Jimmy Carter, who entered hospice care at home on the weekend, has had long and surprising connections to Canada, including the time he helped save us from a nuclear meltdown.
fter Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, he was assigned to the early American nuclear submarine program when an accident at Canada’s NRX nuclear research reactor at Chalk River, Ont., caused a loss of coolant to the reactor and the core was left significantly damaged.
It was late 1952 and the future president was dispatched to Chalk River, leading a small group of American servicemen that assisted in the cleanup. Decades later, when Carter was president, Canada came to America’s aid when six U.S. diplomats escaped the clutches of Iranian revolutionaries who had seized the American Embassy in Tehran.
Canada’s Ambassador to Iran, Ken Taylor, sheltered the Americans in his own home in what became known as the Canadian Caper. Carter’s recalled both events at the book launch for Kingston, Ont., historian Arthur Milnes’s volume Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: A Canadian Tribute, in Plains, Ga., on April 30, 2011:
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