Nuclear Vision: Canada, Modernity, and the Nuclear Age, 1942-1979

This thesis proposes that the nuclear age offered high modernity and technological nationalism a central position in the making of modern Canada. The nuclear age influenced modern Canada’s social, economic, and political history and it did so by telling Canadians they were, essentially, a modern people governed by a modern state. From the 1940s to the end of the 1970s, Canada’s development of the nuclear industry reflected the pursuit of science and technology to create modern forms of energy production. Canadians were urged to see in nuclear power a way of remaining competitive in a changing global order. It offered them new industries at many stages of the nuclear cycle. The post-war era reflected a changing direction in the country’s central ideological direction – one defined since the 1840s by liberalism and a subordinate role in the British Empire. The creation of the Canadian nuclear cycle signified a transition to a new stage in which Canada, now imagined by some to be a nation, actively sought out modern forms of social and economic progress. Nuclear energy systems came to fruition at a moment when Canada was establishing new directions as a sovereign state vying for greater global political and economic influence on the global stage. This thesis argues that this pattern was no mere coincidence: this technological nationalism was the logical outcome of deep-seated tendencies. Yet, many citizens remained skeptical of the nuclear age’s possibilities. Although the federal government had established its nuclear cycle to develop the peaceful uses of atomic energy, its birth in the shadows of the Second World War and the Manhattan Project also provoked a widespread sense of discomfort. The dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 solidified fears of nuclear energy long before the AECL built its first reactor on the shores of Lake Huron. Canadians en masse rejected the country’s participation in the development of nuclear weapons and, as Lester Pearson learned to his cost in 1963, were adamant that Canada should remain a nuclear-weapons-free nation. Successive governments in the 1950s and 1960s faced public backlash regarding Canada’s complicity in the stockpiling of nuclear arms, the production of uranium for American weapons, and its involvement in weapons tests. Born out of the peace movements and ecological movements of the 1960s, anti-nuclear groups emerged in the 1970s to oppose the nuclear industry. These groups shared members, ideas, and momentum, and the chasm between anti-war and environmental activism was progressively bridged as the 1970s proceeded. Both the anti-nuclear and anti-bomb activists were essential to challenging the path and direction of the Canadian nuclear system and its role in creating political and environmental uncertainty. Such fears remained a constant social reminder throughout the post-war era of the mutually assured destruction associated with atomic energy and the Cold War arms race. Indeed, Canada’s peaceful nuclear program did not always seem so peaceable, as activists in both camps argued more and more empathetically. Canada’s nationalistic pursuit of a nuclear modernity also entailed the quest of a narrow form of utopianism – one in which a future-oriented Canada provided greater social and economic freedoms under the aegis of liberal democracy. At the community level, nuclear energy symbolized the changing senses and sensibilities of living through modernity – the perception that the core structures of society were giving way to new social realities and that the relations of time and space were shifting. While nuclear energy symbolized the social and economic benefits of the cultural revolution of the nuclear age, it also aroused the concerns and fears about modernity. The conflicts between the pro- and anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s and 1980s were in many respects an extension of debates over high modernity and techno-nationalism.

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