Building the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine is an Anglosphere quest for a military capability to serve Australia’s life in the Indo-Pacific. As an Anglosphere answer to an Asian future, AUKUS asks questions about Australian identity as well as strategic ambition.
Military kilt is powerful, indeed, if it touches the way a nation sees itself. A huge technical challenge, with price-tag to match, sails Australia through the geopolitics of its past as it seeks Indo-Pacific balance.
Ahead of AUKUS’s third birthday on 15 September, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia held a symposium on the “assumptions and implications” of AUKUS. The Canberra conference’s wittiest Anglosphere line was from Professor James Curran, quoting a French government official: “I can understand why you went back to Uncle Sam, but I cannot understand why you have gone back to Mummy.”
Uncle Sam and the Mother Country ask about the relative weight of Asia and the Anglosphere (and relative has dual meanings). As a naval project, AUKUS fits the maritime mindset of the Anglosphere Ways of War and its key rule: the top dog has to put to sea.
At the symposium, one of our great public intellectual economists, Ross Garnaut, a former Australian ambassador to China, observed that Australia drawing closer to US defence and strategic policy “has had positive elements, but has also contributed to reduced intensity of interaction with our closer neighbours. Some strands of support for AUKUS can be seen as a contemporary reflection of yearning for security in the old and familiar changing world. Some can be understood as an attempt to come to grips with new realities of power”.
Garnaut worried that the Anglosphere dimension doesn’t reflect today’s diverse Australia: “I think it’s a risk for our government and security elite; there’s a danger they will presume old perspectives can be sustained. But when it comes to the point, they may find not all of the people are behind them.”
The former Labor foreign minister, Gareth Evans, said AUKUS is “one of the worst defence and foreign policy decisions our country has made.” He said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s preoccupation is “avoiding being wedged as weak on security”, Defence Minister Richard Marles’s “love for the US is so dewy-eyed as to defy parody”, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong is “unwilling to rock the boat”.
Evans judged that: (1) There is zero certainty of the timely delivery of the eight AUKUS boats. (2) Even with the superior nuclear-powered capability, usual operating constraints would “mean having only two boats deployable at any one time.” (3) The “eye-watering cost” of AUKUS will mean “a dramatic increase in the defence share of GDP.” (4) “Integrated deterrence” means Australia “will have no choice but to join the US in fighting any future war in which it chooses to engage anywhere in the Indo-Pacific”. (5) “The purchase price we are now paying, for all its exorbitance, will never be enough to guarantee the absolute protective insurance that supporters of AUKUS think they are buying.”
Curran, the professor of modern history at Sydney University and international editor for the Financial Review, said Australia is now locked into US grand strategy for Asia with submarines that will be used in any war over Taiwan. Along with the effort for US military “interchangeability”, he said, Washington could no longer talk of Canberra having “splinters in its backside from sitting on the fence”. Curran said the change in the Australian debate is that “talk of Australia acting outside the alliance is sacrilege”.
The military dimension of AUKUS comes down to the old defence kit debate about cost versus capability. The cost equation drove Professor Hugh White’s thinking, while the superior capability of nuclear-power boats was argued by retired Australian rear admiral Peter Clarke.
Looking at the AUD$368 billion estimated cost of AUKUS, the “spurious precision” of that final eight billion drew a wry smile from White, as he mounted the case that Australia has better ways to spend the money. For the price of eight AUKUS boats, White said, Australia could buy a fleet of 40 conventional subs, and this difference in numbers trumps the advantage of nuclear propulsion.
Peter Clarke commanded both diesel and nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Navy before joining the Australian Navy. When it comes to stealth, speed, and capability, he argued, there’s no comparison. A nuclear-powered submarine that fires its torpedoes, Clarke said, has a far better chance of getting away than a conventional boat. He quoted British estimates that the difference is three-to-one – meaning that a conventional boat was unlikely to return from its first attack mission.
Australia faces a submarine capability gap, even if the life-of-type extension for the current Collins class boats is successful. That gap must drive the AUKUS commitment, Clarke argued, “We are not in a good situation. There’s going to be a capability gap. I don’t think buying a commercial sub is the answer. I think we have got to focus on getting this nuclear sub right.”
While Canberra has made a treaty commitment to store AUKUS nuclear waste, Professor Maria Rost Rublee told the conference that Australia is yet to create a “social licence” for storage and meet the requirements for sovereign ready. The Melbourne University international relations professor said if Australia can’t become sovereign ready, which includes a strong nuclear stewardship culture, the US and UK will not transfer the technology: “This weighs heavily on Australian minds.”
What constitutes appropriate safety and risk for long-term storage of military-grade nuclear waste from nuclear-powered submarines, she said, is not just a technical issue, but a social and political decision. “This is not going to be easy. The technical and geological problems can be solved,” Rublee said. “There have been many proposals around the world for nuclear waste storage. All of them fail for lack of social licence.”
The government declaration that Australia’s storage will be on defence land can’t avoid issues of community consent and understanding, Rublee said, pointing to the many failed attempts around the world to establish long-term nuclear storage sites. She noted those unsuccessful efforts had created an acronym for the storage failure: DADA. The DADA cycle is to Decide on a site, Announce, and then Defend against community resistance that eventually leads to Abandon.
AUKUS will give Australia many versions of the DADA test: old strategic habits of mind, our Indo-Pacific geography, and a nuclear waste “lifecycle” responsibility stretching far into our future.
A journalist since 1971, Graeme Dobell is a fellow of the AIIA.
This article has been corrected at the request of the author.
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