal governments kept the secret all these years for the same reasons. Local MP Paul Crete who finally got the admission out of the current government this week, says "we have a lesson here in how people have a right to know what happens." Looks too like a lot of those anti-war peace groups were right back then when they kept telling us the government wasn't telling the truth. PMO CANCELS BIG MEETING The Ontario Liberal caucus, the most powerful caucus on Parliament Hill, summoned the prime minister's press secretary Francine Ducros this week, to explain the government's handling of the Jane Stewart affair. Some of them are particularly concerned with what has been happening. They see the problem as sloppy handling by the prime minister's office, allowing and issue to develop into a crisis, by first denying there was any problem, then blaming the public servants, and then failing to provide documentation that would have helped them get their pal Stewart off the hook a lot earlier. Ducros agreed to attend, believing it would be nothing more than a question and answer period with the Liberal backbenchers. But when the prime minister's principal secretary Jean Pelletier found out about the nasty mood of the Ontario Liberal MPs, he called off the meeting. Now relations between the Ontario Liberal MPs and the PMO are worse than before. READY FOR WAR The Liberal government brain trust thought last December that the big issue in Parliament this month would be Bill C-20, the so-called "Clarity Bill" setting down the federal rules and conditions respecting a future Quebec referendum. The Privy Council girded for war, hired a huge staff of bright young men and women ready to tackle the nasty separatists (Bloc Quebecois) head on in the Commons this month. The trouble is that so far, the big war has amounted to nothing more than a polite skirmish. Apart from a few members of the French-language press, it has failed to attract much attention, as everybody is still focused on the scandals in the Human Resources Development ministry of Jane Stewart or preparing for next week's federal budget. So every day in committee an army of Privy Council warriors, all spit and polish, come armed with pads and pencils, ready to do war. And all the do is sit around and take notes, and wish they had more to do. But in the last few days they've found a use for their talents, slipping all sorts of very precise and accurate questions for Liberal MPs to ask committee witnesses. So all sorts of Liberal backbenchers, some of whom who wouldn't know a constitutional clause if it bit them on the nose, are able to ask the most erudite and pertinent questions... provided they have their little slips of paper with them. The Liberal backbench has never looked so good in committee. TOBINATOR STRIKES CHORD Newfoundland Premier Brian Tobin is sneaking up on his Liberal leadership rivals. First he makes a big political speech denouncing the current federal preoccupation with cutting income taxes when the real problem in Canada is the declining quality of health care. And that's not something you can fix by cutting taxes of the rich. Tobin socked it to federal Liberals who spend more time worrying about the rich than about Medicare. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out he's nailed Finance Minister Paul Martin and Health Minister Allan Rock with the same stroke. Now this week Tobin announces that he would rather let Inco Ltd. mothball its $4.3 billion Voisey's Bay nickel project for the time being than renege on an earlier pledge to process the ore in Newfoundland. Many other premiers would have caved in to the big corporation rather than risk the anger of the boardroom. Now the Tobinator who is staking out a nationalist stand. He's every bit as political as when he went after Spanish turbot trawlers when he was federal fisheries ministers. This is hardball politics, Tobin style, a clear pitch for the nationalist vote which has been looking for a hero who will stand up against big corporations on behalf of the little guy. Inco too is playing hardball. Sure it wants to process the Labrador nickel and cobalt somewhere else where production is cheaper, but the bigger issue is can a politician stand up to a big corporation? Make no mistake. A high-stakes poker game is being played out in Newfoundland. There's a lot more than a $5 billion nickel project at stake. What Tobin is doing is being watched carefully in boardrooms everywhere, not just in Canada, but around the world. A lot of corporations are telling Inco hang tough and not cave in to Tobin and his Newfoundlanders. What if governments everywhere began acting like Tobin, standing up to big corporations and forcing them to honour their promises? Pretty soon control of entire national economies would pass out of the hands of corporations and back into the hands of elected representatives of the people. What would big business do then? BACK AT IT AGAIN Federal government officials spent about 1.3 billion taxpayers' dollars last year, often against their better judgment, fighting the Great "Millennium Bug" scare. A lot of them thought the "Millennium Bug" thing was mostly a gigantic hoax whipped out by private computer firms to suck lucrative de-bugging contracts out of the federal government. Several government departments spent millions of dollars fighting the Millennium Bug and when the new millennium came in, nothing went wrong with their computers, but several other departments didn't prepare so well, and still nothing went wrong. This has led some government officials to believe that perhaps they were had. Was it all a hoax? Senior officials in some big multi-nationals are coming to the same conclusion, especially after seeing how entire countries in the developing world who were supposed to be destroyed by the "bug" did nothing and still escaped unscathed. Nobody wants to say anything because nobody wants to look foolish, while de-bugging firms are laughing all the way to the bank. Government officials whispered to each other last month that with the end of the Millennium Bug scare, at least they will have seen the end of the leeches that took them for such a ride. But alas, the same leeches are back again this month, with a new scare. This time it's the Great Hacker Attack. Now the leeches are warning that unless they are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to make federal government computers secure against hackers, all the federal government computers will soon be rendered useless. Is it another Millennium Bug hoax? Government officials are suspicious because Web sites broken into last week were mostly those guaranteed to attract the most public attention, Yahoo, CNN, e-Bay, e-trade. They were not sites where the most harm could be inflicted, such as shutting down the water works, the electrical company, the telephone companies. In the giant scheme of things, shutting down Yahoo for a couple of hours is peanuts compared to shutting down the Canadian government. The sites the hackers chose to attack last week were precisely those you would choose if you were out to promote a hacker scare and mount a campaign to extract several billions out of governments and big corporations while not doing all that much permanent damage to society. In Ottawa at least one government department is working with the RCMP to see if there might be a connection between the Millennium Bug hoax and the current Hacker Attack campaign. Is it just coincidence the beneficiaries are the same?
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