Incidentally, and to give Mike a sussie for once … how about the delightful Fran Frost?
Not quite the piece of work that Jamie Ginn is, but in that league.
It can’t be 153 years. It sems like just yesterday I was at the 100 year Expo in Montreal.
Yeah 1967, I was there too. Pierre Elliot Trudeau shook my hand as he walked along a line of us. Seems like 9:30 yesterday morning!
Well, since we’ve kind of drifted in to Bomarcs, Avro Arrows, and things that go zooming around, how about a look at a film role that Canadian actor Christopher Plummer insisted on playing as a Canadian?
A distinguished Canadian speaks eloquently of the characteristics of the Canadians and citizens of the United States:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebbh-BF7V5E
Does anyone here still think of “Dominion Day”?
My understanding was that as Canada was a non-nuclear nation, the Canadian Bomarcs were fitted with high explosive warheads, although the option to fit nuclear warheads in case of a real war was retained.
Norman Freidman expressed it well when discussing nuclear depth charges fitted to ASROCs “a nuclear warhead makes up for a lack of accuracy in targeting…” One of his books illustrates a live fire test of a nuclear ASROC. The photo was taken from a ship a long way back from the launching Destroyer.
But a problem with the Avro Arrow and contemporary USA and UK aircraft was that the analogue electronics was not sufficiently reliable.
In the Royal Australian Navy there were lots of hare-brained scheemes to tailor weapons for things they were not designed for, the worst of which was a scheme to use the 5" 54 cal Mk 42 as an anti sea -skimming missile weapon. Many thousands of dollars were wasted
Maybe I should have been offended, but I laughed along with everyone else!
If you can’t laugh at yourself, what good are you?
I believe the Pearson government, despite its initial anti-nuclear policy, ended up reversing its decision and accepted fully operational nuclear-armed Bomarcs.
It should be noted that when the Diefenbaker government decided to cancel the Arrow project and accept Bomarcs the missile only had a operational radius of less than 300 miles. Given the placement of Bomarc sites in the northeastern U.S, this meant that any strikes against incoming enemy targets were likely to occur directly over southern Ontario and Quebec, with significant nuclear fallout directly over the most populated areas of Canada.
Peter/M636C-- Thanks for the good analysis. Puts things in perspective, much needed.