Pearls and Irritations

US attack submarines operating from Australia could be armed with US nuclear weapons at the stroke of a presidential decision; and US strategic bombers based in Australia could be nuclear-armed, as in fact USAF nuclear safety regulations permit in crisis already.

I was asked to speak today about ‘AUKUS and non- proliferation’ – which is already in itself a problem – because the standard and overly simple conceptions of what constitutes nuclear proliferation obscure the nuclear reality Australia has placed itself in.

The three AUKUS submarine projects are but a part of a wider restructuring of the place of Australia in United States alliance arrangements that might be termed ‘AUKUS-plus”.

Beyond the well-documented strategic, fiscal and defence capability risks and travails of the submarines projects, AUKUS-plus centres on Australian embrace of US-auspiced doctrines of ‘integrated deterrence’ to reshape Australia’s force posture through heightened integration with US combatant commands – including IndoPacific Command, Space Command, and indeed Cyber Command.

Witness, for example

• AUKUS submarine bases east and west
• integration of space surveillance capabilities at North West Cape with US planning for space warfare, yet more expansion of Pine Gap,
• rotational deployment of B-52 nuclear-capable bombers to RAAF Base Tindal
• dedicated USAF infrastructure at other northern airbases, and
• hard wiring of Australian defence facilities into US networks, such as the integration of the Delamere Air Weapons Range into a single trans-Pacific virtual and material coalition air, space, and cyber weapons range stretching from Australia to Alaska.

These shifts are critical to understanding where Australia stands in relation to nuclear proliferation, but are obscured by conventional thinking about nuclear proliferation in terms of ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ dimensions.
Horizontal proliferation is usually reduced to the question which countries have the bomb or seek to acquire it. This ‘who’s got the bomb?’ discourse is famously flawed by double standards.

We can’t stop talking about the dangers of actual or potentially outliers like North Korea and Iran, and we cannot begin to start talking about the dangers posed by Israel as the fifth or sixth largest nuclear weapons state.
Even more conceptually underdeveloped, ‘vertical proliferation’ is usually presented as a matter of a nuclear weapons state having more bombs or building better bombs, with side glances to the nuclear energy infrastructure underpinning weapons acquisition.

In reality, vertical proliferation properly understood includes acquisition and distribution of critical ‘non-nuclear’ infrastructure that enables use of nuclear weapons.

In the US case, this includes globally-distributed technologies of support for nuclear operations, including delivery systems, command, control, communication and intelligence capabilities (NC3I), precision-strike targeting, space-based surveillance and missile defence.

These are the underpinnings and capabilities without which ‘the bomb itself’ is effectively irrelevant.

For Australia, there are two salient modes of our involvement in US nuclear proliferation:

• The hard materiality of military bases, delivery systems, bases, logistics, and so on, that underpin the extraordinary velocity of which US military activities are capable.
• The dematerialised (but not wholly – sensors, computers and satellites are decidedly material) Herzian landscape of globally distributed NC3I facilities linking Washington and combatant commands to sensors and computers by globe-spanning optical fibre and satellite communications.

Australia’s nuclear posture has long been replete with elements of US vertical nuclear proliferation, and is now moving to more direct involvement in US nuclear operations.

• Historically, our specialisation has been hosting NC3I – Pine Gap and in the past Nurrungar, North West Cape submarine communications, seismic detection of nuclear weapons, and so on.
• The AUKUS submarine projects are strategically explicable only as a (marginal) contribution to nullifying China’s secure second strike nuclear force on its currently small number of ballistic missile submarines – themselves the essence of a plausible Chinese deterrent capability. The AUKUS debate has by and largely ignored the threat to this capability to which Australia is committing itself, with all its attendant risks– possibly the most destabilising contribution to ‘the ‘nuclear balance’ that Australia could possibly make.
• The nuclear-capable strategic bomber deployments – currently for Tindal, and most likely other nuclear-capable bomber types to other airfields in due course – will launch from Australian bases, critically enabled by an RAAF protective screen of F-35s and early warning and control aircraft, and a fleet of refuelling tankers. The B-52 bomber deployment magnifies risk further by the Australian government’s positive embrace of entanglement of nuclear-capable and conventionally armed strategic weapons platforms at the one base. How is China to distinguish what B-52s are coming their way?

Australian deepening involvement with properly understood US vertical proliferation is a geographic kind of ‘horizontal’ proliferation, deepening our involvement in US nuclear operations.

And there may be more to come.

Australia may not yet be hosting US nuclear weapons, but recall that there are currently no legal or policy impediments to the introduction of nuclear weapons into Australia.

On the basis of Australia’s involvement with both US NC3I and active base support for strategic power projection, and the compromised sovereignty of our defence decision-making exemplified by the AUKUS catastrophic policy process, it is now possible to conceive two future plausible Australian pathways to US nuclear weapons in Australia, based on straightforward changes of current US policy:

• US attack submarines operating from Australia could be armed with US nuclear weapons at the stroke of a presidential decision; and
• US strategic bombers based in Australia could be nuclear-armed, as in fact USAF nuclear safety regulations permit in crisis already.
• These are not fanciful considerations – certainly conceivable, technically and politically, and not implausible.

Panel presentation by Professor Richard Tanter to the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia Conference, AUKUS: Assumptions & Implications, Canberra, 16 August 2024

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