A US allegation that China conducted a secret nuclear test was widely reported despite clear evidence to the contrary, highlighting how security claims are too often treated as facts before they are proven.

There used to be a simple rule in newsrooms: allegation is not evidence.

It’s not that difficult to understand. You just don’t treat a claim as a fact until someone, somewhere, had actually proven it.

Lately, though, this rule seems to have acquired a quiet footnote: for example, allegation from our sheriff is probably close enough.

Recently, the United States alleged that China secretly ran a nuclear weapon test six years ago, as a senior American official stood up at a Geneva disarmament conference and gave a date – 22 June, 2020. Our most trusted public broadcaster, the ABC, quickly carried the Reuters wire. While our major private network, Sky News, brought in a former defence official to explain why it all sounded plausible.

Neither mentioned the most trustworthy organisation on Earth whose sole job is to detect nuclear explosions.

And that’s the problem.

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO), operates a global sensor network – seismic, acoustic, atmospheric – purpose-built to catch covert nuclear tests. It is how we know when North Korea tests. It is how we would know if anyone else did.

On 22 June, 2020, it detected nothing. The organisation said so plainly on its own website: “the CTBTO’s IMS did not detect any event consistent with the characteristics of a nuclear weapon test explosion at that time. Subsequent, more detailed analyses have not altered that determination.”

The CTBTO published this the day before the ABC story ran. Finding it required roughly the same effort as checking the weather.

No seismic signal. No radionuclide trace. No anomaly consistent with a nuclear explosion.

But that would have complicated things. And complicated stories are harder to run than clean allegations wrapped in allied authority.

And that’s how the familiar script played out.

Washington alleges. Beijing denies. Analysts explain gravely why China’s nuclear modernisation makes the claim plausible. And before anyone quite notices, the question shifts from “did this happen?” to “what does it mean for regional stability?”

The allegation becomes the fact. Everyone reports around it.

Sky News was the more direct one of the two, and guest expert Peter Jennings even extended the claim: China is modernising its nuclear arsenal, and testing certainly makes sense.

That’s how plausibility quietly slides into presumption, and even asking for evidence feels almost impolite.

The ABC was calmer. But calm is not scrutiny. Carrying a wire does not relieve an editor of the most basic question: did the global nuclear monitoring network register an explosion?

It did not. Because there was nothing to register.

This is not about one bad news cycle. It just points to an embarrassing reflex, which is so ingrained it barely registers: when Washington speaks on security, its claims arrive Australian newsrooms preloaded with credibility – not because they are verified, but because of who is speaking.

The burden of proof shifts quietly. China is expected to disprove the allegation. The United States only has to state it.

Here’s the thing: you can’t fake a nuclear blast. It’s not a matter of ‘he-said, she-said’ or political spin. You’re talking about a massive physical rupture that leaves a fingerprint on the planet. It leaves measurable traces. Instruments designed specifically to detect those traces sit across the globe, run by an independent international body. When those instruments report nothing, that should carry, at least equal weight as a podium statement from our sheriff.

Actually, we have been here before. The last time our sheriff’s allegations about weapons of mass destruction were treated as near-facts, we joined a war built on evidence that never materialised. Hundreds of thousands died. A country was shattered. The mission was never quite completed, only rebranded.

History rarely repeats exactly. But it leaves patterns.

Good journalism is supposed to ask the unfashionable question: what does the evidence actually show?

In this case, the evidence – public, independently gathered, and available to anyone with a search bar – showed nothing consistent with a nuclear test.

That was the story.

Our major media outfits, both public and private, ran with the allegation instead.