Category: History

Is environmentalist solidarity with Indigenous peoples opportunistic?

During the last few years, solidarity with Indigenous peoples has been a major area of emphasis for environmentalist, climate change activist, and anti-pipeline groups. In part, this seems to be based on the view that indigenous peoples have the strongest legal tools for blocking new fossil fuel projects, at least in Canada.

This raises the question of how genuine the support for Indigenous people really is. Do these environmental groups provide such support principally for the narrow (yet essential) purpose of avoiding catastrophic climate change? Is it somehow automatically the case that indigenous communities will choose low-carbon energy if given more power to influence political and economic choices? When Indigenous groups support fossil fuel development, for whatever reason, what is the appropriate response for those seeking to prevent catastrophic climate change? And even if the impulse to prevent catastrophic climate change is morally laudable, how should indigenous communities feel about being used as a means to that end?

Israel’s nuclear weapons

I have read quite a few books that pertain to Israel’s development of nuclear weapons at Dimona. It’s of historical interest for many reasons, ranging from the support states notionally opposed to nuclear proliferation actually providing assistance to foreign weapon programs, to whistleblower history, the geopolitics of the Middle East, and the details of capabilities required for weapon development.

Now, according to The Economist, the Dimona facility where Israel is thought to have made its fissionable material and assembled weapons may be reaching the end of its usable life:

The country’s atomic secrets have always been closely guarded, so little is known about the plant at Dimona. However, officials at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) admitted at a scientific conference last month that the reactor is showing its age. An ultrasound inspection of the aluminium core found 1,537 small defects and cracks, they said. The lifetime of such a reactor is usually around 40 years. At 53, Dimona is one of the world’s oldest operating nuclear plants.

The article also discusses the development of Israeli delivery systems:

The third leg of the triad is thought to have been added in 1999, when Israel received the first of six planned submarines. These were built and largely paid for by Germany. If, as reported, they can launch nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, this would give Israel a “second-strike” capability, allowing it to retaliate even if an enemy were to destroy its air bases and missile silos in a nuclear “first strike”. In January Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said: “Our submarine fleet will act as a deterrent to our enemies who want to destroy us.”

Among books on the development of nuclear weapons in many different states, I especially recommend those of Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007), and The Twilight of the Bombs (2010).

My shot

It’s strange that a stage show running in one city is affecting the whole continent, but New York isn’t a normal place and Lin-Manuel Miranda clearly isn’t a normal man.

The killing in Orlando originally prompted my personal doctrine in response to political violence: refuse to be terrorized. One or a few people armed and keen to kill do not affect my thinking about politics.

I cried quite unexpectedly when I saw Miranda’s sonnet.

Reading more about the musical, and revelling in my BitTorrent audio, I am increasingly impressed by the virtuoso genius of the thing. Violence has sometimes been a decisive factor historically, but there is scope to hope that ideas and arguments can be our battleground as humanity learns to live all together on this small planet.

“Rickover and Rolls Royce” or “How England Got Nuclear Submarines”

This remarkable interview with Robert Hill, Former Chief Naval Engineer Officer of the Royal Navy, discusses the peculiarities of Hyman Rickover, including some very revealing stories, as well as Rickover’s role in developing the civilian reactor at Shippingport. The description of Rickover’s interaction with the chairman of Rolls Royce is quite amusing, though it also highlights the absurd degree of capricious control one unpopular admiral had over the proliferation of military nuclear technologies.

It also makes me want to find this 1962 paper “Submarine Propulsion in the Royal Navy”.

Part of the same set of interviews is another remarkable one with Stanley Orman, Former Deputy Director of the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. He seems to clearly provide classified nuclear weapon information, for instance on the details of uranium oxidation in oxygen and nitrogen; plutonium-tritium interactions and how to inhibit them; long-term plastic and rubber degradation as major issues in maintaining weapon functioning; and details on systems to prevent unauthorized nuclear detonations.

An Abwehr agent in Canada

There were large expanses of the globe where spying, or even a pretence of it, seemed an unproductive activity because they were strategically irrelevant. When a question was raised in London about running some double agents out of Canada, the responsible MI5 officer — Cyril Mills, of the well-known British circus-owning family — demurred. Even the Abwehr, he said, could see that nothing of much importance was happening in Canada. [Abwehr chief] Canaris disagreed. On 9 November 1942 a U-boat landed his man Wener Janowsky on the Gaspe peninsula. Following his subsequent arrest he was found to be carrying a Quebec driving license taken from a Canadian PoW captured at Dieppe, but with an Ontario personal identification and address. Most of the $5,000 in Canadian currency with which Janowsky was supplied was time-expired — a mistake which prompted his capture after he used it to pay a New Carlisle hotel bill. He had already roused the proprietor’s suspicions by smoking German cigarettes and taking a bath at mid-morning. Among the possessions appropriated by the Canadian police were a Wehrmacht travel pro forma and diary, a .25 automatic pistol, radio, knuckle-duster, five US$20 gold pieces, a microfilm copy of coding instructions and a copy of Mary Poppins as a code crib. Janowsky was a thirty-eight-year-old former French Foreign Legionnaire who had a wife living in Canada, and knew the country. But no Allied secret service, even on a bad day, would have dispatched an event into the field — at the cost of a substantial investment of Nazi resources, including the U-boat — so absurdly ill-equipped. Janowsky was fortunate to survive the war in British captivity.

Hastings, Max. The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. p. 466–7 (hardcover)

Enigma decrypts and the Battle of Crete

Spring brought an increasing flow of decrypts about Wehrmacht operations in the Eastern Mediterranean. Senior officers strove to streamline the transfer of information from Bletchley to battlefields, so that material reached commanders in real time. One of the most significant intercepts, detailing German plans for the May 1941 invasion of Crete, reported ‘probable date of ending preparations: 17/5. Proposed course of operation … Sharp attacks against enemy air force, military camps and A/A positions … Troops of Fliegerkorps XI: parachute landing to occupy Maleme, Candia and Retiomo; transfer of dive-bombers and fighters to Maleme and Candia; air-landing operations by remainder of Fliegerkorps XI; sea-transport of flak units, further army elements and supplies.’ Churchill personally annotated the flimsy: ‘In view of the gt importance of this I shd like the actual text transmitted by MOST SECRET together with warnings about absolute secrecy.’ This information was passed to Wavell and Freyberg, the relevant commanders, at 2340 on 6 May. The loss of the subsequent Battle of Crete, following the German invasion which began on the morning of the 20th, emphasised a fundamental reality about Enigma decrypts: they could change outcomes only when British commanders and troops on the ground were sufficiently strong, competent and courageous effectively to exploit them. Stuart Milner-Barry of Hut 6 said that he and his colleagues looked back on Crete as ‘the greatest disappointment of the war. It seemed a near certainty that, with … every detail of the operation spelt out for us in advance … the attack would be ignominiously thrown back.’

Hastings, Max. The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. p. 84 (hardcover)

Note: this accords with historian John Keegan’s analysis of the WWII Battle of Crete in Intelligence in War.

Toronto land recognitions

Land acknowledgements — in which people recognize the traditional territory of indigenous peoples on which they are assembled — are an important part of decolonization and indigenous reconciliation. This year, I included one in my handout for tutorial students.

There is not, however, a definitive recognition for downtown Toronto or the U of T area. I have head a wide variety of indigenous peoples recognized, most commonly the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat peoples, but often others as well, and sometimes with one or more of those excluded.

For the divestment Community Response, we used the Ryerson University land acknowledgement.

Recently, Massey College and the School of Public Policy hosted the Walter Gordon Symposium on the theme of responding to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The program for the conference included a land acknowledgement which is probably as well-researched and historically justified as any that is available for this area:

I would like to acknowledge this sacred land on which the University of Toronto operates. It has been a site of human activity for 15,000 years. This land is the territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The territory was the subject of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes.

Today, the meeting place of Toronto is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work in the community, on this territory.

This acknowledgement can be found on a U of T libraries page about the indigenous history of Toronto. It notes that it was: “Revised by the Elders Circle (Council of Aboriginal Initiatives) on November 6, 2014”.

For my PhD research, the challenge of identifying which indigenous peoples have traditionally occupied any piece of territory from Texas to Oklahoma, to Kansas, to Nebraska, to South Dakota, to North Dakota, to Montana, to Saskatchewan, to Alberta to British Columbia is considerable. So too, the challenge of identifying any indigenous governance bodies that regulate academic research, and what sort of approval process each requires.

Hastings on GCHQ and cracking Enigma

Hut 8 [of Bletchley Park] now had enough information to read some U-boat signals, but the seizure which opened the traffic to fluent decryption was the fruit of chance and high courage, rather than of design. On 9 May 1941 a convoy escort group attacked and forced to the surface Julius Lempe’s U-110. A boarding party from HMS Bulldog commanded by Sub-Lieutenant David Balme secured the submarine, prevented its sinking, and brought back to his destroyer pearls beyond price: documentation for current Enigma. Though U-110 later sank under tow — fortunately so, from a security viewpoint — the short signal book, officer ciphering instructions and other material reached Bletchley safely, and the secret of the submarine’s capture was preserved beyond the war’s end. An Enigma machine was also recovered, but perversely this was the least useful element of the booty, because Bletchley had one already, together with assorted rotors seized in other ‘pinches’. Within days, Hut 8 was reading a steady stream of German naval messages. Ralph Erskine, one of the foremost experts on codebreaking at Bletchley, believes that the Park was already close to reading the Kriegsmarine traffic, even without the U-110 haul. What is for certain, however, is that it was impossible to break the U-boat ciphers without the assistance of captured material, which would again become a vital issue later in the war.

Hastings, Max. The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. p. 83 (hardcover)

Civilians in intelligence

Donald McLachlan, a journalist who served under Godfrey [head of British naval intelligence] at the Admiralty, afterwards argued that all wartime intelligence departments should be run by civilians in uniform, because they are unburdened by the lifetime prejudices of career soldiers, sailors and airmen: ‘It is the lawyer, the scholar, the traveller, the banker, even the journalist who shows the ability to resist where the career men tend to bend. Career officers and politicians have a strong interest in cooking raw intelligence to make their masters’ favourite dishes.’ MI6 remained until 1945 under the leadership of its old hands, but most of Britain’s secret war machine passed into the hands of able civilians in uniform who — after an interval of months or in some cases years while they were trained and their skills recognized — progressively improved the quality of intelligence analysis.

Hastings, Max. The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. p. 69 (hardcover)

Related:

2016 Walter Gordon Symposium — Indigenous reconciliation

The 2016 Walter Gordon Symposium (Word document) was about indigenous reconciliation in Canada, following the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

I attended every panel, and I am working on processing and uploading my photos.

A complex confluence of factors seem to have combined to make indigenous issues critically important politically all around the world. In particular, the resurgence of aboriginal peoples is deeply bound up with our best hopes for avoiding destroying human flourishing and life as we know it through climate change.