Introduction: Understanding the Indexes

In the 1950s, the Canadian and American governments collaborated on a variety of mutual defence and diplomacy concerns. One of the primary concerns was that of American nuclear arms transport and stationing in, around, and over Canadian soil. In order to facilitate these types of diplomatic conversations, the Canadians at the embassy in Washington and those in the Department of External Affairs created the WISER system to correspond on bilateral nuclear issues.

Due to the complexity of these affairs, many WISER documents were sent back and forth in the early 1950s. They were organized into indexes for easier reference. The pages of this briefing book replicate the shape of these indexes, with individual documents linked by Canada Declassified identifier number. 

Each page of this briefing book correspond with a WISER index, which was used to categorize memoranda and telegrams between External Affairs (often referred to as Ext or External) and the Canadian Embassy in Washington DC (sometimes referred to as WashDC). Index numbers record specific meetings or events, which are then broken down into WISER documents.

There are different sets of numbers on the indexes: the index number on the far right side, as well as the WISER numbers displayed by the titles of their corresponding documents. See the example below:

As seen above, multiple WISER documents might correspond to the same index number, and a single WISER number or letter might be listed in multiple indexes.

The designation of Wa-WISER refers to a document coming from the Canadian Embassy in Washington, as opposed to WISER or Ex-WISER, which would refer to a document from the Department of External Affairs or an affiliated office.