OTTAWA—Canada admitted it cannot fully defend against the threat of a nuclear device and begged the United States military to lend a hand less than a year before the 2010 Olympics, secret cables between the two countries reveal.
Eight months before Canada hosted the international athletic event in British Columbia, Ottawa was scrambling to get security plans in place and turned to the country’s more able American counterparts to help prepare for a doomsday scenario, according to two diplomatic notes put out by Wikileaks.
“Although unlikely, Canada could potentially face the threat of an improvised or military nuclear device being constructed in, or imported to, its national territory,” says the June 2009 cable first released to the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network.
“Canada does not currently possess the capability for the rendering safe of a nuclear device.”
The Canadian military also suggested U.S. forces be stationed on Canadian soil to better coordinate the two nations’ efforts in the event of an attack. There were specific requests for seaborne surveillance crews and other equipment to protect three locations in Vancouver Harbour, one of the two cables says.
Canada’s elite special operations force, which includes JTF2 commandos and the Canadian Special Operations Regiment, also asked for the assistance of the U.S. military’s National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to track suspicious targets from the sky.
It is not known if any U.S. military personnel were ultimately stationed in Vancouver during the Olympics. If so, the cables suggest they would have been placed under the operational control of the Canadian military, though not necessarily under foreign command.
The gap in Canada’s ability to respond fully to a nuclear threat is alarming. A branch of the country’s special operations forces is trained to deal with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear terrorism in concert with the RCMP and the Public Health Agency of Canada, but the national response team is apparently ill-equipped to “render safe” or defuse such devices.
It is these “catastrophic scenarios” that attracted the most concern in the June note to the U.S., written by Shelley Whiting, director for defence and security relations at the Department of Foreign Affairs. It was sent five months after the first request for American assistance, which had gone unanswered.
“Confirmation of the availability of the requested capabilities is of critical importance to the planning process for the security of the Games and the preceding exercises,” the diplomatic note pleads.
The second note asked for mail-screening services, U.S. Coast Guard help watching the Pacific shores of Washington state and B.C., and a host of technical and medical assistance to respond to a possible nuclear strike.
That aid would include medical crews to extricate victims from contaminated areas; a facility capable of treating and performing surgeries on contaminated casualties; a high-altitude radiological sensing capability; aircraft capable of carrying up to 350 Canadian reservists, plus their equipment, vehicles and three days of rations; and helicopters to transport a smaller crew of reservists and their equipment.
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