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| - Canada emerged from the Second World War a world power, radically transforming a principally agricultural and rural dominion of a dying empire into a truly sovereign nation, with a planned state economy focused on a combination of resource extraction and refinement, heavy manufacturing, and high-technology research and development. As a consequence of supplying so much of the war effort for six long years, Canada's military grew to an exceptional size: over a million service personnel, the world's third largest surface fleet and fourth largest air force. Despite a draw-down at the end of the war, the Canadian military nonetheless executed Operation Muskox, a massive deployment across the Canadian Arctic designed in part to train for a ground and air war in the region. Canadians also assist
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| abstract
| - Canada emerged from the Second World War a world power, radically transforming a principally agricultural and rural dominion of a dying empire into a truly sovereign nation, with a planned state economy focused on a combination of resource extraction and refinement, heavy manufacturing, and high-technology research and development. As a consequence of supplying so much of the war effort for six long years, Canada's military grew to an exceptional size: over a million service personnel, the world's third largest surface fleet and fourth largest air force. Despite a draw-down at the end of the war, the Canadian military nonetheless executed Operation Muskox, a massive deployment across the Canadian Arctic designed in part to train for a ground and air war in the region. Canadians also assisted in humanitarian efforts, sending observers for the United Nations to India and Palestine in 1947 and 1948 as well as flying blockade running flights during the Berlin Airlift. During these early years of the Cold War, Canada became established in its own right on the international stage but also fell in under the protective aegis of the post-war allies, namely France, Great Britain and the United States. The Canadian-American defence relationship is and has largely been one of mutual assistance in all continental defence matters though with different geo-political goals in terms of each nation's foreign affairs. Under the post-war dominance of the Liberal Party of Canada, several prime ministers, including Mackenzie King, Louis St-Laurent, Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Trudeau forged ahead on a path independent of NATO's over-focus on large troop concentrations in Western Europe to instead supporting foreign intervention, peacekeeping, diplomacy and support to Non-aligned Nations. Canada's military history during the Cold War is characterized by a focus on international cooperation and foreign intervention with the UN as a 'third way' approach to maintaining the delicate international balance of power. Canada was a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) in 1958 and played a central role in United Nations peacekeeping operations - from the Korean War to the creation of a permanent UN peacekeeping force during the Suez Crisis in 1956. Subsequent peacekeeping interventions occurred in the Congo (1960), Cyprus (1964), the Sinai (1973), Vietnam (with the International Control Commission), Golan Heights, Lebanon (1978), and Namibia (1989-1990). Concomitantly the Canadian military maintained a standing presence in Western Europe as part of its NATO deployment - including long tenures at CFB Baden-Soellingen and CFB Lahr, in the Black Forest region of West Germany. Additional CF military facilities were maintained in Bermuda. Throughout most of the Cold War Canada maintained nuclear weapons - including short-range ballistic missiles, nuclear depth bombs, nuclear-tipped air-to-air rockets, surface-to-air missiles and high-yield gravity bombs principally deployed in the Western European theatre of operations. Nuclear weapons were almost exclusively tactical in nature and were employed as part of a larger conventional military design, one which necessitated a standing army of nearly 100,000 personnel throughout most of the era. Another key element of Canada's military history during the Cold War was Unification, recommended in the bold 1964 Defence White Paper, and put into action in 1968 with the aim of streamlining the Canadian military into a single all-services force akin to American Marine Corps, reflecting to multi-role nature of Canadian military operations.
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