Nuclear climate warming up

Bob Groeneveld, April 4, 2008, The Chilliwack Times -- Here's an interesting take on global warming that ought to chill your blood.

Gwynne Dyer, a highly respected Canadian journalist and military historian, has suggested that climate change may make it imperative that Britain carefully maintain its stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Ouch!

Just when the world seemed to be coming to its nuclear senses, the Americans and Brits have both announced (not too loudly, lest the neighbours complain) that they have to upgrade their nuclear arsenal, and a guy like Dyer suggests that they might not be wrong.

He points out that northern countries like Canada and Britain will be less seriously affected by the climate when the planet achieves its new, warmer equilibrium.

Parts of countries like ours might even become more people-friendly than they currently are.

Our country's imminent blessings paradoxically ought to put us on our guard. We are likely to be flooded by refugees from more southerly countries whose lands are destined to become desert wastelands under a new climate regime that may be upon us by the time our children's grandchildren take their turn at becoming parents.

Worse than the flood of refugees may be the flood of military forces of countries that decide to take what they need from the few of us who still have something left to take.

For Canada, it should not be a great surprise that our greatest threat is most likely to rise up from a desertified, agriculturally impoverished America.

Global warming might set off a nuclear war.

Who'da thunk it?

Guys like Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau and even Brian Mulroney spent years and huge efforts at planting and nurturing Canada's peace-making reputation all around the world.

Ours may be the only country on the planet that developed its own nuclear capability without actually using it to build nuclear bombs--although, admittedly, one or more current nuclear weapons programs probably piggy-backed off our technology.

We don't even allow nuclear weaponry on our soil--although, once again admittedly, the United States almost certainly violated that sanctity several times, and just as certainly with a nod and a wink from our federal authorities.

Pearson was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize for his work at saving the planet from what many believed was an imminent Third World War by defusing the Suez Crisis in 1957, in no small part by coaxing into existence the United Nations peacekeeping forces that continue to operate today, albeit with somewhat altered motivations, it seems.

Under successive prime ministers, including Joe Clark, John Turner, and Kim Campbell, Canada's peacekeeping service to the world was unequalled by any other country. Our one-half per cent of the world's population provided fully 10 per cent of peacekeeping activity throughout the planet's hot spots.

And then it seems to have changed.

Canada went to war in Iraq--without UN sanction for the first time in most Canadians' memory --in support of the Desert Storm.

Now there's Afghanistan.

And the carbon that we are belching out of the Athabasca Tar Sands might not only be remembered as one of the chief causes of the global climate catastrophe that burned up or sank half of the planet, it might end up having fueled the nuclear war that rendered the other half unsuitable for humanity.

If there's anyone left to remember, that is.

- Bob Groeneveld is editor of the Langley Advance.