- by William Briggs
- The Guardian
- Issue #2116
B-52H Stratofortress. Photo: Alan Wilson – flickr.com (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Once more the Albanese government has made it clear that the interests of Australia, its sovereignty and independence, are irrelevant. The interests and security of the Australian people and the region come a very poor second to the government’s commitment to the USA. There is only one interest worth pursuing and that is the US ‘alliance.’
It has just been revealed that the Albanese government has given the green light for American B-52H Stratofortress bombers to be based at Tindal RAAF base in the Northern Territory. What is significant about these bombers is that they are capable of carrying and deploying strategic nuclear weapons.
The US-funded expansion of the Tindal base radically alters the status quo. By hosting nuclear-weapons capable B-52 aircraft, and providing extensive operational mission support, Australia will, for the first time in history, be giving support for potential combat-missions using nuclear weapons.
Any government that even pretends to have the interests of the people at heart would demand the right to know whether the bombers are nuclear armed or not. A statement from the Albanese government waived this right, saying that it both “understands and respects” the US doctrine to neither confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons on US aircraft.
This revelation was made in a report for the Nautilus Institute, a progressive public policy think tank that seeks to address critical security and sustainability issues with a view to promoting a peaceful future. The authors, academics Vince Scappatura and Richard Tanter have produced a detailed, reliable and transparent document. Their research came from readily accessible open sources. The government, however, failed to take advantage of these same sources. They owed it to the people of this country to do so and to let us know where we are being led.
Under current Australian law, there is no legal or even policy barrier that might limit US aircraft carrying nuclear weapons from entering the country. The ‘respect’ that our government gives the US for not feeling any obligation to confirm that Australia is aiding and abetting potential nuclear strikes from an Australian air-force base is out of step with how things play out in other countries. To cite just one important example, the USA, under the conditions of the New Start Treaty that came into force in 2011, is obliged to provide Russia with just the sort of information that our government feels it cannot ask for.
The report is particularly relevant because it takes away a degree of the unknown that goes with a refusal to be ‘straight’ with an ally. Scappatura and Tanter offer an explanation of how nuclear capable aircraft can be identified. The term ‘Visual Guide’ is used. As the report says, this “Visual Guide applies strict classification and confidence criteria to open-source photography to identify each B-52H bomber in the US Air Force active fleet as nuclear-capable or conventional-only.” This is important, but our government has wilfully chosen to ignore and deny its significance. After all, if your valued “friend and ally” is not prepared to be open with you, it would seem reasonable to make a few checks of your own. That is not about to happen.
When Minister for Defence, Richard Marles, can fawningly and publicly say to his American counterpart, Lloyd Austin, at the recent AUSMIN meeting that “we could not be happier with the extent of your presence in the Indo-Pacific. It’s been wonderful – genuinely wonderful – and for that, we thank you … but of course, your alliance with us is completely central to our worldview, to our national security,” then we all know just how craven our government has become.
Things were not always this way. In the 1970s, during the prime ministership of the conservative Malcolm Fraser, a strong sense of national sovereignty existed. The USA was welcome to use Australian bases but a ‘Fraser Model’ or code of conduct was put in place. It was a simple case of the US being required to inform us about what sort of armaments their aircraft were carrying. The protocol had a clause that made it necessary for the government to them keep the people informed. How scrupulous the ‘truth-telling’ might have been is another matter but the intent was there.
The report points out that the Fraser government made it a condition of the alliance that B-52 operations in Australia, including landings in Darwin, were approved on the express condition that they be “unarmed and carried no bombs.”
The Albanese government in its subservience to the dictates of America has made a stark choice. Scappatura and Tanter make it clear things need not be that way. Their report provides essential information regarding the nuclear capability of the B-52 bombers that will be using Tindal base. The government should have made this information available to the public. It should be obliged to share this with the other signatory states of the Treaty of Rarotonga. These Pacific Island nations, so patronisingly referred to by Australia as the “Pacific family” along with Australia, signed a treaty in 1985, committing each state and the region to maintaining a nuclear-free status as part of a campaign for a nuclear-weapons free world.
Our government could have done what the authors of the report did, but it pointedly failed to do so. It is one more damning indictment, not merely of the subservience of our government to the USA, but shows of just how far to the right mainstream Australian political structures have moved.
Young people reject AUKUS
According to a US Studies Centre poll, obtained by Crikey, only 14 per cent of people aged 18-34 strongly agreed that it’s a good idea for Australia to have nuclear-powered submarines. The number goes up for the 35-64 age group, in which 17 per cent strongly agreed.
Overall, 52 per cent of those polled thought AUKUS would give Australia no choice about joining the US in armed conflict. 39 per cent of respondents overall thought AUKUS wasn’t worth the expense involved ($368 billion at least).
The report’s co-author, Ava Kalinauskus described the results as unsurprising, telling Crikey that young people “are more likely to care about issues like climate change rather than defence or security.”
We’re not so sure that the 62 per cent of young people who think AUKUS is a bad idea don’t care about defence and security. A lot of people – not all of them young – are against AUKUS because they care about our security and defence. AUKUS makes the country less secure and harder to defend.
FK
