Canadian War Museum (Ottawa, Ontario)

My venture into the world of Nuclear Museums started innocently enough: I was a graduate student, and enrolled in a class wherein we were going to be focused, open-endedly, on 'global museums'. Having a prior interest in nuclear issues, I decided to research if, hey, maybe there was one or two institutions about nuclear testing in the USA that I could write about? More on that later—I was immediately under the impression that there were no comparable 'nuclear museum industries' in my home country, as Canada is not a nuclear-armed state. Boy howdy was I wrong...

Upon discovering the mere existence of a Canadian nuclear museum in October 2022, I immediately had to send them an email—the Society for the Preservation of Canada's Nuclear Heritage—hoping against hope that their mainly-closed facility would have an open house some time before my paper was due. I honestly expected either no reply, or to be met eventually with some far off date way past the deadline for my paper, but I figured that I had to shoot my shot regardless. So when they got back to me almost immediately, and with the tantalizing offer of a personal tour of the facility, I had to stop celebrating long enough to ask myself: how the hell am I going to get to Deep River?

To the Capital!

There is no direct route from Toronto to Deep River, essentially you need to build one yourself. But that's another story—the point is that to get to Deep River, where the Canadian Nuclear Museum is located, I needed to get the hell out of Dodge and on a train to Ottawa (note: booking your ticket through the ViaRail app and setting your seating preference to 'window' will increase your chances of not having to awkwardly look over your seatmate's shoulder for 5½ hours!).

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