Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to be able to participate in this debate. It is not often we get to talk about the question of nuclear testing or the whole issue of nuclear weapons. I welcome the opportunity to do so. We certainly do not intend to obstruct the passage of this particular bill. I think all parties in the House are agreed that it should pass with dispatch.
Nevertheless, it does provide an opportunity to comment on a very pressing and urgent matter and that is the future of the planet. If current conditions are allowed to persist a false sense of safety which a lot of people acquired as a result of the end of the cold war may come to a horrible end when we realize that we actually live in a world that is arguably much more dangerous than the world that we rightly perceived as dangerous during the cold war.
As a member of my particular generation I have perhaps been more sensitive to this issue than some others. I am a baby boomer. I am part of the post-Hiroshima generation. I was born in the fifties and was exposed as a child in western Canada to all the fallout from American testing in the northwestern United States, the consequences of which we are still learning about through studies that come forward. Most recently a study came forward with respect to this particular issue.
I remember very well being a grade 6 student at Westview Elementary in Transcona in 1962 when the Cuban missile crisis was upon us. I remember going to school that afternoon, after having been home for lunch, knowing that sometime in the early afternoon the Russian ships would meet the American blockade. It was uncertain whether that would be the end of the world. At least that was the way it was seen, that it would be the beginning of a nuclear conflagration which would destroy the human race. It is something that has always stuck with me.
As children we experienced terror. We practised bombing exercises where we would hide under our desks. We learned how to peel bananas because that was the only kind of food we would be able to eat, as everything else would be radioactive.
I say all this by way of being very grateful in many respects that my own children have not had to experience the nearness and the proximity of nuclear weapons and nuclear war in that way. But having said that, the fact remains that their future and the future of the human prospect is every bit as much in peril today as it was then. It is just that we have convinced ourselves that this is no longer the case.
There are many more nuclear weapons and many more powerful nuclear weapons in the world today than there were when I was that grade 6 child worrying about the destruction of the human race. There is much less control over the nuclear weapons that exist in the world today than there was in 1962 when I was having my first experience with nuclear terror.
What we need to do today is say yes. Let us ratify the comprehensive test ban treaty, but let us realize that the real task for the human race and for the planet is to abolish nuclear weapons entirely, once and for all, and seize the moment which is now before us after the end of the cold war to do so. If we do not do it soon we will live in a world in which nuclear weapons will have proliferated all across the world.
It will not only be India and Pakistan. It will be country after country after country acquiring nuclear weapons capability as a way of saying they have status in the world, as a way of saying they want to be powerful players in the world. This kind of nuclear technology is more and more available as a result of the end of the cold war and the way it ended, which is to say as a result of the rather chaotic disintegration of the Soviet Union and the way in which nuclear technology, technicians and equipment have become available on the black market and officially.
We live in a very dangerous world. I believe the Canadian government should be showing a lot more leadership than it is in trying to get members of the nuclear club to face up to their responsibilities in this critical historical moment.
We belong to NATO and in NATO we have Britain, France and the United States, three of the more powerful members of the nuclear club. We also have Russia which is affiliated with NATO in the NATO-Russia Council. We have a context in which real moral pressure, and ultimately more moral than political pressure, could be put on these members of the nuclear club to do what is right now for all time and for all human beings that will come into existence in the future and whose potential existence is threatened at this time by inaction.
There was a great deal of self-righteousness in the House and across the land when India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons. To some extent that outrage was justified. However in another way it was not. In another way it was a form of hypocrisy in the sense that the NATO countries and anyone else who as part of the nuclear club pointed the finger at India and Pakistan were acting in a hypocritical way if they were not willing to entertain the notion of total nuclear disarmament, of the abolition of nuclear weapons.
In the absence of a commitment by the existing nuclear club to do so, it seems to me that India, Pakistan and other countries to follow will have an argument which I feel they should be deprived of. They can only be deprived of that argument if the members of the nuclear club act appropriately.
Canada is part of that club. We make a big deal about how we do not have nuclear weapons. However, we have been part of this thing from the beginning, from the Manhattan project on. We have also been part of it through our own nuclear industry, the export of reactors, and our general commitment to nuclear technology even though we always say it is for peaceful purposes.
We have some repenting and rethinking to do on this. We have an opportunity to show some leadership. I would certainly hope we would do so and do so soon for the sake of the people to follow us.
Nuclear weapons are just a form of warfare that we deplore when we see it in microcosm. When we see civilians in Kosovo or anywhere else being tortured, killed, having their houses burned and their homes destroyed, we think that is terrible, despicable and evil. We want something to be done about that and something should be.
However, what is nuclear war except a massive hostage taking of the civilian populations of other countries, basically saying that we would do on a scale which is unimaginable what we find contemptible and disgusting on a small scale? How have we managed to do this to ourselves in our imagination that we can counsel as realpolitik, as good strategic thinking, the wholesale destruction of the planet and entire civilian populations when we reject this on a much smaller scale? Somehow it does not strike us the same way in both cases, and that is unacceptable.
I would close by recalling the words of George F. Kennan, a distinguished American diplomat, a cold war diplomat, who said—and I am paraphrasing because I do not have the quote with me—something to the effect that the intention of the west, or for that matter anyone else, to destroy creation, to put at risk the future of planet earth, the human prospect and the lives of all the non-human creatures that also exist on this planet, is nothing more than the ultimate blasphemy offered up to God, saying we reject your creation; we reject our role as creatures; and we are going to set ourselves up not as gods but in this case as demons.
Who would even think, for the sake of a particular civilization, for the sake of a particular economic system or for the sake of a particular strategic stance, of destroying the human prospect? It is a blasphemy and something I hope the human race will very soon erase from its midst.