How Canada's PEACEFUL sales of uranium have ended up in.....

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Blast from the Past: How Canada's PEACEFUL sales of uranium have ended up in nuclear weapons

Gordon Edwards - August 01, 2026

Friends and Colleagues:

The Peaceful Atom Goes to War.

The 81st horrific anniversary of the detonation of two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9 1945), killing hundreds of thousands of men women and children in each case, is just around the corner. Canada helped to supply the necessary explosive materials in each case.

Here is a link to a striking W5 documentary (1985) outlining how Canadian uranium sold for peaceful purposes has also ended up in thousands of nuclear warheads, through the surreptitious military use of “depleted uranium” from Canada and elsewhere.

In fact, from 50% to 80% of the total explosive power of a typical thermonuclear weapon is due to the forced fissioning of depleted uranium, a material that is left over as a waste byproduct from uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes. Moreover, in almost all cases, thermonuclear weapons require plutonium produced from that same leftover depleted uranium in order to trigger the explosion. Aoms for Peace? Don’t look too closely!
[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lK65S5eHRQ ]

Canada and the World War II Atomic Bomb Project

During World War II, Canada processed much of the uranium needed for these two bombs at Port Hope, Ontario. Some of the uranium was left over from a radium mining operation that ran from 1931 to 1940, on the western shore of Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, and some was from radium-rich Congolese ore that was stored in a warehouse on Staten Island by its Belgian owners – all of it processed at Port Hope.

The Hiroshima bomb was made from highly enriched uranium, while the Nagasaki bomb was made from plutonium – a uranium derivative that is created as a byproduct in every fission reactor that is fuelled with uranium. Plutonium, like highly enriched uranium, is a powerful. Nuclear explosive.

Canada and the Cold War buildup of tens of thousands of nuclear warheads

For twenty years after the end of the war, Canada sold virtually all of its uranium (and most of its plutonium) to the American military for direct use in the bomb program. These military sales came to an end in 1965, when Prime Minister Pearson declared that all Canadian nuclear materials would henceforth be sold only for peaceful purposes.

But, as it turns out, more than 80 percent of all uranium exported from Canada for peaceful purposes ends up as “depleted uranium” (DU) which is mainly uranium-238 (a non-chain-reacting type of uranium). Canada cedes title to the depleted uranium to the foreign-owned enrichment plant owners. Depleted uranium is regarded as an unwanted waste byproduct.

But the US nuclear weapons program makes free use of this depleted uranium to produce the plutonium that is essential to almost all nuclear warheads (in large warheads, a small plutonium bomb is needed to raise the temperature to 100 million degrees in order to ignite the “fusion” reaction). In addition, depleted uranium metal is used as a “jacket” that is responsible for 50% to 80% of the explosive power of a thermonuclear weapons by forced fission of the uranium-238.

Although uranium-238 cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction, U-238 atoms can be “split” by fast neutrons from an external source, releasing an enormous amount of nuclear energy in the process.

Gordon.


P.S. Here is a link to a YouTube of a recent zoom presentation by Gordon Edwards – A Brief History of Canada Pushing Nuclear ‘Hopium’, [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lK65S5eHRQ ]