In the late 1960s and early '70s, Australian strategic policy underwent two transformations. Conventionally, fears about the concurrent retrenchment of British and American power led Canberra — for the first time in its history — to begin shedding its strategic dependence in favour of a more self-reliant defence policy.
In the nuclear realm, things went in the exact opposite direction. Whereas Canberra had spent parts of the 1960s in active, if sporadic, pursuit of its nuclear ambitions — first by lobbying the British to supply ready-made nuclear weapons, later by devising plans for an indigenous uranium enrichment capability — by the early 1970s, Australian had reversed course. With a change of government and the advent of détente and a global arms-control regime, nuclear plans were shelved, the NPT signed and Canberra's place under the US nuclear umbrella reoccupied and reserved indefinitely.
The legacy of this episode is an enduring tension in Australian strategic policy. On the one hand, Canberra is committed to defence self-reliance, defined by the 2009 White Paper as the ability to 'deter and defeat armed attacks on Australia...without relying on the combat or combat support forces of other countries.' Yet against the threat of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, the most destructive weapons of all, the operational employment of which could have a devastating effect without warning and in a single strike, Australia remains entirely dependent on the US for extended nuclear deterrence.
Is this a viable strategy? Is it prudent? Or is END an article of faith, as some of Australia's best strategists have suggested, fated to obsolescence by the ongoing transformation of the regional strategic order and the fluid nuclear landscape this entails?
There are a number of reasons to be pessimistic. To begin with, Australia's nuclear dilemma reflects a broader problem in its alliance relations with the US, which I've explored elsewhere. The dual risks of abandonment and entrapment, common to all alliances, sharpen as the distribution of world power shifts, with important implications for the credibility of America's nuclear umbrella.
The risks of entrapment arise in two forms. At a general level, Canberra's strategic dependence on Washington, including for END, circumscribes its ability to dissent from American policies that may not accord with Australian interests. Cognisant of its privileged place under the US nuclear umbrella — and of its limited range of alternatives, should END be withdrawn in the event of Australian non-compliance (a la New Zealand circa 1984-1987) — Canberra could find itself dragged into a costly war alongside the US that its fortuitous strategic geography might otherwise allow it to avoid.
More directly, the joint facilities that Australia hosts as a quid-pro-quo for US nuclear assurances — critical as they are to America's intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance network — could present as valuable targets in major war that, by virtue of their distance from Northeast Asia, only nuclear-tipped ICBMs may be reliably assured of destroying.
This may sound rather fantastic, yet it's not a consideration that Australian defence planners can automatically discount. Moreover, there is a historical basis to such concerns. As former defence minister Kim Beazley once noted in the context of the Cold War, 'we accepted that the joint facilities were probably targets, but we accepted the risk of that for what we saw as the benefits of global stability.'
These concerns notwithstanding, it is the risks associated with abandonment that are the most acute. Credible nuclear deterrence operates on the basis of a defending state's threat — through some combination of explicit pronouncements and the deployment of nuclear capabilities — to impose intolerable costs on an attacker, thereby preventing the attacker from using nuclear weapons against the defender's ally. By contrast to conventional deterrence, where risks are generally limited, nuclear deterrence relies on the defender — in this case, the US — conveying a willingness to sacrifice large swathes of its population on behalf of Australia, which is an essentially non-vital, possibly even marginal, strategic interest. The question for Australian defence planners is: would the US government really trade San Francisco for Sydney?
Indeed, if Canberra's broader quest for self-reliance reflects enduring concerns about the potential limits of Washington's willingness or ability to furnish assistance in a strategic crisis, there is no compelling logical reason why, with the balance of power shifting away from US primacy, those concerns should be so sharply limited to conventional threats. If anything, Australian defence planners should expect Washington to act with greater caution and more reticence in a nuclear crisis, however unlikely one might be, when the costs and risks to itself will inevitably be exponentially greater.
I ventured a few thoughts on how Australia might begin redressing its nuclear dilemma in this article a few years ago. Unfortunately, however, the traditional impetus for change in Australian strategic policy is crisis, or at least perceptions of crisis, at which point it's usually too late to do anything other than 'muddle through'. This is likely to be doubly true of nuclear issues, which, given the wide-spread aversion to even discussing them in Australia, remain largely beyond the realm of acceptable political discourse. So don't expect any movement for at least a couple of decades.
In the meantime, is END dead? Let's hope we never have to find out.
