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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

It's really a special relationship with the Commonwealth A-list, and it's about military collaboration, nuclear technology and intelligence sharing. No other countries are as close to the US and work with them as peers in these areas, by a very large margin.

Britain is the lynchpin but Canada, Australia and New Zealand all contribute valuable strategic assets just by their location, but also bring specialist expertise to the table out of proportion to their population. The scientist in Britain that made arguably the single greatest contribution to the Manhattan project was an Australian.

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It’s really not though, I’m from Canada, and the fact is we do 75% of our trade with the US and 3% with the UK. When push comes to shove, Canada would never prioritize the UK over the US.

Nor should you. The special relationship has never been about trade though. It’s about national security and intelligence sharing.

Only one of the five acknowledged nuclear powers buys rather than builds their warheads: UK buys from US, because of the Manhattan Project history. NB the critical calc about the mass of Uranium 235 necessary for fission was done at Birmingham Univ in 1942. Note the UK has supplied the US with plutionium as well as tech under the mutual defence treaty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_US%E2%80%93UK_Mutual_Defe...

I was under the impression the UK builds it’s own warheads at AWE/Aldermaston. What we bought was the delivery platform.

They certainly were fans of test detonations in the Australian Outback and atolls in Kiribati.

And I think you're right about AWE. I can't imagine the modern UK wanting to be dependent on the US for nukes any longer than it needed to be.

I still disagree. There’s a lot more cooperation with the US and Canada in Canada on both of those fronts. Small US military contingents train in Canada with our military and vice versa. Furthermore the United States has provided intelligence information multiple time now that have stopped terrorist attempts in Canada. I don’t believe there’s a similar depth of cooperation with the UK — what could the UK even provide to Canada that the US doesn’t already.

Furthermore we’re integrated with the US in ways that we aren’t with the UK, Canadians can stay in the US visa free for six months and when a Canadian enters the US by air they use the US immigration line, whereas UK citizens would not. There’s also freer movement between Canada and the US in that designated professional classes can get NT work visas easy and can be continually renewed with no limitations.

The Canadian UK relationship is just about tradition, and us being polite. At the end of the day, in modern times, countries like Japan or Germany have more sway in Canada simply because we invest and trade more with them. I know some British really want to believe it’s possible to bring back the empire, but it’s really not, Canada is a completely different country now from what it was 80 years ago.

I didn't mean to imply that Canada's relationship with the US is in any way via the UK. That may have been the case in some ways back in WW2 but certainly not since then. You're all growed up. The US is the lynch pin.

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