Vanguard Magazine

North American Aerospace Defense Command launched three pairs of fighters from the command's Alaskan NORAD Region (ANR) and the Canadian NORAD Region (CANR) in response to Russian aircra that penetrated North America's Air Defense Identification Zone. NORAD is the bi-national command responsible for airborne early warning and detection and maritime early warning for the air and sea-space surrounding the United States and Canada. Photo: NORAD Public Affairs www.vanguardcanada.com JUNE/JULY 2020 29 AIR is threatened by any other empire." Roo- sevelt's words were widely welcomed in Canada. Prime Minister Mackenzie King responded that "we too have our obliga- tions...and one of these is to see that...en- emy forces should not be able to pursue their way, either by land, sea, or air to the United States across Canadian territory." In August 1940, King visited Roosevelt in Ogdensburg, NY. They agreed that the two nations had to cooperate to ensure the defence of the continent. That under- standing established the core institution of bilateral defence cooperation, the Perma- nent Joint Board on Defense (PJBD). None of the three statements by the President and Prime Minister (Roosevelt at Queen's University; King's response; the joint statement at Ogdensburg) con- stituted an official treaty or agreement; however, their value as political statements from the highest level, has endured. In September 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet Union's em- bassy in Ottawa, defected to Canada with evidence that Soviet espionage had pen- etrated the US nuclear weapons program. Despite the shock felt in Washington and Ottawa, bilateral military cooperation continued with little sense of urgency. Yet, only five years later, Canada and the U.S. would be deeply involved in planning extensive air defences which would soon become a joint endeavour as foreseen by the PJBD. What brought about such a sudden change? Two events stunned the U.S. defence and intelligence establishments. First was the revelation at the May 1947 Moscow military parade that the Soviets had re- verse engineered the B-29 bomber, the aircraft which had delivered the two atom- ic bombs on Japan. The second event, on August 29, 1949, was the successful test by the Soviets of a nearly exact copy of the "Fat Man" bomb tested in New Mexico and used against Nagasaki. Most assess- ments had concluded that a Soviet atomic bomb was not likely before 1951 or even 1953 but Soviet espionage at Los Alamos and elsewhere had delivered the secrets of the Manhattan Project, including the more advanced implosion weapon. The Cold War nuclear era had begun. By 1950, both Canada and the U.S. were developing jet interceptors (the similar CF-100 and the F-89); planners,

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