Tag Archive for: extended nuclear assurance

Australian statecraft must restore the link between deterrence and non-proliferation to survive in the new nuclear age

In the week of Australia’s 3 May election, ASPI will release Agenda for Change 2025: preparedness and resilience in an uncertain world, a report promoting public debate and understanding on issues of strategic importance to Australia. This is an article from the report. The full report can be read here.

The problem: Australia and the region face a rising tide of nuclear coercion

Nuclear weapons are becoming a more salient feature of the international order in ways that the next Australian Government can’t afford to ignore. Russia, China and North Korea are expanding their arsenals and leveraging new technologies to coerce others with nuclear threats, as Moscow demonstrated by intimidating democracies into restricting their support for Ukraine.

Of greatest concern to Australia, Beijing is rapidly expanding and modernising its nuclear arsenal, including deploying large numbers of shorter-range missiles that can probably field nuclear as well as conventional warheads. While the US has a larger nuclear stockpile, it arguably lacks the flexibility that China is developing to fight a limited nuclear war in our region—a war in which the main targets would be military units and infrastructure, including in the territories of US allies such as Australia, while China and the US curtail nuclear strikes against each other’s homelands for fear of uncontrolled escalation. As Beijing’s nuclear arsenal grows, so might its willingness to use non-nuclear coercion and military aggression to reshape the Indo-Pacific, especially if the regional balance of conventional forces continues to shift in China’s favour. In strategic circles, this is called the stability–instability paradox.

The US is responding with overdue investment in its conventional and nuclear forces, including the deployment by the mid-2030s of a new sea-launched, nuclear-tipped cruise missile (SLCM-N). Because the SLCM-N could be deployed on US Navy vessels that routinely visit allied ports, it signals assurance as well as deterrence. But the Trump administration faces budget constraints, including competing demands on defence spending, such as the planned Golden Dome missile defence system.

Strategic commentators enjoy compiling lists of capabilities that the US should acquire, which sometimes includes calls for redeploying ground-launched nuclear missiles on allied soil—a capability that the US retired after the Cold War. Even if the Trump administration backed such ideas, capitalising on the US’s withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, the US nuclear-industrial base would struggle at current capacity to fill orders for new nuclear systems in a timely fashion. In theory, allies could help by investing directly in US production lines. For instance, Australia’s investment in US shipyards should accelerate delivery to the US Navy of Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, the primary mission of which is nuclear deterrence, as well as the Virginia-class attack submarines that the RAN will acquire.

Cognisant of the US’s limits, the Trump administration has ramped up longstanding pressure on allies to shoulder more of the burden of collective defence, including linking allied defence spending to US security assurances in the case of NATO. Trump and some of his team also sometimes seem equivocal about the US’s longstanding policy of dissuading allies from acquiring nuclear weapons. That has spurred debate about the reliability of the US nuclear umbrella, which is formally called extended nuclear deterrence (END). Some ‘umbrella states’ that receive US protection, including South Korea and Poland, have openly mooted acquiring nuclear weapons, while others, including Japan, probably have the latent capacity to develop and deploy nuclear weapons promptly if the political decision were taken to do so.

French President Emmanuel Macron is leading discussions about expanding French, and perhaps also British, contributions to END in Europe. But such conversations would be harder in the Indo-Pacific, where the US presently remains the only provider of END amid a concentration of nuclear powers that includes India and Pakistan, as well as China, North Korea and Russia.

With so many uncertainties, any perceived gap in the US umbrella could be exploited for nuclear coercion. While North Korea and Russia make nuclear threats routinely, the real concern for Australia is China because it has the gamut of nuclear, conventional and hybrid tools of coercion, all focused on the Indo-Pacific.

The solution: Australia should put deterrence at the heart of its approach to non-proliferation, arms control and disarmament

In line with decades of public strategic guidance, the 2024 National Defence Strategy (NDS) addressed Australia’s approach to nuclear deterrence only briefly, in a paragraph on page 14:

Australia’s best protection against the increasing risk of nuclear escalation is US extended nuclear deterrence and the pursuit of new avenues of arms control.

That remains the right approach, at least for now, but only if the next Australian Government is willing to invest more to lock in US commitment. That should include deeper political, logistical and conventional military contributions to END, beyond hosting visiting US nuclear forces and the joint and collaborative facilities, such as Pine Gap.

Canberra could learn from NATO’s model for pooling risk, responsibilities and decision-making, which includes allies using their conventional forces to protect and enable US nuclear operations, as well as tightly circumscribed nuclear sharing arrangements. Although NATO-style conventional–nuclear integration grafts imperfectly onto Australia’s strategic situation and legal obligations, there’s leeway in frameworks like the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone that Australia could leverage, if the government has the political courage to try. Discussions between Canberra, Paris and London about NATO might segue fruitfully into the roles that France and Britain see themselves playing in Indo-Pacific deterrence.

In the same vein, Australia should coordinate its deeper contributions to END with Japan and South Korea, the other regional umbrella states. Indeed, minilaterals like the Australia–US–Japan trilateral defence ministerial meeting are already working in areas relevant to deterrence, including contingency planning and networked air and missile defence. Even so, Canberra must remain alert to subtle differences in national objectives and approaches to crisis management in Tokyo and Seoul. Equally, the Trump administration might treat the US’s Indo-Pacific allies somewhat differently, and it isn’t yet clear whether and how the Biden-era concept of integrated deterrence will be reflected in Trump’s forthcoming national security strategy. Regional partnerships are important, but the next Australian Government needs the confidence and policy nous to develop bespoke contributions to the US alliance and END.

Whatever options are considered for strengthening END, the most important task for the next government will be giving the ADF the resources and conventional equipment required for deterrence by denial, which includes fully delivering both pillars of AUKUS. A conventionally capable ADF couldn’t directly counter Chinese nuclear threats, but it makes those threats less credible by raising the cost to Beijing of using coercion or military aggression up to the nuclear threshold. By way of comparison, Moscow’s nuclear threats have so far deterred direct Western military intervention in Ukraine, but not Kyiv’s willingness to fight. Ukraine’s experience shows that facing down nuclear threats requires national resolve as well as military capability. Civil defence and national mobilisation were not mentioned explicitly in the public version of the NDS, but they could be vital to countering nuclear coercion.

The NDS didn’t specify which ‘new avenues for arms control’ Australia should pursue, but those efforts need to reinforce the core multilateral architecture around the Non-Proliferation Treaty, including the Partial Test Ban Treaty and ongoing efforts to put into effect the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty. While the prospects for progress on multilateral arms control are dim, active engagement with those frameworks could somewhat raise the reputational costs to the Trump administration of striking opaque arms-control deals with Russia, China or North Korea without adequately consulting allies.

However, if the US or other key partners such as South Korea were to seriously contravene or withdraw from multilateral regimes—for example, by testing a nuclear weapon—then Australia should prioritise deterrence and strategic necessity over any moral argument for non-proliferation. Punitive sanctions against an ally or partner, like cutting off uranium exports, would be justified only if they served Australian interests and security. Washington’s allies, such as South Korea, would probably take the drastic step of proliferating only if they had serious concerns about US protection, in which scenario, Australia could not afford to burn bridges with its regional partners.

Prioritising Australia’s strategic interests in such circumstances need not equate to abandoning the whole premise of non-proliferation. As with deterrence, the constraining power of the nuclear taboo is eroded with each violation, rather than disappearing completely in the first mushroom-shaped puff of smoke. Non-proliferation discussions could continue through smaller groups, even if the multilateral framework fractured. Such minilateral groups, which Australia excels at convening, might help mitigate the risk of a regional proliferation cascade being triggered by a new entrant to the nuclear club.

At present, Australia’s active participation in multilateral non-proliferation remains essential to AUKUS safeguards and our wider security. But Canberra still has the leeway to prioritise deterrence and responsible nuclear stewardship more clearly in its advocacy. As part of that sharper approach, Canberra should oppose unrealistic calls for immediate progress towards universal disarmament, including the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which undermines END without having any discernible effect on China and Russia.

To implement this policy, the next government would need the political courage to manage blowback from domestic anti-nuclear constituencies and our Pacific neighbourhood. In private, ministers should also be frank with their New Zealand counterparts about the limits that Wellington’s membership in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons could place on the cross-Tasman limb of the ANZUS security treaty and bilateral cooperation on defence and procurement. The government must also rebut disinformation, from Beijing and elsewhere, falsely claiming that Australia is set on proliferation.

Thankfully, the Trump administration seems relatively focused on competing with China, which should help prop up the US role in regional deterrence structures. However, nothing is certain. Australia and its partners, notably Japan and South Korea, need the policy flexibility to deal with gradations of US retrenchment, which would more likely occur in a piecemeal and inconsistent fashion rather than in a precipitous and total one, sending mixed deterrence signals.

One policy option seems unrealistic: it’s questionable whether Australia retains the technical knowledge and industrial base required for an indigenous nuclear weapons program. The government of then Prime Minister Bob Hawke was embarrassed when details of a classified assessment of the lead time required for developing nuclear weapons leaked in 1984, and several treaties and domestic laws have since made the process harder. Given the prevalence of disinformation about Australia’s nuclear intentions and regular punditry about building a bomb, it’s surprising how little attention non-proliferation has received in the current debate about civil nuclear power in Australia.

If the strategic outlook were sufficiently dire to warrant serious consideration of a sovereign nuclear capability, including bearing the enormous financial costs and potential damage to relations with Indonesia and others in the region, then Canberra would need a proliferation partner, as ASPI Senior Fellow Rod Lyon has pointed out. It’s plausible that the US might one day act as Australia’s proliferation partner, especially if Washington wanted to curtail or withdraw END, but the independence of such an Australian capability would be subject to scrutiny, as Britain’s nuclear deterrent is. The modest size and vulnerability of a sovereign Australian nuclear capability would also compromise its credibility.

This leads us back to the more pressing task on the next Australian Government’s plate: raising the conventional capability of the ADF for war fighting and deterrence by denial. The range of strategic options available to the next and subsequent Australian governments will stem from the investments made now in the ADF and national defence, including the signals those send to allies and partners as well as adversaries. As my colleagues, Malcolm Davis and Marc Ablong, point out in their chapters, urgent work is required to patch the holes in ADF readiness and the defence budget.

Policy recommendations for the next three years

Put the Prime Minister at the centre of nuclear policy.

END and non-proliferation policy straddles the portfolios of the Defence Department and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, but also engages the responsibilities of Home Affairs, the national intelligence community and—when viewed through the wider lens of the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear research—the various branches of government responsible for business, energy, education and legal affairs.

Prime ministers have guided important shifts in nuclear policy before, such as the decision to lift the ban on uranium exports to India, a nuclear-armed state outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which eventually resumed in a piecemeal fashion in 2017. But that process was tortuous and slow, damaging Australia’s partnership with India.

Given the magnitude of the nuclear challenges that Australia now faces, central coordination needs to be better resourced, perhaps under the direction of a national security adviser (see Danielle Cave’s chapter), to support the Prime Minister in setting the policy direction and cutting through bureaucratic rivalries.

There are potential downsides to centralisation, especially if the Prime Minister had a poor grasp of deterrence or were wedded to idealistic forms of arms control, but the greater risks are inaction and incoherence, which often occur when policy is balkanised between bureaucratic fiefdoms.

Design the expansion of HMAS Stirling and Henderson shipyard near Perth to accommodate the maintenance of nuclear-armed US Navy vessels.

From around 2027, HMAS Stirling will host regular rotations of US and British attack submarines (SSNs) as part of the Submarine Rotational Force—West (SRF-W) component of AUKUS. HMAS Stirling, and the SSN maintenance facilities being developed at Henderson shipyard a short distance away, will significantly improve the operational effectiveness of US submarines in the region, while also alleviating pressure on US shipyards. Those advantages should factor strongly in the US Government’s assessment of the net value of AUKUS to the US Navy’s undersea capabilities, which is a required step before the transfer of Virginia-class SSNs to the Royal Australian Navy in the 2030s.

From the mid-2030s, some of the US Navy SSNs operating from SRF-W could be armed with SLCM-N nuclear missiles, improving collective deterrence and highlighting the value of AUKUS to Washington. Therefore, the design of Australian infrastructure around SRF-W needs to accommodate nuclear-armed US vessels. It should be possible to do that in a manner that complies with Australia’s non-proliferation obligations. As Foreign Minister Bill Hayden clarified in the 1980s, US naval vessels with nuclear weapons on board could even dry-dock in Australia within the terms of the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone.

Use multilateral forums to champion responsible nuclear stewardship and the positive contribution that US extended nuclear deterrence makes to strategic stability and non-proliferation.

The 2024 AUSMIN statement included new language complementing the US’s ‘responsible transparency as a nuclear weapon state’ and called for Russia and China to engage meaningfully in similar efforts. That harks back to Robert Menzies’ view in the 1950s of the great powers’ responsibilities as nuclear stewards. But that strand of Australian statecraft has been understated in recent decades, as arms control and disarmament have taken the centre ground. By foregrounding responsible stewardship, Australia could shift the discussion in multilateral forums—including small groups that Australia helps drive, such as the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative—away from regarding nuclear weapons as the problem and towards scrutiny of the nuclear coercion and secrecy practised by a handful of authoritarian countries. In the same vein, Australia should publicly defend END as a contribution to non-proliferation.

Remove ‘sole purpose’ from Australia’s declaratory policy on extended nuclear deterrence.

Starting with Australia’s 1994 Defence White Paper, successive defence strategic guidance documents and statements have implied that Australia relies on US extended nuclear deterrence only for protection against nuclear attack. The 2024 NDS retained the implication of ‘sole purpose’ by referring specifically to protection against nuclear escalation.

That approach is outdated. China could plausibly use a variety of non-nuclear means to mount large-scale and highly damaging attacks against Australia, including cyberattacks and long-range conventional strikes against the Australian population and critical infrastructure, imposing an air–sea blockade, and cutting off Australia’s digital connectivity to the world by severing subsea cables and jamming satellites. By dropping ‘sole purpose’, Australia would be aligning its declaratory policy more closely with partners such as Japan.

Is nuclear proliferation back?

Preparations are already underway at the United Nations for the 2026 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which was originally signed in 1968. Many expect a contentious event. Some countries are having second thoughts about the principle of non-proliferation because they wonder if Russia would have invaded Ukraine in 2022 if the latter had kept the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. Such counterfactuals, in turn, have renewed others’ fears of nuclear proliferation.

These concerns are not new, of course. In my memoir, A Life in the American Century, I revisit an equally contentious period in the 1970s, when I was in charge of US President Jimmy Carter’s non-proliferation policy. Following the 1973 oil crisis, the conventional wisdom was that the world was running out of oil and needed to turn to nuclear energy. However, it was also widely—and wrongly—believed that the world was running out of uranium and therefore would have to rely instead on reprocessed plutonium (a byproduct of the uranium used in nuclear reactors).

According to some forecasts at the time, as many as 46 countries would be reprocessing plutonium by 1990. The problem, of course, was that plutonium is a weapons-usable material. A world awash in the trade of plutonium would be at much greater risk of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism.

In 1974, India became the first country beyond the five listed in the NPT (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the US) to launch what it euphemistically called a ’peaceful nuclear explosion’. It used plutonium reprocessed from American and Canadian uranium, which had been provided on the condition that it would be used for peaceful purposes only. France then agreed to sell a plutonium-reprocessing plant to Pakistan, whose prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had said the country would eat grass before letting India develop a nuclear monopoly in South Asia. Meanwhile, in Latin America, Germany was selling a uranium-enrichment plant to Brazil, and Argentina was exploring its options for using plutonium. With other countries quietly doing the same, an incipient nuclear arms race was developing.

A decade earlier, US President John F. Kennedy had warned that the world would have 25 nuclear powers by the 1970s. Though the NPT was supposed to avert that scenario, it was beginning to look like his prognosis might come true. But Carter (who had experience as a nuclear engineer in the Navy) was determined to prevent this when he arrived in the White House.

For my part, I had recently served on a Ford Foundation and Mitre Corporation commission on nuclear energy and non-proliferation—which included multiple eventual members of the Carter administration. While many feared that the world was headed for a plutonium economy and the spread of nuclear weapons, the Ford-Mitre Report called this conventional wisdom into question and argued that the safest way to use nuclear energy was with an internationally safeguarded ‘once through’ fuel cycle that would leave the plutonium locked up in the stored spent fuel.

Carter accepted our report when we met with him in the White House. But our recommendation was wildly unpopular with the American nuclear industry and with senators from western and southern states whose facilities would be closed. It was also anathema to allies such as France, Germany, and Japan, whose energy strategies (and exports) would be undercut.

My job, when I entered the administration, was to implement Carter’s policy, which resulted in heavy criticism from all the groups mentioned above. As an academic, it was a new experience to see my name in critical editorials and headlines, or to be hauled before a Senate committee for a hostile grilling. When you are constantly being told you’re wrong, it is sometimes hard to remember that you might be right!

The question was how to break through the conventional wisdom that was driving the world toward a plutonium economy. We invited other countries to join an international nuclear fuel cycle evaluation (INFCE) so that we could examine subjects such as the availability of uranium supplies and the ability to safeguard plutonium. The INFCE was launched at a large conference in Washington DC, in 1977, and its committees and working groups then met for the next two years. It thus played a central role in Carter’s strategy to buy time, to slow things down, and to develop transnational webs of knowledge about the true costs and alternatives to what the nuclear industry regarded as the immutable nature of the nuclear-fuel cycle.

Over those two years, the INFCE did much to advance these objectives. The major nuclear-supplier countries met in London in 1977, and agreed on guidelines to ’exercise restraint’ in the export of sensitive nuclear facilities. Soon thereafter, France and Germany suspended their exports of controversial facilities.

Where does nuclear non-proliferation stand today? The good news is that there are only nine countries with nuclear weapons, compared to the two dozen that Kennedy predicted by the 1970s. Moreover, the NPT has 189 parties and is one of the few arms-control agreements that the major powers still observe. The Nuclear Suppliers Group guidelines still hold, and while a few countries engage in reprocessing, the world is not hurtling toward a fragile plutonium economy.

The bad news is that North Korea has abandoned its commitments under the NPT. It has achieved six nuclear explosions since 2006, and Kim Jong-un frequently rattles his nuclear saber in a destabilising manner. In the Middle East, Iran has developed facilities for enriching weapons-grade uranium, and it is fast approaching the threshold of becoming the 10th nuclear-weapons state. Many observers fear that if it does so, it may precipitate a proliferation cascade across the region, with Saudi Arabia quickly following suit.

These are worrying developments. As my experience in the 1970s shows, it is when conditions seem especially dire that efforts to slow the spread of nuclear weapons must be maintained. Otherwise, the world will become a far more dangerous place.

Is nuclear proliferation back?

Preparations are already underway at the United Nations for the 2026 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which was originally signed in 1968. Many expect a contentious event. Some countries are having second thoughts about the principle of non-proliferation because they wonder if Russia would have invaded Ukraine in 2022 if the latter had kept the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. Such counterfactuals, in turn, have renewed others’ fears of nuclear proliferation.

These concerns are not new, of course. In my memoir, A Life in the American Century, I revisit an equally contentious period in the 1970s, when I was in charge of US President Jimmy Carter’s non-proliferation policy. Following the 1973 oil crisis, the conventional wisdom was that the world was running out of oil and needed to turn to nuclear energy. However, it was also widely—and wrongly—believed that the world was running out of uranium and therefore would have to rely instead on reprocessed plutonium (a byproduct of the uranium used in nuclear reactors).

According to some forecasts at the time, as many as 46 countries would be reprocessing plutonium by 1990. The problem, of course, was that plutonium is a weapons-usable material. A world awash in the trade of plutonium would be at much greater risk of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism.

In 1974, India became the first country beyond the five listed in the NPT (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the US) to launch what it euphemistically called a ’peaceful nuclear explosion’. It used plutonium reprocessed from American and Canadian uranium, which had been provided on the condition that it would be used for peaceful purposes only. France then agreed to sell a plutonium-reprocessing plant to Pakistan, whose prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had said the country would eat grass before letting India develop a nuclear monopoly in South Asia. Meanwhile, in Latin America, Germany was selling a uranium-enrichment plant to Brazil, and Argentina was exploring its options for using plutonium. With other countries quietly doing the same, an incipient nuclear arms race was developing.

A decade earlier, US President John F. Kennedy had warned that the world would have 25 nuclear powers by the 1970s. Though the NPT was supposed to avert that scenario, it was beginning to look like his prognosis might come true. But Carter (who had experience as a nuclear engineer in the Navy) was determined to prevent this when he arrived in the White House.

For my part, I had recently served on a Ford Foundation and Mitre Corporation commission on nuclear energy and non-proliferation—which included multiple eventual members of the Carter administration. While many feared that the world was headed for a plutonium economy and the spread of nuclear weapons, the Ford-Mitre Report called this conventional wisdom into question and argued that the safest way to use nuclear energy was with an internationally safeguarded ‘once through’ fuel cycle that would leave the plutonium locked up in the stored spent fuel.

Carter accepted our report when we met with him in the White House. But our recommendation was wildly unpopular with the American nuclear industry and with senators from western and southern states whose facilities would be closed. It was also anathema to allies such as France, Germany, and Japan, whose energy strategies (and exports) would be undercut.

My job, when I entered the administration, was to implement Carter’s policy, which resulted in heavy criticism from all the groups mentioned above. As an academic, it was a new experience to see my name in critical editorials and headlines, or to be hauled before a Senate committee for a hostile grilling. When you are constantly being told you’re wrong, it is sometimes hard to remember that you might be right!

The question was how to break through the conventional wisdom that was driving the world toward a plutonium economy. We invited other countries to join an international nuclear fuel cycle evaluation (INFCE) so that we could examine subjects such as the availability of uranium supplies and the ability to safeguard plutonium. The INFCE was launched at a large conference in Washington DC, in 1977, and its committees and working groups then met for the next two years. It thus played a central role in Carter’s strategy to buy time, to slow things down, and to develop transnational webs of knowledge about the true costs and alternatives to what the nuclear industry regarded as the immutable nature of the nuclear-fuel cycle.

Over those two years, the INFCE did much to advance these objectives. The major nuclear-supplier countries met in London in 1977, and agreed on guidelines to ’exercise restraint’ in the export of sensitive nuclear facilities. Soon thereafter, France and Germany suspended their exports of controversial facilities.

Where does nuclear non-proliferation stand today? The good news is that there are only nine countries with nuclear weapons, compared to the two dozen that Kennedy predicted by the 1970s. Moreover, the NPT has 189 parties and is one of the few arms-control agreements that the major powers still observe. The Nuclear Suppliers Group guidelines still hold, and while a few countries engage in reprocessing, the world is not hurtling toward a fragile plutonium economy.

The bad news is that North Korea has abandoned its commitments under the NPT. It has achieved six nuclear explosions since 2006, and Kim Jong-un frequently rattles his nuclear saber in a destabilising manner. In the Middle East, Iran has developed facilities for enriching weapons-grade uranium, and it is fast approaching the threshold of becoming the 10th nuclear-weapons state. Many observers fear that if it does so, it may precipitate a proliferation cascade across the region, with Saudi Arabia quickly following suit.

These are worrying developments. As my experience in the 1970s shows, it is when conditions seem especially dire that efforts to slow the spread of nuclear weapons must be maintained. Otherwise, the world will become a far more dangerous place.

Australia, the TPNW and nuclear weapons

The Labor party avoided an open stoush over nuclear weapons at last week’s national conference. But it would be wrong to imagine the issue’s gone away. Nuclear weapons are becoming more prominent in a more contested world. Australians, like others, are naturally apprehensive about the future. The government must become more articulate in helping Australians to understand a more complex nuclear order, in explaining why US extended nuclear deterrence still matters, and in defending the particular contributions that Australia makes to global and regional security as well as its own. At a time when US allies are being asked to carry more strategic weight, we should probably expect our alliance burdens to increase, including in relation to nuclear deterrence.

Geraldine Doogue’s astute interview with Melissa Parke, the new executive director of ICAN (the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) on Radio National’s Saturday Extra program last week, gives a sense of the key issues in play. Many of those issues crystallise around the question of whether Australia should sign and ratify the Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Doogue’s best question was almost her last: what would joining the TPNW mean for Australia? Parke went out of her way to minimise the consequences. It would mean that we would cease to claim protection under the US nuclear umbrella. And it would mean ensuring that the joint defence facilities didn’t have a nuclear role and that the B-52s rotating through Tindal were not nuclear capable. Parke said she didn’t see any ‘impediments’ to such actions.

Let’s start with our rejection of extended nuclear deterrence. Badmouthing a doctrine central to the defence policies of dozens of countries worldwide would not be a good look—not least because many of those countries are close strategic partners, such as Japan, South Korea, and the European members of NATO. ICAN is fond of labelling the non-nuclear states which benefit from extended nuclear deterrence as ‘weasel states’, claiming they want both to flaunt their anti-nuclear credentials and to huddle under the US nuclear umbrella during crises. But ICAN should be careful what it wishes for. A collapse of current extended deterrence arrangements would probably spur a wave of nuclear proliferation unseen since the early days of the Cold War.

Similarly, and as I’ve argued before, countries don’t usually get to choose which parts of an ally’s arsenal they are willing to see deployed in their defence. New Zealand tried to play that game, specifically requesting a port visit by an Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate. Washington wasn’t willing to play ball. Sure, that was 1985. But go and read Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review: nuclear deterrence is inseparable even from conventional deployments.

Let’s look at the joint facilities, plus the Australian-run Harold Holt Naval Communications Station (still informally known as North West Cape). There is now a distinct set of parliamentary statements which should form the starting point for anyone interested in what the joint facilities do (see here and here). But one point usually underdone in the official record is the list of beneficiaries—that is, for whom do the joint facilities facilitate? Most Australians probably think of them in relation to the ANZUS treaty, and therefore see their role as primarily one affecting ourselves plus American capabilities in our near region. That’s wrong.

The joint facilities are part of the command and control of US forces worldwide. Limitations on their role have global consequences and not merely local ones. To deny them a nuclear role in ANZUS is also to deny them a nuclear role in US defence strategy and every other US alliance. Does anyone seriously imagine that ballistic missile launch detection, for example, is of interest to Washington only when ANZUS parties are involved?

The North West Cape facility provides another example. The facility houses a very low frequency (VLF) transmitter, capable of transmitting messages to submarines without requiring them to deploy an antenna on the surface. It is one part of a global communication system. Readers would be forgiven for thinking that transfer of the facility to Australian ownership back in the 1990s implies that we are now its main users. We aren’t. The station provides four communication channels. Three of those are for American use, one for Australian. Under the user-pays principle, Washington picks up 75% of the running costs of the station. And the US currently uses the facility under a 25-year lease, which expires in 2033.

Now, how are we going to ensure that the station doesn’t support US ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) operating within its transmission footprint? The footprint is large: although actual signal range varies in accordance with atmospheric and sea conditions, the transmitter is credited with a nominal range of 5,000 kms. And we know that US SSBNs do, on occasion, move through the Indian Ocean—the USS West Virginia made a port call at Diego Garcia last October. But the idea itself is preposterous. Secure second-strike capabilities are a critical element in deterrence stability. Why would we want to disrupt reliable communications to our ally’s submarines?

So, where does that leave us? At the moment the Labor government is pretending that the TPNW merits Australia’s support and that the main issue in question is one of timing. More strategically-minded individuals acknowledge that the treaty in its current form probably won’t ever get up: the verification provisions are too weak, the treaty has no support from any nuclear-armed state, and Australia’s alliance commitments get in the way of signature and ratification.

But the principal hurdle to our joining the TPNW is that the treaty sees nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence as the key strategic problem rather than the relationships between states. For decades, Australian governments of both political persuasions have supported the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. True, some individuals within those governments have argued that deterrence is a mere way station on the road to nuclear disarmament, but that’s essentially been an argument over the definition of ‘mere’.

The government’s reluctance to join the TPNW does not mean it is opposed to nuclear disarmament. It’s just that real nuclear disarmament is going to be hard. The G7 summit in Hiroshima earlier this year gave a good indication of just how hard: the leaders at the summit reaffirmed their commitment ‘to the ultimate goal of a world without nuclear weapons with undiminished security for all, achieved through a realistic, pragmatic and responsible approach’. Five adjectives there, all doing some heavy lifting.

Nuclear disarmament is not close. Indeed, we’re headed in the opposite direction—towards a more complex and competitive world where nuclear weapons play larger roles than they have in the past. The government needs to acknowledge that changing nuclear reality, and to explain to Australians that while our goals—principally the building of a stable nuclear order which minimises the prospects of actual use—have not changed, we’ll probably need to pursue those goals in a more turbulent world. Still, even in that world of heightened risk, US extended nuclear deterrence has a critical role to play; and it will pay us to work with our ally, not against it.

Biden’s nuclear posture review is too timid for 2022

Nuclear weapons are serious capabilities, and declaratory policies are serious commitments. So readers who have followed the US government’s nuclear posture product line since President Bill Clinton’s first review in 1994 have learned to expect both elegant wordsmithing and substantial elements of continuity in a policy that has long been broadly bipartisan. Moreover, it’s impossible to divorce thinking about nuclear weapons from the level of threat in the international security environment. Darker security environments naturally reinforce policy conservatism—and the current security environment is as gloomy as it has been in many a year.

It’s no surprise, then, that President Joe Biden’s recently released nuclear posture review reflects more continuity than change in relation to its predecessors. It probably disappoints the progressive side of the Democratic Party, which had been lobbying Biden to follow his instincts in favour of further nuclear restraint. On the other hand, continuity also disappoints those who had hoped for a more robust nuclear response in a rapidly darkening security environment.

Personally, I’d have liked to see a review that wrestled rather more energetically with the challenges of the future. Unlike its predecessors, this NPR anticipates the imminent arrival of a tripolar nuclear world. It briefly sketches the problems of that world but makes no effort to solve them. Granted, there aren’t easy answers. Truels—three-cornered duels—are, like the classical three-body problem, not amenable to simple solutions. And both nuclear deterrence and assurance will struggle more in a tripolar world, because the credibility of threats must decrease in a world where a third player would be the unintended beneficiary.

In place of such wrestling, readers will find an administration still debating itself.

Back and forth swings a debate about whether deterring, and if necessary responding to, nuclear weapons use should be the ‘sole purpose’ of America’s nuclear arsenal. The NPR settles on ‘fundamental purpose’, not least because a sole-purpose statement would spook US allies. But then it says the US will keep trying to get to a sole-purpose position anyway. Implicit in the text, and explicit in former Pentagon official Leonor Tomero’s comments at the launch of the NPR, is a judgement that America’s allies oppose a sole-purpose declaration mainly due to ignorance, and that better-educated allied elites could be brought on board.

Back and forth swings a debate about salience. The US nuclear deterrent is ‘foundational to broader US defense strategy and the extended deterrence commitments we have made to allies and partners’. And, it says, ‘For the foreseeable future, nuclear weapons will continue to provide unique deterrence effects that no other element of US military power can replace.’ But the review promptly shifts gear, and states that the US will continue to reduce the salience of nuclear weapons in its arsenal, and its reliance on nuclear weapons. It will do so at a time when great-power adversaries are increasing the salience of nuclear weapons in their own arsenals.

Back and forth swings a debate about arms control and its place in the broader strategic setting. Mutual, verifiable arms-control agreements can provide a lasting reduction in the size of nuclear arsenals and the risks of nuclear war. Left unanswered is the problem of how to reach such agreements without willing, responsible and trustworthy partners. China has declined to participate in formal arms-control frameworks on numerous occasions. And the statement of the leaders of the P5 nuclear-weapon states on 3 January that a nuclear war could not be won and must never be fought, preceded by 52 days Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the coercive nuclear threats that accompanied it.

Beyond the NPR, but closely linked to it, is a broader debate over the future of the sea-launched cruise missile program announced in the Trump administration’s NPR.

Biden’s termination of the program, foreshadowed in the release of the classified version of the NPR back in March, provoked congressional advocates to restore its funding. In the unclassified version, it’s still cancelled.

No actual replacement for the old land-attack, nuclear-armed Tomahawk missile yet exists—except as a drawing on a piece of paper. But therein lies one of the central problems for the NPR. The long-overdue, multi-decade modernisation of the nuclear triad currently underway is sucking the oxygen out of other proposals for force development. Such proposals are increasingly canvassed in the media by foreign-policy pundits. Franklin Miller has suggested increasing warhead numbers substantially beyond those agreed in New START; Hal Brands has urged redevelopment of US skills in arms racing. Revolutionary times cry out for greater boldness.

The NPR is responsible and balanced, but it’s not bold. Oddly missing is the sense that we’re living in transformational times—odd, because that’s a major theme in the Biden administration’s national defence strategy, released on the same day as the NPR. It also states that hedging against uncertainty will no longer be ‘a formal role’ of nuclear weapons. What? We’re sliding into a decade riddled with uncertainty, a decade that will decide the future of the world order for many years to come, but US nuclear weapons are no longer a hedge against uncertainty?

So, what’s the balance overall? Well, Biden deserves credit for holding the line on modernisation; for fighting off those who wanted to move to a dyad, or to a no-first-use or a sole-purpose declaration; and for supporting stronger extended deterrence arrangements with allies. In short, he deserves credit for guiding the NPR through a relatively unsupportive political environment. But, strategically, this NPR looks too timid for current-day settings. It fiddles at the margins with US declaratory policy and nuclear forces at a time when Russia and China are moving much more aggressively—Russia to fight wars of conquest under the nuclear shadow; China to triple the size of its nuclear arsenal.

These are difficult days, the harbinger of an even more difficult future, and US nuclear policy must adapt to address those new challenges.

Two concepts of nuclear sharing

Suddenly and unexpectedly, a small but intense debate has ignited in Australia over an unlikely topic—the wisdom of acquiring an indigenous nuclear weapons arsenal. (Some of the contributions to that debate can be found here, here, here, here, here and here.) One of the more novel contributions was made in a recent post on the Lowy Institute’s blog, The Interpreter. The author, Peter Layton, suggested that Australia ought to consider the merits of ‘nuclear sharing’, either by deliberately strengthening its extended nuclear deterrence arrangements with the US or—more audaciously—by buying its way into a share of the British nuclear arsenal.

While his post examines both alternatives, it’s clear Peter favours ‘going British’. But at first glance there’d seem to be some serious hurdles in the way. For one thing, Australia still wouldn’t have full control over its own nuclear arsenal. Indeed, we’d be paying more—a lot more—to mimic an arrangement that the US already has with some of its key allies, but with a partner possessing a much smaller nuclear arsenal that’s typically deployed in the north Atlantic. Further, we wouldn’t be bringing anything to the table in terms of actual nuclear sharing; the Brits would be doing that, since it’s their arsenal. All we’d be sharing is money.

So I’d like to use this post to unpack two concepts of nuclear sharing: the kind we already enjoy as a US ally, and the kind we might be more interested in pursuing if we really were intending to proliferate.

Let’s start with the first. US allies around the world that benefit from US extended nuclear assurance participate in a range of supportive activities intended to strengthen the credibility of that assurance and to share the risks associated with nuclear deterrence. Some allies host US nuclear warheads. Some host the aircraft that would deliver those warheads. Some support nuclear operations by providing aerial refuelling or air defence for nuclear-armed aircraft. And some contribute less directly: Australia, for example, has long been a contributor to US strategic command and control, rather than to the weapons systems themselves.

This form of nuclear sharing makes the benefits of nuclear deterrence more widely available to US allies—and aims to forestall proliferation among a group of advanced Western countries that could, if they chose, cross the nuclear threshold with relative ease.

The second form of nuclear sharing—the form currently practised by North Korea and Iran—covers a set of activities intended to lift both parties over the nuclear threshold. Cooperation is typically built on the basis of a shared strategic agenda—as when China helped Pakistan with nuclear weapons design to frustrate India, for example.

This second form of sharing is anathema to many—because it smacks of proliferation rings, nuclear smuggling and illicit technology transfers. And, let’s be honest, sometimes the ‘sharing’ is involuntary; several nuclear weapons programs have depended on stolen information and technology. Still, as Jack Boureston and James Russell observe dryly, ‘None of today’s nine nuclear weapons states achieved their status without the assistance from people, information, equipment and/or sensitive technology that came from somewhere else.’ Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman, in their book The nuclear express, argue that all current nuclear programs have, over time, turned upon a shared pool of knowledge that can be traced back to the Manhattan Project—a research effort in which ‘less than a quarter of the senior technical staff at wartime Los Alamos, New Mexico, were native-born American citizens’.

In short, when the need to proliferate is strong, nuclear sharing (of this second kind) makes sense. Proliferating is hard work. Sharing the burden with others typically hastens the process by broadening both the human capital and the technological skill set upon which the potential proliferator can draw.

What might sharing arrangements involve? Well, in principle, they might occur across the full range of activities necessary to build, deploy and sustain a nuclear arsenal. There are opportunities for cooperation in acquiring fissile materials, designing and fabricating nuclear devices, testing nuclear weapons, constructing delivery vehicles, supporting each other’s nuclear operations, and so on. Parties to a sharing agreement might feasibly devise a cooperative venture at any point along that spectrum. They might cooperate on uranium enrichment, for example, but not on anything else. Similarly, they might cooperate on bomb design, or on nuclear testing, but not on delivery vehicles. Or they might cooperate only on delivery vehicles, steering clear of the more sensitive areas of cooperation.

Why is it worth thinking about this second form of nuclear sharing? For the simple reason that it might be about to enjoy a seminal revival. The first form of nuclear sharing is a core part of the global order forged by the US since the early days of the Cold War. While US alliances continue and extended nuclear deterrence endures, US allies have less incentive to proliferate. The second form gives us a picture of what a post-alliance world might look like.

In that world the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty might not hold. For a number of states, a program of technical cooperation with a friend or partner would then offer the fastest route to successful proliferation. Some of those might see Australia, which has a record of close nuclear cooperation with both the UK and the US, as a potential partner for their own endeavours—despite the relatively underdeveloped nature of our nuclear sector.

Moreover, the shoe might well be on the other foot: in a darker Asian strategic environment, we might be the ones soliciting closer nuclear-sharing arrangements. If we were keen to proliferate quickly, where might we look for assistance?