Air raid sirens rang out from coast to coast, and an eerie voice announced that Canada was under attack: 14 nuclear missiles were inbound.
The sombre voice then went on to tell startled citizens that this was the beginning of a country-wide drill and that for the next 24 hours, Canada would be behaving as if it had just been the subject of a massive nuclear strike.
This story appears in the book Backyard History: Forgotten Stories From Atlantic Canada’s Past Volume Two order a signed copy from the author here!
The day was November 13th, 1961, and for many Canadians, this came as a surprise.
While there had been some talk of a drill beforehand, mere talk was quite different from air raid sirens going off for 3 minutes straight, followed by a voice announcing nuclear missiles were incoming.
The Prime Minister came on the television at exactly 8pm Atlantic Time, to make a national address – a rarity at the time, which drove the seriousness of the drill home.
Emergency broadcasts took over all radio stations nationwide, carrying his message to the people.
In a sombre tone, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker announced: “My fellow Canadians, you have just heard the siren sound the national alert. This is an exercise and a test. All of us pray that it will never be required as a reality. But if war comes, the alert warning would mean that the continental air defence system had detected and identified a likely attack on North America.”
Diefenbaker went on to tell the public that in three hours and ten minutes, the nation’s capital would be destroyed by a nuclear warhead. 35 minutes later, Toronto would be destroyed, and six minutes after that, Montreal would be wiped out.
As New Brunswickers watched, they learned that Chatham — home of a large air force base — was the target of an incoming nuclear missile. Additionally, nearby Bangor and Presque Isle were going to be struck by nuclear bombs, and the fallout would soon be carried by winds into their province.
Nova Scotians watching were informed by the sombre Prime Minister of the dire news: in a matter of hours, their capital and most populous city, Halifax, would be utterly wiped out by a five-megaton nuclear bomb.
Top officials in the government — both federally and all of the ten provinces — began to implement their emergency response plan in such a crisis: they were to flee their respective capitals for military bases.
From there, they would receive messages detailing twists of fate in the crisis — such as fresh emergencies breaking out, people requiring assistance or changes in weather that would bring nuclear fallout into new communities.
This extensive nationwide drill was called “Exercise Tocsin B” (“tocsin” is an archaic word which means the ringing of the church bells of a village to warn of an incoming attack.)
Tocsin B was a massive exercise for the top government and military officials on how they would ensure ultimate public survival in the event of a catastrophic nuclear war. While public survival was the overarching goal, the best way to achieve this, the government had decided, was through the continuance of the government, which some might consider a rather biased view.
Between the screaming air raid sirens and the dour national address, the public was told to stay calm and not do anything out of the ordinary as the massive emergency test went on. Canadians were asked to spend this time “considering their families' plans for survival.”
While the citizens were being told to go about their business in this nuclear drill, top political leaders from the federal and provincial governments were being evacuated to rural military bases, where they would manage the outcome after the nuclear bombs had killed two million Canadians.
Canadians, for their part, were not amused. It was a Monday. They had work to do and lives to live, which were disrupted by deafening air raid sirens which ran for 3 minutes straight, followed by an announcement that nuclear bombs were incoming. Then, to add insult to injury, they watched their duly elected political leaders scurry to safety while they were left to “die.”
Remarkably, the military appeared to have genuinely not expected how upset people would be over the air raid sirens blaring suddenly for three minutes straight and a voice telling them that nuclear bombs were headed for Canada’s cities and military bases. Police around the country were swamped with thousands of calls from angry and terrified Canadians.
The exercise got off to a bad start when it turned out that many of the 500 air raid sirens installed across Canada didn’t work. In Montreal, they were so quiet that they were practically inaudible. In Vancouver, one air raid siren caught fire.
All the provincial Premiers scurried off to safety except one.
In New Brunswick, the Premier was the recently elected Louis Robichaud, who had been voted in on an ambitious platform to reform and modernize the province. For Robichaud, the timing was appalling; Exercise Tocsin B occurred on the day of the opening of the Legislature, an important day for rolling out his ambitious agenda.
Robichaud decided he was busy doing the actual governing to play war games, and simply ignored the drill. He did, however, send his top officials and Ministers to participate in the exercise as if it were real, giving New Brunswick adequate government representation for the purposes of the exercise.
Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Prime Minister Diefenbaker, despite having approved the operation, decided that he did not, in fact, want to evacuate after all. Perhaps it occurred to him that the optics of elected officials fleeing and leaving their citizens to ‘die’ might not reflect well upon him come the next election.
So, while the rest of the government evacuated to the army base Camp Petawawa, the Prime Minister stayed at home with his advisers at 24 Sussex Drive, which had a nuclear bunker.
The drill continued, and the nuclear bombs fell, targeting Canadian bases and cities.
The exercise was organized so that the government and military leaders would receive new messages detailing what was happening and would have to react to them.
Those leaders soon learned that the nation’s capital had been utterly annihilated by a direct missile strike. The direct hit had been too much for the bunker at 24 Sussex Drive to withstand: the Prime Minister was “dead.”
At Camp Petawawa, where the remains of the government huddled, Defence Minister Harkness was appointed Prime Minister and immediately invoked the War Measures Act, giving himself almost dictatorial levels of power.
The remains of the government assessed the damage: Canada’s six largest military bases, along with seven cities, were no more. Half the country was without electricity. The St. Laurence Seaway system was in ruins, and rail service had been knocked out. Two million Canadians were dead, and a further one million were suffering from radiation poisoning. Furthermore, more radiation was blowing in on the winds from the nuclear fallout.
Despite the catastrophic damage and horrific casualties suffered in the attack, the remains of the national and provincial governments set about their goal of ensuring public survival.
Fourteen million Canadians had survived the attack, and the government needed to find ways to ensure they all could be fed, given medicine and essential services restored. Efforts were made in the secret bases where the national and provincial governments hid to figure out how they would go about restoring rail service, transportation of food, medicine and essential goods across the country, and how to get medical aid to the stricken regions.
In New Brunswick, the central emergency centre was run out of the Forestry School in Fredericton. In the command centre, those coordinating the emergency response received a succession of messages about continuing crises, and the kinds of ongoing disasters which could be potentially realistic developments in such a massive disaster.
The following are some actual examples of the many, many messages the command centre in Fredericton received about local disasters, and had to solve by coordinating with local officials and agencies on the ground:
— Riot at the Moncton Airport by people trying to flee
— The province’s entire North Shore requiring evacuation to Moncton after the initial nuclear bomb strike on Chatham, to escape the radiation
— Survivors from Chatham requiring medical attention
— The winds shifting from the nuclear strike in Bangor in such a way that radioactive fallout was moving towards Saint John, requiring 20,000 Saint Johners to be evacuated to Fredericton
— The winds suddenly shifting from the Halifax nuclear strike and blowing towards Moncton, requiring the re-routing of the North Shore refugees towards Fredericton instead
— Preparations being made to register, feed, house and provide medical attention to the coming influx of tens of thousands refugees to Fredericton
— An influx of Nova Scotian refugees coming towards Moncton and requiring aid
— RCMP officers angry at being sent into the fallout (the message reads in part that they were “proving to be as sensitive to radiation as ordinary men”)
— Rioting and looting in Alma requiring boats of police from Saint John to be sent over
— An airplane laden with supplies crashing en-route to Chatham
— A bus load of inmates from Lancaster Mental Hospital being struck by a train
— A school bus full of 40 children crashing on the Moncton-Riverview Bridge, and catching fire
Needless to say, they were pretty intense about the exercise!
Despite the myriad of imaginary disasters that happened in those 24 hours, New Brunswick actually fared better at responding to them than much of the country. In anticipation of a large-scale disaster, NB Tel had installed closed circuits between municipalities and department heads in Fredericton. In their debrief after it was all over, the coordinators congratulated themselves for having “performed a truly marvellous feat.”
Despite the myriad of imaginary disasters that happened in those 24 hours, New Brunswick actually fared better at responding to them than much of the country. In anticipation of a large-scale disaster, NB Tel had installed closed circuits between municipalities and department heads in Fredericton.
In their debrief after it was all over, the coordinators congratulated themselves for having “performed a truly marvellous feat.”
When Exercise Tocsin B was over 24 hours after it began, however, the government leaders emerged from their bunkers on secret military bases to find that Canadians were distinctly less than impressed.
To the Canadian public, it seemed awfully self-serving that the politicians and bureaucrats’ top priority was saving the politicians and bureaucrats.
The Army in particular, had hoped that Exercise Tocsin B would “stimulate the increased interest in Survival or Civil Defence.” In their report afterwards, they railed against the public for having a “cynical attitude.”
To the Canadian public, it was the officials who were seen as those with a cynical attitude. Especially so in the case of the Premier, Ministers and top officials of the Ontario and Nova Scotia governments, who fled their respective capitals of Toronto and Halifax, leaving the citizens who elected them behind to die in a nuclear blast.
While newspaper stories praised the government’s competent response in the exercise, the letters to the editor told a very different story: according to the Army’s own assessment, three-quarters of the public commentary sent in about the exercise was either “unsupportive” or “critical”.
The Canadian public, however, learned that in a time of crisis, their government would abandon them. Premier Robichaud and Prime Minister Diefenbaker were praised by the public for bravely staying in their capitals with their people.
However, the fact that the Prime Minister stayed behind and “died” in his bunker was perhaps the public’s biggest takeaway.
For the preceding decade, Canadians who were wealthy enough to own a house with a yard had been told over and over that they should build a backyard bomb shelter to protect them from a nuclear bomb. Hearing that the Prime Minister died in his bomb shelter in the exercise effectively killed off the backyard nuclear bomb shelter industry overnight.
The exercise also served to highlight stark differences between middle-class Canadians who could afford backyard bomb shelters — or even just basements — and working-class citizens who could not.
It became painfully clear in the course of the exercise that the odds of survival for the upper and middle classes were much higher than for the working class, and that after the radioactive fallout blew in, there would be nowhere for lower-income people to go.
This led for calls to build underground bunker systems in cities, an idea which got bogged down in a very Canadian battle over federal versus provincial jurisdiction and funding.
Exercise Tocsin B had been planned to be the first of many national drills to prepare the public for a nuclear war. The plans were that future ones would involve more public participation.
Less than a year after Exercise Tocsin B, the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, which, from the military’s perspective, vindicated the exercise.
However, in the government’s view, the disparity and income inequality laid bare between Canadians of different socioeconomic classes was not worth whatever training and experience was gleaned through the exercise, and Exercise Tocsin B was the last time the air raid sirens ever rang out in unison from coast to coast.
This story appears in the book Backyard History: Forgotten Stories From Atlantic Canada’s Past Volume Two order a signed copy from the author here!
