It is ludicrous, as the member for York North has suggested.
Then we come to another reason that we should be very careful with this kind of business. It is the one that was raised, and quite rightly, by the member for York Centre when he said that we should not be engaged in any activity that would lead to the weaponization of space. That is a very important consideration.
We already had this debate in the House a couple of weeks ago. If the Minister of National Defence were asked whether there was the possibility of a weaponization of space, he in all honesty would not be able to deny that eventually there could be a weaponization of space once we enter a missile system. There will be considerable pressure eventually. This is a possibility that we ought to be taking very seriously, as we all do.
Something I learned about this a couple of days ago has troubled me enormously and I believe it was raised in the debate earlier today. It has to do with a decision made by the senate armed services committee in Washington. There is a decision to repeal a ban against developing smaller, more usable nuclear warheads, and the senate armed services committee already has voted in favour of a total repeal of the prohibition which was passed 10 years ago. The prohibition is gone. We have learned from media reports that the Bush administration and many Republicans in Congress have said that the law should be repealed because in a world of dangerous new threats, the United States needs a new generation of low-yield weapons for pinpoint strikes, et cetera. The language always has to be translated into plain English. Low-yield weapons mean having warheads with a force of five kilotons. That is about a third of the force of the warheads used in bombing Hiroshima in 1945 which caused the deaths of 140,000 civilians.
Someone may wonder what the connection is between that and the missile system. It is possible that these kinds of signals of re-armament, these kinds of initiatives which are coming out of Washington eventually will find their way into the weaponization of space. Once we move in that direction in a general policy sense, there is no limit to how far we will go when under pressure in terms of potential threats.
There is a third reason. The first was that Norad is no longer relevant. The second was that there is no enemy of Canada. The third is that the threats are not threats of weapons by some of these states that are in desperate economic shape, including North Korea, but the threats come from other sources. I have indicated many and the ones that I think are particularly important are the gross economic inequalities, the poverty, the hunger and the environmental degradation. To me these are the real threats with which we should be coping.
I was interested in an observation made by my colleague from Medicine Hat, for whom I have a great deal of respect. He said that he was nervous in the knowledge that a certain country has nuclear weapons. I agree with him. We should be nervous about the possession of nuclear weapons by any country. We have to come to grips with deciding who is ethically entitled to be the possessor of weapons of mass destruction. That is a debate which has not even started yet, but the member for Medicine Hat is right to be nervous. We are all nervous but not because it is just one nation in Asia. There are many nations that are in possession of weapons of mass destruction.