I am almost out of time, but not quite: it’s still February 15 in much of Canada.
The 60th anniversary of the first unfurling of our Maple Leaf flag.
Now I don’t usually engage in patriotic-nationalistic bull-baloney, and it’s not usually a Canadian thing in any case.
However, in light of our American “friends” declaring a trade war on our country and expressing a desire to annex Canada as the “51st state”, I feel the need, really the strong urge, to do so.
Allow me to advocate again that Canada needs a strong, independent national defence capability, and that we must seriously contemplate, as a one-time participant in the famed Manhattan project, re-establishing ourselves as an independent nuclear power with a credible nuclear deterrent and do so before it’s too late. What else can we do to guarantee the souvereignty of an underpopulated country with highly desirable natural resources, sandwiched between rabid warmongering neofascist Putinistan and the mad personality cult of Trumpland?
Join with the UK and France, the only nuclear powers in Western Europe since Ukraine trusted in giving up its post-Soviet nuclear arms, to build a Canadian nuclear capability.
I’m fairly sure China, with its historic fear of instability would continue to discourage Russia from First Use, and a credible non-US Western nuclear force is the only way I can see for the remnant of NATO to maintain MAD in the short term.
As you probably know, the UK and France both have submarine-launched nuclear missiles, which I believe pose a sufficient threat to discourage all-out attacks.
But Putin might well consider using battlefield nukes, of which our supplies are, I believe, much smaller….