“Porcupine their countries”, I really like that.

Canada is one of the few non-nuclear-armed countries in the world that has so much nuclear technology, expertise, infrastructure, and resources, that we are considered effectively zero days away from nuclear weapons. In other words before anyone else discovered we were considering pursuing nuclear weapons, we would already be armed with them. For the intents and purposes of most risk assessments, Canada is already nuclear armed, just without the expense of doing all the work of building, testing and maintaining them. This presumes we could start (or perhaps already have started?) such a program clandestinely, which remains to be seen, of course, and depending on your point of view, could be argued to be pretty unlikely. Our level of preparation could certainly be called into question in the event of a surprise attack, by say, our closest ally, trading partner and neighbor. You’d have to be sort of nuts to imagine such a bizarre scenario. It is an interesting thought experiment though.

It’s okay! We still have most of the uranium and our reactors make plutonium as a by-product. We don’t need to stock nuclear cakes when the pantry is overflowing and the oven is pre-heated.