- by Peter Farmer
- The Guardian
- Issue #2105
By the time you read this everybody will have had a gutful of Peter Dutton’s idea of building nuclear reactors around the country while crippling action on renewables. For Dutton nuclear power, is a transparent delaying tactic designed for mainly the purpose of delaying action on climate change.
For a lot of the 20th Century, ‘nuclear’ meant the other sort – nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons used to be a major concern. Now we only need to worry about climate change, right?
Wrong. The fact that most people aren’t thinking about nuclear weapons does not make those weapons go away. The nuclear weapons that were on everybody’s minds during the 1980s and earlier are all still there. In fact they’re worse, and the relations between the countries that have them are worse.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) all nine nuclear-armed states are modernising their weapons, relying on those weapons more, and boosting spending on them.
The nine nuclear states are the USA, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, France, the UK, Israel, and the DPRK (North Korea). Together, those countries spent US $91.4 billion (AU$137 billion) on their nukes in 2023. That was an increase of $10.7 billion. The USA made up 80 per cent of the increase.
Unsurprisingly the US spends more on nuclear weapons in total than the other eight nuclear-armed nations put together.
Alicia Sanders-Zakre of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has made the obvious point that the spending “is not improving global security.”
Another worrying trend is that, according to SIPRI, there is less transparency regarding nuclear forces in both Russia and the US, who own most of the deployed missiles.
Last year, Russia suspended its participation in the New Start nuclear treaty, after Washington suspended its ‘bilateral strategic stability dialogue’ with Russia. This is serious stuff; the nuclear treaties did a lot of things that made the world less dangerous, like getting the major nuclear powers talking with each other, warning each other of accidents, as well as limiting development of new forms of nuclear weapons.
Australia is not a bystander here. Australia does not have nuclear missiles, it’s true, although our radar stations and the US bases here have a role to play in the US nuclear arsenal. So does the runway at RAAF Base Tindal, which can now support nuclear-armed bombers, thanks to us spending millions upgrading it.
The AUKUS alliance is supposedly for our safety, the idea being that becoming even more a working part of the US military will mean that Washington protects us from China. The Guardian has explained many times why the idea of being protected from China is a furphy – we don’t need protection from a friendly nation which is our major trading partner, has exactly one base outside its borders, and which has a win-win approach to foreign relations.
If the Albanese government really cared about our safety they would be demanding that Washington restart its bilateral strategic stability dialogue with Russia. While they’re at it, they should ask the USA to accept China’s offer to have a ‘no first use’ policy. That’s right, Beijing has made it clear it’s prepared to commit to not being the first to use nuclear weapons, but Washington has knocked them back.
There’s a lot our government could do about the threat of nuclear war. They’re not doing it.
