Invitation to Learning

Some sensitive souls insisted on thinking that the new U.S.-Canadian defense agreement (TIME, Feb. 24) was something it was not. Moscow's Izvestia said the agreement had "clearly aggressive characteristics." A Moscow radio commentator cried: "There are [U.S.] troops everywhere [in the Arctic], and in such places as ... Churchill they experiment with jet-propelled planes." Such sniping was not confined to Russia. Saskatchewan's socialist Agriculture Minister Isidore Nollet, U.S.-born and a U.S. veteran of World War I, complained that there were U.S. troops stationed at North Battleford, Sask., and that they should be told to go home.

Tired of such talk, National Defense Minister Brooke Claxton made a public answer: "All the discussion and veiled charges about what is going on [at Churchill] have no foundation in fact." To prove it, he forthwith invited the Ottawa military attaches of ten foreign countries, including Russia, to go to Churchill, Man., to see for themselves.

An inkling of what the junketeers would see came from Winnipeg, where the U.S.Canadian Permanent Joint Board on Defense was holding one of its periodic meetings. Canadian Chairman Andrew G. L. McNaughton and U.S. Chairman Fiorello LaGuardia hopped up to Churchill on a tour of their own. They reported that there were 1,000 soldiers, civilians and their wives (including 130 Americans) at Churchill on the bleak western shore of Hudson Bay. Artillery, machine guns, snowmobiles and winter clothing are being tested there. So are a few planes -- DC-35, Mosquitoes, and a Halifax. Jet-propelled planes? Said McNaughton:'"There is nothing of that sort up there. . . . There is not a thing we are the least anxious about. I'm afraid if anyone is expecting something like rockets capable of reaching the moon, he will be disappointed."

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