Today is a very retroactive anniversary to consider and it is one that, sadly, reminds us of the dangerous era that was the Cold War. It was on this date in 1978 the Soviet Union’s nuclear-fueled reconnaissance satellite, Kosmos 954, crashed to earth over northern Canada, leaving a trail of radioactive waste across the NWT, what is now Nunavut, and parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter later recalled the reaction he received from then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau when he called him to give his Canadian counterpart a heads up about the satellite’s possible crash-landing in northern Canada. In making the call the 39th president discovered he’d woken up his Canadian friend.
“My message to Pierre was that the satellite was tumbling and would fall somewhere in Canada, hopefully just east of Great Slave Lake,” Carter told Canada’s Nancy Southam (for her book Pierre: Colleagues and Friends Talk About the Trudeau They Knew). “He thanked me for calling him, (and) said he would be sure to stay in Montreal, and would check to ensure that none of his cabinet members were fishing in the area. There was one whom he said he wouldn’t warn, but he didn’t name him.”
What was no laughing matter was the search and clean-up operation Canada has to launch due to the nuclear material Kosmos 954 left in her wake. Only a tiny fraction of the radioactive fuel was ever recovered, meaning the rest is still out there.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.