“Canada would have to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, putting it in the company of only five other countries: North Korea, Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Sudan. Do we want to be more like North Korea than, say, Australia and New Zealand?”
Debate is intensifying over the potential role of nuclear weapons in Canada’s defence posture in a context where, globally, nuclear energy is in the midst of a revival. At SPPGA, faculty are offering some of the most substantive interventions in this debate, examining the real costs of nuclear ambition, from weapons proliferation and regulatory erosion to waste governance and the promises being made to developing countries.
The True Cost of Going Nuclear
In February 2026, Canada’s former chief of defence staff Wayne Eyre argued that Canada should keep its “options open” on acquiring nuclear weapons, pointing to the country’s existing civilian nuclear infrastructure as a foundation. Writing in the Globe and Mail, SPPGA Director Professor Allison Macfarlane and Professor Hugh Gusterson examine what that would actually entail.
Macfarlane and Gusterson walk through what acquiring nuclear weapons would actually demand of Canada: Enrichment and reprocessing facilities, secure weapons factories, remote test sites capable of underground detonations, and new missile delivery systems, capable of reaching the United States, Russia, and China. None of this is cheap; the authors note that a single enrichment facility in New Mexico cost US$5 billion, and the clean-up of the Rocky Flats plutonium site in Colorado cost more than US$7 billion. Beyond the financial toll, Canada would have to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, placing it alongside North Korea, Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Sudan, and potentially encouraging other middle powers such as Japan, South Korea, and Germany to follow suit. The authors conclude with a pointed question for Canadians: whether true strategic independence is worth the price. Read the Globe and Mail article
Don’t Believe the Nuclear Hype
With the Trump administration pouring hundreds of millions into small modular reactors and Big Tech signing major deals with nuclear startups, the United States is racing toward a nuclear revival, even as the technology has no commercial track record in the United States, and its oldest problem, nuclear waste, remains unsolved.
Macfarlane has been speaking directly to both. In MIT Technology Review, she warned that the new reactor designs, sodium-cooled fast reactors, and molten salt designs will require specialized waste treatment before disposal, adding cost and complexity the industry has yet to reckon with. “These reactors don’t exist yet, so we don’t really know a whole lot, in great gory detail, about the waste they’re going to produce.” Speaking to CNN, she was equally clear-eyed on timelines: these reactors may not be ready for decades. “Will these companies wait until then? Will AI be relevant then?”
As the administration accelerates the buildout, questions about who is driving it and at what cost have grown louder. Speaking to ProPublica about the Trump administration’s overhaul of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Macfarlane was direct: “The regulator is no longer an independent regulator — we do not know whose interests it is serving. The safety culture is under threat.”
There are also problems with the argument that there will be a large market for new nuclear reactors. In PNAS Nexus, Ramana and SPPGA’s Maha Siddiqui, alongside Friederike Friess of BOKU University, find that the three expectations developing countries most commonly hold about small modular reactors — cheap electricity, proven technology, and local manufacturing — are not supported by the evidence.
Read the MIT Technology Review article | Read the CNN article | Read the ProPublica article | Read the PNAS Nexus article
The Ties That Cannot be Undone
Professor MV Ramana has been examining the deeper question underlying the Canadian debate: whether nuclear energy and nuclear weapons can ever truly be separated.
In CounterPunch, Ramana examines former defence chief Wayne Eyre’s call for Canada to keep its ‘options open’ on nuclear weapons and what it reveals about the structural ties between civilian nuclear programs and weapons capacity. Tracing five overlapping ties between civilian nuclear infrastructure and weapons development, he argues the connection is not incidental but fundamental: “It will not be possible to eliminate nuclear weapons without policies and resource-allocation decisions that are grounded in the reality that nuclear energy cannot be separated from nuclear weapons.”
The nuclear question, Ramana argues, cannot be understood in isolation from broader militarization trends. Speaking to IPS News on SIPRI data showing global arms transfers jumped 9.2 per cent between 2016-2020 and 2021-25, the largest increase since 2011–2015, driven overwhelmingly by transfers to Ukraine and Europe, Ramana warned that the trend reflects a deeper crisis: military expenditure reaching an estimated $2.7 trillion in 2024, collapsing arms control frameworks, and weapons being used in attacks on civilian populations across Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Ukraine, and Iran. “Much of this money flows to companies that profit from making weapons and facilitating death,” he told IPS News.
Read the CounterPunch article | Read the IPS News article
