Pearls and Irritations

By entering the AUKUS Partnership in 2021, Australia has undertaken to co-operate with the United States and the United Kingdom, two nuclear-weapon states, with objectives that include acquiring nuclear-powered submarines that would be armed with conventional weapons. This has the potential to weaken both the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), by setting a damaging precedent for other states, and the Treaty of Rarotonga.

The Albanese Government has told delegates at the Australian Labor Party National Conference that Australia’s planned acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines is necessary to ‘deter aggression’. The Minister for Defence, Richard Marles, argued too that ‘making our contribution to the collective security of our region and to the maintenance of the global rules-based order … is at the heart of Australia’s strategic intent …’

This article argues that strengthening alliances, as the AUKUS Partnership intends, and participating in a project of nuclear deterrence may not contribute to the objective of collective security. In participating in AUKUS Australia is treading a fine line: it is acquiring nuclear-powered submarines but at the same time strengthening an alliance with a nuclear state. This will not necessarily achieve collective security and a rules-based order but may undermine it. This proposition can be illustrated by examining the working of nuclear deterrence since 1945.

It is important to establish that collective security is not the same as deterrence. Rather, as Inis Claude has shown, collective security was the dominant preoccupation of most of the twentieth century. It has security as its objective, collective as the nature of the means and system as the institutional component in the form of the international organisation that developed gradually from the Great War onward. Collective security, moreover, was developed specifically to counter the problem identified by liberals like US President Woodrow Wilson that rigid alliances between states could undermine stability and produce great wars.

The system of nuclear deterrence developed during the Cold War and was buttressed by a system of US regional alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and ANZUS. After the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, military strategist Bernard Brodie argued that the atomic bomb (and later the nuclear weapon) had fundamentally changed the nature of warfare.

In his seminal work, The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, Brodie outlined a theory of nuclear deterrence in a world where more than one state possessed nuclear weapons, as became the case after 1949. Brodie concluded that nuclear weapon states having an assured second-strike ability—the capacity to retaliate after a first strike—would prevent the outbreak of wars or their escalation. This was because no state would be prepared risk launching a preemptive strike.

Later, other theorists argued that nuclear deterrence prevented war and some even recommended proliferation of nuclear weapons—the argument that everyone should have them.

This was not how US policymakers thought and acted during the Cold War. The United States amassed a nuclear arsenal and delivery systems in a triad—land-based missiles, long-range bombers, and, from 1957, nuclear-powered submarines armed with ballistic missiles—in its arms race with the Soviet Union. At the same time, however, it consistently sought to prevent proliferation of the weapons among its adversaries and its allies too.

This culminated in 1968 when the United States co-operated with its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, to establish the greatest arms control measure adopted since World War II, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Under the treaty, participating nuclear weapon states undertook not to provide the technology of the bomb to other states and to co-operate in furthering the goal of nuclear disarmament. For their part, non-nuclear weapon states, such as Australia and West Germany, agreed not to acquire them.

Although some Australian policymakers did not want to surrender an ability to acquire nuclear weapons, the Whitlam Government ratified the NPT in 1973. It has been a cornerstone of Australian security since. For half a century, Australia has belonged to a region where states do not threaten each other with nuclear weapons as is the case on the Indian sub-continent. Arguably, the greatest contribution the United States made to the obsolescence of major war was not deterrence but the success of its non-proliferation endeavours. This can be measured by the relatively limited number of states that now have nuclear weapons.

In the 1980s, Australia augmented the NPT by joining with other Pacific states to sign the Treaty of Rarotonga, which formalised a nuclear-weapon-free-zone in the South Pacific. The signatories agreed not to manufacture, station or test nuclear weapons in their zone; not to use them against parties to the treaty; and not to test within the zone.

By entering the AUKUS Partnership in 2021, Australia has undertaken to co-operate with the United States and the United Kingdom, two nuclear-weapon states, with objectives that include acquiring nuclear-powered submarines that would be armed with conventional weapons. This has the potential to weaken both the NPT, by setting a damaging precedent for other states, and the Treaty of Rarotonga.

Other aspects of the theory of nuclear deterrence based on assumptions of rational decision makers and making credible threats of deploying nuclear weapons, if they became necessary, came under intense questioning during the Cold War.

In the Berlin dispute from 1958 to 1962, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev threatened the Western occupied sectors of Berlin in East Germany, the US mobilised its nuclear forces, thereby risking a war that could have killed tens of millions of people to defend a conventionally indefensible portion of a city hundreds of kilometres inside enemy territory. This was against an enemy whose stake in the contest was arguably greater since it had the core objective of stopping West Germany acquiring the bomb, an objective obtained later with the NPT.

In the even more dangerous Cuban Missiles Crisis of 1962, Khrushchev stretched the bounds of ‘rationality’ in decision-making by stationing missiles in Communist Cuba and pushing US President John F. Kennedy into a game of brinkmanship which might easily have escalated into a catastrophic global conflict. Avoidance of war came about more through good luck and the admirable restraint by Kennedy of his military advisers than by the success of deterrence.

If Australia wishes to contribute to the laudable objective of deterring the outbreak of war between two great powers, its major ally, the United States, and its most important economic partner, China, acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines at exorbitant cost is not the answer. If successful, Australia may gain an additional capability but at the same time we may weaken collective security by strengthening an alliance system with a nuclear state that operates the same nuclear deterrence strategy that risked nuclear catastrophe last century.

It is preferable for Australia to retain a conventional navy and its tested regional defence strategy and not weaken either the NPT regime, one of the greatest bulwarks of its security, or its relationships with neighbours. Rather than participating in any contest between the great powers that carries the risk of dangerous escalation and catastrophic conflict, Australia should continue to work to promote nuclear disarmament under the NPT and to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Finally, as former Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bob Carr, has argued, Australia must make clear, as some argue had been made implicit in the AUKUS Partnership, that it will not join the United States in any war with China over Taiwan.

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