The return of Donald Trump to the White House has had multiple repercussions for international security. His desire for a rapprochement with Russia over Ukraine and disdain for the United States’ traditional European allies suggests the end of Washington”s role as Europe”s “offshore balancer.” In Asia, as Ben Bland of Chatham House put it, “Trump”s transactional, bullying style” has “intensified fears about U.S. abandonment” among U.S. allies and induced a “growing sense of fatalism about China”s rise to regional dominance.” As if that weren’t enough, his chaotic on-again, off-again tariff war threatens to unravel the global trading order. In short, under Trump the United States has become a “renegade” superpower unconstrained by rules as it “stokes global chaos” in pursuit of “power, profit, and unilateral advantage,” as Hal Brands wrote for Foreign Affairs.
Prominent Australian commentator Clive Hamilton has asserted that in “this period of American madness” Australia ought to consider “building our own nuclear deterrent.” For Hamilton, the need for this is obvious given that “Beijing has made it clear,” through such actions as the recent circumnavigation of Australia by a Chinese naval task group, “that it regards the entire Asia-Pacific, including Australia, as its exclusive sphere of influence.”
Absent U.S. extended deterrence, Hamilton contended, Australia has only three options: “We can say we never needed it [deterrence] anyway and rely on ‘diplomacy’ for security. We can wait two decades for the new submarines to arrive, hoping they won’t be strategically redundant. Or we can put the money into building our own nuclear deterrent.”
This is an ill-informed set of arguments that reflects an increasing predilection in Australian national debate to look for silver bullets to resolve policy problems.
First, the starting assumption of Hamilton”s argument that Australia has had a security guarantee from the United States is incorrect. The ANZUS Treaty does not provide any explicit security guarantee – nuclear or otherwise – to Australia. There is merely a commitment under Article III of the treaty that its parties will “consult together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific.”
Second, the notion that Australia could acquire a credible nuclear deterrent faster than it can acquire nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS is simply wishful thinking. How will Canberra obtain the necessary fissile material to construct a nuclear bomb? Yes, Australia has large reserves of natural uranium, but it does not have full nuclear fuel cycle capabilities, such as an uranium enrichment industry, necessary to produce the highly-enriched uranium required for weaponization. Australia also has no existing civilian nuclear industry, nor the requisite scientific and industrial base, that could be leveraged for a “crash” nuclear weapons program. Then there is the no small matter of testing and weaponization.
Third, even if these substantial scientific and industrial obstacles could be overcome, how would Australia’s presumably small nuclear arsenal be made credible as a deterrent to China? This entails answering key questions about what the employment guidance for the nuclear arsenal would be, what force size and composition Australia would employ, and what declaratory policy it would adopt.
These questions matter, as nuclear strategy expert Vipin Narang noted, not only because nuclear weapons “deter unequally as a function of a state’s nuclear posture” but because “contrary to conventional wisdom, there is little evidence that mere possession of nuclear weapons – or even secure second-strike forces – systematically deters conventional conflict.”
Fourth, beyond these scientific-industrial and strategic considerations, a decision to acquire nuclear weapons would do considerable damage to Australia’s diplomacy and international reputation. Foreign Minister Penny Wong has asserted categorically that “countries like us need an international system that constrains power with rules.” Yet a decision to acquire nuclear weapons would both make Australia a hypocrite – as acquisition would necessarily entail abrogating Canberra’s commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – and at a stroke shred decades of Australian activism as a champion of arms control and non-proliferation.
These are not mere discretionary niceties to be bargained away for the questionable security benefits of acquiring nuclear weapons. This is particularly the case if one recognizes that successive Australian governments since the 1970s have assessed that Australia’s commitments to both the NPT and efforts to strengthen international controls on the spread of nuclear technology have been important steps to proliferation-proof the region.
In short, nuclear weapons acquisition by Australia is neither as easily attainable nor as beneficial to the country’s security as some would have us think.