While not mentioned by Schudson, nothing spoke to the rise of “objective journalism” more clearly than the rise of “scientific” polling: the attempt to document “the voice of the people” based on interviews that, in principle, gave every citizen an equal chance of being heard, of saying what they had to say, via questions free of bias, that bane of objectivity.

George Gallup, a figure central to the spread of polling, presented poll-takers, in his polling manifesto The Pulse of Democracy (1940), as people “moving freely about all sorts and conditions of men and noting how they are affected by the news or arguments brought from day to day to their knowledge.” Gallup took this model from James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth (1888), but his own polling, with its set questions and predetermined response categories, was far removed from the kind of observation Bryce favoured

In reality, Gallup followed a news-making model — the model exemplified by press conferences and media releases, where news is made for the press without being controlled by the press. Gallup not only created news, controlling what was asked, how it was asked and when; he also syndicated his results to a broad range of newspapers. Having his polls published by papers whose politics ranged widely shored up his claims to objectivity.

A parallel existed with the Associated Press, America’s first wire service. Since it “gathered news for publication in a variety of papers with widely different political allegiances,” Schudson notes, “it could only succeed by making its reporting “objective” enough to be acceptable to all its members and clients.”

While servicing a diverse range of outlets was central to Gallup in America, this is not what happened in Australia. When Keith Murdoch introduced the Gallup Poll here in 1941 he made sure that the company he set up to run it was controlled by his own Herald and Weekly Times and its associates in various states. Although Australian Public Opinion Polls (“The Gallup Method”) was notionally independent, executives from the Herald and Weekly Times, including Murdoch, could (and did) influence the questions Roy Morgan, APOP’s managing director, asked, including whether they should be repeated from poll to poll.

Whereas the American Gallup boasted subscribing newspapers that were Republican (as Gallup himself may have been), Democrat and independent, none of the newspapers that subscribed to the Australian Gallup Poll are likely to have ever editorialised in favour of federal Labor; for many years, Morgan himself was an anti-Labor member of the Melbourne City Council.

Much of the polling done in America and later in Australia, however, fits a third model: things that the press creates either directly (in-house polling; for example, of a newspaper’s own readers) or indirectly (by commissioning an independent market research firm to ask questions on the newspaper’s behalf). Media products that fit this category range from Clyde Packer’s creation of the Miss Australia contest in the 1920s (also copied from America) and the Australian Financial Review’s endless business “summits” in the 2020s, to the media’s ubiquitous sit-down interviews with politicians and celebrities. This is now the dominant model.

Creating news is the surest route to having an “exclusive” and creating “product differentiation.” If the “exclusive” is produced often enough, is highly valued, and prominently flagged — polling is now featured on the front page — it becomes a way of building “brand loyalty.” Newspapers that regularly commission polls from the same source, or that have a regular but non-financial relationship with a pollster, hope for all of this. Media that don’t commission their own polls — television and radio, especially — are often happy to recycle polls published in the press.

Brand loyalty is a way of building a readership. When it comes to polling, it generally means not citing polls generated by competing brands — especially polls that could raise doubts about one’s own polls. Where different polls produce different — even conflicting — results, this usually means that the rules of objectivity that require journalists to confirm their stories using more than one source are readily abandoned. While some newspapers are more brand-focused than others, journalists consulting their own polls and not others has become standard practice.

In polling, the strength of any brand — the reputation of the poll — depends on the prestige of the news outlet that publishes it. It also depends on the poll’s record, and that record is assessed against the few objective measures that exist: election results and referendums.

Polls that score well on these measures are more likely to be trusted on things other than the vote. That, at least, is the hope of the companies that poll for the press or have their polls publicised by the press. Companies involved in the prediction business try to ensure that their polls come as close as possible to predicting the actual vote — closer, certainly, than any of their rivals.

What pollsters hope to be trusted on, as a result of the accuracy on these measures, is everything else they do for the press — notably, reporting on the popularity of party leaders and taking “the pulse” (as Gallup liked to say) on issues of public policy. More than that, they are after a spillover or halo effect for their market research businesses more generally; financially, this is the point of involving themselves in the not particularly lucrative business of predicting votes. Trust is important because what companies report on matters other than the vote typically cannot be checked directly against any external measure.

Absent any objective check, there is always a risk of polling that panders, consciously or otherwise, to the client’s agenda or the pollster’s preferences. Against this happening, the guardrails erected by industry bodies like the relatively new Australian Polling Council or the old (Market) Research Society are either weak or non-existent — the APC mostly concerned that pollsters explain their methods and post their questionnaires online, a very welcome development but one that stops well short of setting wide-ranging standards in relation to the questions members ask; the Research Society mostly concerned to reassure respondents about the way polling companies protect their privacy.

Newspoll — and other polls

Enter Newspoll, a brand owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Established for a high-end newspaper, the Australian — whose news and views are seen by some as exerting an out-size influence on conservative politics — Newspoll can claim a record of predicting national elections second to none.

In the course of conducting its most recent poll — a fortnightly event that usually grabs the headlines for what it has to say about national voting intentions, leadership satisfaction and preferred prime minister — Newspoll raised the issue of nuclear power. “There is a proposal to build several small modular nuclear reactors around Australia to produce zero-emissions energy on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired,” Newspoll told respondents (emphasis in the original). It then asked: “Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?” Respondents were invited to select one answer: “Strongly approve” (22 per cent); “Somewhat approve” (33 per cent); “Somewhat disapprove” (14 per cent); “Strongly disapprove” (17 per cent); “Don’t know” (14 per cent). In short: 55 per cent in favour; 31 per cent against; 14 per cent not prepared to say either way.

As Newspoll might have anticipated on an issue as contentious as this, its question generated controversy. Unimpressed, the economist John Quiggin proposed — tongue-in-cheek — a quite different way the question might have been worded: “There is a proposal to keep coal-fired power stations operating until the development of small nuclear reactors which might, in the future, supply zero-emissions energy. Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?”

A question on nuclear power could have been asked in any number of ways: by putting the arguments for and against nuclear power; by taking the timeline for getting nuclear power up and running and comparing it to the timeline for wind + solar + hydro; by asking who should pay (governments, consumers, industry, etc.) for different forms of energy with zero emissions, and how much they should pay; by qualifying the “zero-emissions” solution with some reference to the waste disposal problem; by omitting the words “small, modular” — not just descriptors but, potentially at least, words of reassurance; and so on.

Different questions might still have produced a majority in favour of nuclear energy. A question asked for the Institute of Public Affairs by Dynata, in April 2022, on whether Australia should build nuclear power plants to supply electricity and reduce carbon emissions,” found a majority (53 per cent agreeing), and an even lower level of opposition (23 per cent).

As with Newspoll, the IPA poll raised considerations that invited an affirmative response: “small modular,” “zero-emissions energy,” “on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired” (Newspoll); “to supply electricity,” “reduce carbon omissions” (IPA). Not a single consideration in either poll might have prompted a negative response.

The high proportion in the IPA survey neither agreeing nor disagreeing (24 per cent) — an option Newspoll didn’t offer — allowed respondents who actually had an opinion to conceal it, Swedish research on attitudes to nuclear power suggests. So, while the level of opposition recorded by the IPA might have been higher without the “easy out,” the level of support might have been higher too.

Other questions about nuclear power failed to attract majority support. Asked in September by Freshwater “if Australia needs nuclear power” (the precise question was not published), and presented with a set of response options similar to those offered by the IPA, 37 per cent of respondents supported nuclear power and 36 per cent opposed it, 18 per cent saying they were “neutral” and 12 per cent “unsure.” Apart from coal (supported by 33 per cent), every other energy source received wider support: hydrogen (47 per cent), natural gas (56 per cent), offshore wind (58 per cent), onshore wind (61 per cent) and solar (84 per cent).

Asked in the same poll whether “Australia should remove the ban on nuclear power development,” 44 per cent agreed. But asked whether they agreed or disagreed that “Australia does not need to generate any energy from nuclear power,” 36 per cent disagreed. Similarly, no more than 35 per agreed that “the federal government must consider small nuclear modular reactors as part of the future energy mix” — a much lower figure than Newspoll’s, even if the question isn’t necessarily better.

Freshwater also asked respondents to choose between two trade-offs: “Australia builds nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are replaced earlier” (44 per cent chose this one) and “Australia does not build nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are extended” (38 per cent); 18 per cent were “unsure.” Respondents opposed to both coal and nuclear power were left with only one place to go — “unsure.” But on the poll’s own evidence — 33 per cent supporting coal, 36 per cent supporting nuclear — the figure of 18 per cent appears to underestimate this group considerably.

Another question on nuclear power, this time asked by RedBridge, is said to have shown a 35–32 split over “the idea of using nuclear to provide for Australia’s energy need.” As yet, however, neither the question nor any figures have been posted on its website.

Yet another question, asked in February by Resolve for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, also failed to show majority support for nuclear power. Told that “there has been some debate about the use of nuclear power in Australia recently” and asked for their “own view,” respondents split four ways: “I support the use of nuclear power in Australia” (36 per cent); “I do not have a strong view and am open to the government investigating its use” (27 per cent); “I oppose the use of nuclear power in Australia” (25 per cent); and “Undecided” (15 per cent).

In reporting this “exclusive survey,” David Crowe, chief political correspondent for the two papers, made no reference to the Newspoll published the previous day. This, notwithstanding that in reporting the Resolve poll Crowe gave pride of place to “mining billionaire” Andrew Forrest’s attack on the Coalition’s nuclear policy — a policy the Australian suggested had received a “boost” from the Newspoll. Nor did Crowe refer to any other poll.

On one reading, most respondents (61 per cent in the Resolve poll compared to 39 per cent in Newspoll) had “a strong view” (the respondents who declined to say “I do not have a strong view…”), those without “a strong view” either being “open to the government investigating” the use of nuclear power or “undecided.” More likely, the question didn’t measure how strong any of the views were — some of those without strong views being “open to the government investigating its use,” others joining those who harboured strong views (respondents Resolve didn’t directly identify) to indicate either their support or their opposition to nuclear power.

Effectively, the Resolve poll rolled three questions into one — one, about support or opposition to nuclear power; another about the strength of these opinions; and another about “the government investigating” the “use” of nuclear power. But since responses to one of these questions would not necessarily have determined responses to any other, Resolve’s shortcut obscures more about public opinion than it illuminates; a respondent with a strong view, for example, might still have been “open to the government investigating its use.”

In October 2023, Resolve asked another question — this one reportedly commissioned by the consulting firm Society Advisory, and run “exclusively” by Sky News. The result suggested a degree of openness to nuclear power that was even higher than that indicated by Resolve’s poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Asked if “Australia should rethink its moratorium (ban) on nuclear power to give more flexibility in the future,” half (49 per cent) of the respondents were in favour, less than half that number (18 per cent) were against, opposition to “flexibility” requiring some strength, with an extraordinary 33 per cent “unsure” — a sign that this question too was a poor one.

Not only do answers depend on the question, they also depend on the response options. In an extensive survey — not just a one- or two-item poll — conducted in October–November 2023, the British firm Savanta asked respondents “to what extent, if at all,” they supported or opposed using nuclear energy “to generate electricity” in Australia? While 40 per cent said “strongly support” or “tend to support,” 36 per cent said “strongly oppose” or “tend to oppose,” 7 per cent said “Don’t know,” and 17 per cent said they “neither support nor oppose.”

As with the Resolve poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Savanta’s response options — which included “neither support nor oppose” — reduced the chance that its question, however worded, would yield a majority either in favour of nuclear energy or against it; almost as many opposed nuclear energy as supported it, a quarter (24 per cent) choosing to sit on the fence. In the Newspoll, where 55 per cent approved and 31 per cent disapproved, there was no box marked “neither approve nor disapprove.” If there had been, then almost certainly Newspoll would not have found majority support either.

The Savanta survey also shows what happens to support for a single option — here, nuclear power — when respondents are given a range of options. Asked to think about how their “country might shift its current energy generation mix” and given a list of five alternatives, only 23 per cent nominated “nuclear energy”; 41 per cent, almost twice as many, nominated “large-scale solar farms.” Of the rest, 15 per cent nominated “onshore wind farms,” 6 per cent “gas carbon and storage (CCS),” and 4 per cent “biomass from trees.”

Newspoll made no attempt to ascertain whether the public had heard of “small modular nuclear reactors” much less what the public knew about such things. In the Guardian, the proposal was described as “an uncosted Coalition thought-bubble”; in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, former deputy Reserve Bank governor Stephen Grenville noted that there were “just two operational SMRs, both research reactors” and that work on what “was expected to be the first operational commercial SMR” had “been halted as the revised cost per kWH is uneconomic for the distributors who had signed up.” Elsewhere, an academic specialising in electricity generation described SMRs as “not, by any stretch of the imagination, what most people would consider small.”

On what the public knows — or, more accurately, on how much it thinks it knows — the Savanta survey is again useful. When asked what they had heard of nuclear energy, few (8 per cent) said “I have not heard about this energy option” or “don’t know.” But just 18 per cent said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a lot about how it works.” Most said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a little about how it works” (41 per cent) or “I have heard about this energy option, but don’t know how it works (33 per cent).

In a poll conducted by Pure Profile, reported in May 2022, 70 per cent said they didn’t understand “the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.”

… and the Australian

Keen to publicise the result of its Newspoll — a result the paper openly welcomed — the Australian’s reporting of the poll and its commentary around it was tendentious.

The distinction between respondents’ having a view and their having a “strong” view was one it mostly ignored or fudged. The paper’s political editor Simon Benson, reported in Crikey to be “responsible” for the poll, ignored it. He repeatedly represented “majority” support as “strong” support. The fact that pollsters themselves regularly make this mistake shouldn’t make it any more acceptable. If support is a metre wide, it isn’t necessarily a metre deep.

The headline in the print edition — “Powerful Majority Supports Nuclear Option for Energy Security” — fudged the distinction. In itself, 55 per cent is not an overwhelming majority; in 2017, same-sex marriage was supported in the nationwide “survey” by 62 per cent. In itself,  55 per cent is hardly a “powerful” number — one that politicians ignore at their peril; in the lead-up to the same-sex marriage decision, both John Howard and Tony Abbott made it clear that they wouldn’t consider anything less than 60 per cent in favour to be a number that the parliament would have to heed. Had 55 per cent (not 36 per cent) “strongly” approved nuclear reactors, the Australian would have had a defensible case. But even in polls that offer a binary choice, “strong” majorities are rare.

Rather than representing a “powerful majority” in favour of the “nuclear option,” Newspoll’s figures might equally be said to show that most respondents (61 per cent) did not feel strongly one way or the other — a majority that the Australian would not have wanted to call “powerful.”

A highlight, Benson argued, was the fact that respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four — “the demographic most concerned about climate change” — was the demographic most likely to support nuclear power, 65–32. “There is no fear of the technology for most people under 40,” he concluded. This line was one that impressed shadow climate change and energy minister, Ted O’Brien, when he discussed the poll on Sky News.

It also resonated with opposition leader Peter Dutton. Attacking the prime minister for being out of touch with public opinion, which he was reported to have said was “warming to nuclear power,” Dutton noted that nuclear power was “supported by a lot of younger people because they are well-read and they know that it’s zero emissions, and it can firm up renewables in the system.”

The news that “NewsPoll [sic] showed a majority of young Australians supporting small-scale nuclear power generation,” even prompted a discussion of the pros and cons of nuclear power — not the pros and cons of the polling — on the ABC.

But eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds as the age group most favourably disposed to nuclear power is not what Essential shows, not what Savanta shows, and not what RedBridge shows. In October’s Essential poll, no more than 46 per cent of respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four supported “nuclear power plants” — the same proportion as those aged thirty-six to fifty-four but a smaller proportion than those aged fifty-five-plus (56 per cent); the proportion of “strong” supporters was actually lower among those aged eighteen to thirty-four than in either of the other age-groups.

In the Savanta survey, those aged eighteen to thirty-four were the least likely to favour nuclear energy; only about 36 per cent were in favour, strongly or otherwise, not much more than half the number that Newspoll reported.

And according to a report of the polling conducted in February by RedBridge, sourced to Tony Barry, a partner and former deputy state director of the Victorian Liberal Party, “[w]here there is support” for nuclear power. “it is among only those who already vote Liberal or who are older than 65.”

In the Australian, the leader writer observed that “public support for considering nuclear power in Australia is rising as the cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge becomes more real.” But Newspoll had never sought to establish what respondents think are the “cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge” so it could hardly have shown whether these thoughts have changed.

Benson’s remark, on the Australian’s front page, that the poll showed “growing community support” for nuclear power was also without warrant; “growing community support” is something that the poll does not show and that Benson made no attempt to document. Since the question posed by Newspoll had never been asked before, and since polled opinion is sensitive to the way questions are asked, “growing community support” is one thing the poll could not show.

Subsequently, Benson cited Liberal Party polling conducted “immediately after the [May] 2022 election loss” which “had support at 31 per cent.” The question? Benson doesn’t say. Is it really likely, as Benson believes, that in a “short space of time,” as he describes it — less than two years — support for nuclear power could have jumped from 31 per cent to 55 per cent? The considerable shift in polled opinion on same-sex marriage that Wikipedia suggests happened sometime between 2004 and 2007 is hardly likely to have happened since 2022 in relation to nuclear energy.

Peta Credlin, Australian columnist and Sky News presenter, argued the growing-support line by stringing together: a poll conducted in 2015 (by Essential, though she didn’t identify it as an Essential poll), which had support at 40 per cent; the IPA poll (which it was safe to name) from 2022, which had support at 53 per cent; and the Newspoll, which had it at 55 per cent. Not only was each of these conducted by a different pollster, hence subject to different “house effects”; each had posed their own question.

Had the Australian wanted to see whether support really was growing it might have considered re-running one of the questions it had asked years before — or, preferably, re-run more than one. But perhaps the point of the polling was not to show that support was growing but to create the impression that it was growing — that it had a momentum that might leave Labor, “in its fanatical opposition to nuclear power,” as Benson wrote, stranded on “the wrong side of history.”

This was not the first time the Australian has interpreted the results of a Newspoll as heralding a turning point on this issue. In 2007, shortly before prime minister John Howard announced that the Coalition would set up a nuclear regulatory regime and remove any unreasonable impediments to the building of nuclear power plants in Australia, the Australian told its readers that there had been a “dramatic shift” in support for nuclear power. The basis of its claim: questions asked by Newspoll — two in 2006, one in 2007. (In those days Newspoll was a market research company, not a polling brand whose field work had been outsourced first to YouGov and more recently to Pyxis.)

The questions asked in 2006 were not the same as the question asked in 2007. In May and December 2006, Newspoll told respondents: “Currently, while there is a nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney used for medical and scientific purposes, there are no nuclear power stations being built in Australia.” It then asked: “Are you personally in favour or against nuclear power stations in Australia?” The majority was against: 38–51, in May; 35–50, in December.

In March 2007, Newspoll changed the question, and framed it quite differently: “Thinking now about reducing gas emissions to help address climate change,” it asked, “are you personally in favour or against the development of a nuclear power industry in Australia, as one of a range of energy solutions to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions?” On this, opinion was fairly evenly split: 45–40. The majority were not against; in fact, there was a plurality in favour. The Australian’s interpretation: in just four months, Dennis Shanahan and Sid Marris concluded, the attitude of Australians to nuclear energy had “dramatically reversed.”

Not so. After commissioning Newspoll to ask the 2006 question again, in April 2007, the Australia Institute found that the level of support for “nuclear power stations being built in Australia” was 36 per cent (35 per cent in December 2006), the level of opposition was now 46 per cent (previously, 50 per cent), and the “don’t knows” were now 18 per cent (previously 15 per cent). In short, whereas opposition had exceeded support by fifteen percentage points, 50­–35, it now exceeded support by ten points, 46–36 — a decline of five points, but no reversal, dramatic or otherwise.

This time around, both the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald have asked questions similar to the one Newspoll asked in February, but in polls of their readers not in a public opinion poll. Asked, in July 2023, whether Australia should “consider small nuclear reactors as one solution to moving away from fossil fuels?,” the Financial Review’s readers favoured “consider[ing]” the idea, 58–30. Asked, in July 2023, whether “small nuclear power reactors should be part of Australia’s energy mix,” the Herald’s readers opposed the idea, 32–55. Even if these questions had been included in national polls, the Australian might have baulked at citing the results of either, since it would have given oxygen to another brand.

There is evidence of a growth in support for nuclear power between June 2019 and March 2022, but there is no convincing evidence that points to “growing support” in the two years since. When the Lowy Poll asked respondents, in March 2022, whether they supported or opposed “removing the existing ban on nuclear power,” 52 per cent said they supported it, an increase on the level of support in March 2021 (47 per cent). And in September 2021, when Essential asked respondents whether they supported or opposed “Australia developing nuclear power plants for the generation of electricity,” 50 per cent said they supported nuclear power, a sharp increase on the level of support (39 per cent) it reported in June 2019. However, when Essential asked the question again, in October 2023, the level of support hadn’t moved.

The only evidence for a recent shift comes from Resolve. In October 2023, when Resolve first asked the question it asked in February 2024, 33 per cent (compared with 36 per cent in February) supported “the use of nuclear power” and 24 per cent (23 per cent in February) opposed it. (Nine Entertainment appears not to have previously published Resolve’s result for October.) Its February poll represents an increase of four percentage points in the gap between the level of support and the level of opposition, from nine points to thirteen.

But a shift of four points is well within the range one might expect given the vagaries of sampling — the “margin of error” that pollsters regularly parade but just as regularly ignore. Non-sampling error — a much bigger problem than pollsters acknowledge — also might have played a part, especially given a question as complex and confused as the one Resolve asked. Errors of both kinds are compounded by the widespread use by pollsters of opt-in rather than probability-based panels.

Jim Reed, who runs Resolve, is reported as saying that voters “were increasingly open to the potential of nuclear power now the Coalition was advocating for existing technology in large-scale plants.” According to Reed, support has “swung towards at least openness to nuclear power.” But Nine did not reveal what change, if any, Resolve had detected since October in the number without “a strong view” and “open to the government investigating its use (27 per cent in February).” Support, Reed added, was “weak… at the moment simply because people aren’t being asked to approve an actual site.” Even if he had measured strength, which it appears he hadn’t, one could equally imagine support becoming weaker, not stronger, once voters were asked to “asked to approve an actual site.”

What sort of voters did he think were now supportive or at least “open’? “We’ve got a new generation of younger people who are quite positive towards nuclear power,” Reed said. Was this “new generation” evident in October or did it only become evident in February? If it was evident in October, was it responsible for February’s four-point shift? Nothing in what Nine published allows us to say.

While Reed restricted himself, largely, to interpreting the actual data, in the Australian the commentary strayed much further. It wrote, for example, of “the costs and risks of renewable energy” having “become clearer.” But it offered no evidence that those costs and risks had become clearer to the public — not surprisingly, since these too were things about which Newspoll had not asked.

Leveraging the Newspoll result to predict that “most Australians would back a move to small scale nuclear power,” the headline in the online edition of the Australian ignored another distinction — not between strong and weak opinion but between polls that showed un-mobilised opinion and polls that showed mobilised opinion; so, too did Sky News. Any “move to small-scale nuclear power” would be politically contested, and once contested opinion might shift.

Subsequently, Benson ventured a more sober assessment of the Coalition’s prospects of carrying the day. “For Dutton to win the argument,” an argument that would take “courage” to mount, “any Coalition energy policy must be framed in a cost-of-living context that can demonstrate how nuclear power will deliver cheaper and more reliable power into the future,” he wrote. For Dutton to position nuclear power as “a central component” of his energy policy, Benson declared, was “as big and brave as it gets.”

Others went further. In a rare note of dissent within News Corp, James Campbell, national weekend political editor for Saturday and Sunday News Corp newspapers and websites across Australia, called the idea of Dutton “going to the next federal election with plans to introduce nuclear power” as “stark raving mad.” One thing the Coalition should have learnt from the Voice referendum was that “support for anything radical in Australia shrinks the moment it hits any sort of concerted opposition.” And, he added, “there’s the unity problem. Do you really think Liberal candidates in ‘tealy’ places are going to face the front on this?”

Benson, meanwhile, had back-tracked. Pointing again to the distribution of opinion among eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds, he advanced a quite different assessment: “the onus is now on Labor to convince Australians why we shouldn’t have nuclear power.” Chris Kenny, the Australian’s associate editor, thought “the nuclear argument could play well in the teal seats where there is an eagerness for climate change and a high degree of economic realism.”

If Benson was right the first time, however, and the Coalition needs to take care over how it frames the debate, then the Savanta data suggest that it may face a few challenges. Asked what impact nuclear energy would have on their “energy bills,” about a third (35 per cent) of its respondents said it would make their bills “much cheaper” or “slightly cheaper,” less than a third (28 per cent) thought it would make them “much more expensive” or “slightly more expensive,” but more than a third (38 per cent) said they either didn’t know or thought it would make “no difference.”

In the Essential poll, conducted around the same time, respondents saw little difference in “total cost including infrastructure and household price” between three energy sources: “renewable energy, such as wind and solar” (38 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 35 per cent, the “least expensive”), nuclear power (34 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 34 per cent, the “least expensive”), and “fossil fuels, such as coal and gas” (28 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 31 per cent, the “least expensive”).

Supporters of nuclear energy may also have to address some of the concerns Benson didn’t mention. In the Savanta study, 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (45 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (32 per cent) about “waste management”; 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (47 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (30 per cent) about “health & safety (ie. nuclear meltdowns, impact on people living nearby)”; and 56 per cent were either “very concerned” (23 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (33 per cent) about the “time it takes to build.”

In another poll, this one conducted by Pure Profile in the first half of 2022, respondents were asked how they would feel if a new nuclear power station were built in their city. Around 50 per cent said they would feel “uncomfortable,” more than a quarter “extremely uncomfortable”; just 7 per cent would have felt “extremely at ease.”

It would be reassuring to think that any newspaper that wanted its polling taken seriously would need to commission better polling than the polling the Australian was so keen to promote. But the Newspoll results were taken seriously by a rival masthead. “The Newspoll published in the Australian,” the political editor of the Australian Financial Review, Phillip Coorey wrote, “found there was now majority support for the power source.”

A week after its poll was published, and its results — with a nod to the Coalition — described as “powerful,” the Australian’s front page led with another “exclusive,” this time courtesy of the Coalition: its “signature energy policy” to be announced “before the May federal budget” would include “a plan identifying potential sites for small nuclear reactors as future net zero sources.” The following day, Benson wrote that Newspoll had “demonstrated strong support for the proposal that Dutton is working on announcing soon.” But the policy Dutton was working on, apparently, was not the policy Newspoll had tested. “The Coalition energy plan,” Benson revealed the same day in another front-page “exclusive,” was “likely to include next-generation large-scale nuclear reactors — not just the small-modular reactors.”

A newspaper that has a position on nuclear power and thinks of polls as an objective measure of public opinion should make sure that the questions it gets (or allows) pollsters to ask, and the results it gets journalists to write up, look fair and reasonable to those on different sides of the debate. In effect, this was the discipline George Gallup placed on himself when he signed up newspapers with divergent views.

Even if a newspaper wanted to use its polling to gee-up its preferred party, it might also think about using its polling to identify some of the risks of pursuing a policy it backed — risks that no party wanting to win an election could sensibly ignore — not just the opportunities to pursue that policy.

Whether Michael Schudson left polling out of his account of objectivity because it didn’t fit with his argument about objectivity as an ideology, or because he didn’t think it a part of journalism — neither journalism nor market research being a profession in the sense that law or medicine are professions — or simply because of an oversight, is unclear.

Better, more comprehensive, polling wouldn’t end the political debate or the debate about the objectivity of the polls. Nor should it. Nonetheless, it might be a good place from which to progress these debates.

Of course, for those who don’t want to foster a debate about the policy or about the polls, any plea for do better is entirely beside the point. •

The post Nuclear power, Newspoll and the nuances of polled opinion appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s little surprise that five of the six abstentions came from nuclear weapon states: the United States, China, Israel, Pakistan and India (joined, oddly, by South Sudan). But in a dismaying display of power politics, France and Britain voted with Russia and North Korea to oppose assistance to people and landscapes irradiated during decades of nuclear testing.

Diplomats representing Western powers are prone to talk about “the international community,” “the rules-based order” and “democratic versus authoritarian states.” But on this occasion the jargon was undercut by the willingness of London and Paris to line up alongside Moscow and Pyongyang to avoid responsibility for past actions and to limit reparations.

With the International Court of Justice debating genocide in Ukraine, Myanmar and Palestine and UN agencies seeking to defend international humanitarian law, the hypocrisy of major powers has been polarising international opinion. Developing nations are increasingly challenging an international order that sanctions official enemies, at the same time as absolving major powers of the responsibility to deal with their own breaches of international law.

Over the past three years, ambassadors Teburoro Tito of Kiribati and Akan Rakhmetullin of Kazakhstan have coordinated international consultations on how the nuclear assistance provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, should be implemented. Articles 6 and 7 of the treaty, which entered into force in January 2021, include unprecedented obligations on parties to the treaty to aid nuclear survivors and contribute to environmental remediation.

Kiribati and Kazakhstan might seem an unlikely couple, but they have bonded over a common twentieth-century legacy. Both nations’ lands, waters and peoples have been devastated by cold war nuclear testing, and in each case the responsible countries refuse to take responsibility. Britain and Russia have bonded, too, but in their case, they’re united in their refusal to assist their former colonies.

After conducting twelve atmospheric atomic tests in Australia in 1952–57 — at the Monte Bello Islands, Emu Field and Maralinga — Britain sought a new location for developing and testing more powerful hydrogen bombs. During Operation Grapple, the British military conducted nine atmospheric thermonuclear tests at Malden and Christmas (Kiritimati) islands in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, which is today part of the Republic of Kiribati.

Just as Britain chose the “vast empty spaces” of the South Australian desert and the isolated atolls of Kiribati for its tests, Moscow sought similar expanses within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Over more than four decades, it held 456 nuclear tests in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan. The history of Soviet testing in the Central Asian republic and its radioactive legacies, spread across more than 18,000 square kilometres, has been documented by Kazakh scholar Togzhan Kassenova in her compelling 2022 book Atomic Steppe.

Once the TPNW was adopted, Kiribati and Kazakhstan led efforts to develop mechanisms for dealing with the health and environmental effects of radioactive fallout. After seeking technical advice from survivors, nuclear scientists and UN agencies, they developed a set of proposals for action and a UN resolution seeking international support.

Now adopted by the UN General Assembly, that resolution proposes bilateral, regional and multilateral action and the sharing of technical and scientific information about nuclear legacies, and “calls upon Member States in a position to do so to contribute technical and financial assistance as appropriate.” It requires UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres to seek members’ views and proposals about assistance to nuclear survivors and report back to the General Assembly.

Like most non-binding UN resolutions, this one is couched in the cautious diplomatic terminology required to forge a consensus among 193 UN member states. How then do the French and British governments justify their vote against assistance to nuclear survivors, a decision echoed by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un?

When I put questions to France’s ambassador to the Pacific, Véronique Roger-Lacan, the French foreign affairs ministry replied, justifying its decision to stand with North Korea and Russia “because this resolution does not recognise the efforts already undertaken and because it aims to establish an international liability regime which ignores ongoing bilateral or national efforts, to which we are committed.”

According to the ministry, the French “fully” assume their “responsibilities and do everything we can to compensate all victims of nuclear tests, in accordance with the law of 5 January 2010 relating to the recognition and compensation of victims of French nuclear tests, modified in 2017. In this respect, France has in recent years strengthened its human and financial resources allocated to managing the consequences of the tests, including the identification and assistance of potential victims.”

It’s true that in 2010 France established the Comité d’Indemnisation des Victimes des Essais Nucléaires, or CIVEN, a commission to evaluate compensation claims from civilian and military personnel who staffed French nuclear test sites. But CIVEN’s significant flaws mean it is disingenuous to suggest that successive governments are “managing the consequences of the tests.”

President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to respond fully to demands for assistance have been widely condemned by Mā’ohi political, church and community leaders in French Polynesia, where France conducted 193 nuclear tests from 1966 until as recently as 1996. They note, for example, that during its first five years of operation CIVEN approved only 2 per cent of claims submitted by personnel exposed to hazardous levels of ionising radiation at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls.

Changes to the law since 2017 have improved the compensation process, but CIVEN still rejects more than half of all applications. Political and community leaders in French Polynesia continue to push for further reforms as well as an apology for the ongoing trauma caused by thirty years of testing.

In 2022 the French government created a special Mémoire des Hommes website dedicated to the Mā’ohi Nui nuclear testing program and began declassifying some relevant documents. But only archives relating to the Pacific Testing Centre are eligible for declassification — not those that cover France’s atmospheric and underground tests in Algeria between 1960 and 1965. France used its North African colony to conduct four atmospheric nuclear tests at Reggane and thirteen underground tests at In Eker in the Sahara desert, tests that continuing three years beyond Algerian independence in 1962 to give Paris time to build its testing bases in the South Pacific.

Indigenous survivors and researchers from the Nuclear Truth Project continue to call for better access to nuclear archives and the release of the documentary evidence required for compensation programs. They have also developed protocols to ensure any efforts for remediation and assistance are focused on redress for both historic and future harms from nuclear activities.

December’s UN resolution is just one step in a longer campaign to deal with the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons under the TPNW. Seventy countries have now ratified that treaty, and the nuclear weapon states are getting anxious.

The United States, France and Britain — the three states that tested nuclear weapons in Oceania — first tried to ignore the TPNW, but as the number of ratifications mounted, they began to actively oppose it. In our region, eleven Pacific island countries and territories have ratified or acceded to TPNW and the remaining colonial dependencies have also joined the call for assistance to nuclear survivors, even though they can’t sign the treaty.

In September last year the Assembly of French Polynesia unanimously passed a resolution in support of the TPNW. As ICAN France, the local affiliate of the International Campaign to Abolish the Nuclear Weapons, noted, “while French Polynesia cannot currently access the assistance and rehabilitation outlined in Articles 6 and 7 of the TPNW due to France’s non-ratification, it sends a resounding message in favour of the treaty to Paris.”

President Moetai Brotherson of French Polynesia says the Assembly resolution sends an important message to Paris. “It’s not legally binding, so that’s probably one of the reasons they don’t really care about it,” Brotherson told me in November. “But it has a symbolic value that is very strong. For us, it’s only natural that we have this kind of position taken at the parliament. It’s a message we want to send to the world — that nuclear weapons are dangerous and we can destroy this planet if we are not cautious about it.”

In Australia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands and French Polynesia, Indigenous communities affected by nuclear testing want the weapons states to provide funds for independent, comprehensive radiological surveys of nuclear test sites and surrounding communities. They also want the nuclear powers to monitor, secure and remove nuclear wastes on a scale and standard comparable to the clean-up of domestic nuclear sites in their home territory.

As they ended their twentieth-century test programs, the Western powers used the Pacific Ocean as a dumping ground. A 2017 French government report on ocean dumping of nuclear waste admits that 2580 tonnes of nuclear waste in concrete drums was dumped in the ocean at site Oscar off Moruroa atoll in the eight years from 1974. Seventy-six tonnes of untreated radioactive waste had already been submerged at the nearby November site between 1972 and 1975.

ICAN France has also documented significant amounts of nuclear waste buried in the Sahara desert after France’s seventeen nuclear tests in Algeria, even though the French government still refuses to communicate details of the waste and landfill locations to Algerian authorities.

British nuclear test sites in the Monte Bello Islands and South Australian desert are also scarred with the radioactive legacies of atmospheric tests and the hundreds of experiments — including burning uranium and plutonium — conducted on the land of the Anangu people. The nuclear threat to these sacrifice zones is not over. Last year, Barngarla traditional owners won a long battle to protect their country and storylines from the proposed establishment of a radioactive waste on their land near Kimba in South Australia.

France’s answers to my questions about why it joined Russia and North Korea to vote against the Kiribati/Kazakhstan resolution might have been less than satisfactory, but British high commissions in the Pacific declined to respond at all.

Unlike France and the United States, Britain doesn’t have a compensation commission for survivors of nuclear testing. In fact, Britain has a shameful record of nuclear secrecy: in 2018, the National Archives withdrew public access to key files about British nuclear testing in Oceania.

Over more than thirty years, British, Australian, NZ and Fijian military veterans who served at British nuclear test sites in Kiribati and Australia have unsuccessfully lodged a series of cases and appeals before British courts and the European Court of Human Rights. They have sought damages under civil law for the illnesses they attribute to their service at nuclear test sites. Britain’s defence ministry has consistently opposed these claims, unfailingly appealing against lower court rulings that assisted veterans.

A fatal problem for the veterans is that they lack documentary evidence of rates of radioactive exposure for military personnel — evidence still buried in the British archives. Last month, the UK Daily Mirror reported how successive governments have maintained the cover-up, with government agencies refusing to release relevant data. “In 2018, the UK Ministry of Defence claimed it ‘had no information’ about blood testing during the nuclear trials,” the newspaper reported. “Last year the Atomic Weapons Establishment, an MoD agency, admitted it holds up to 5000 files, including a list of 150 specific documents mentioning blood and urine tests taken during the weapons program.”

At a time of warfare in Europe and the Middle East, the actions of these nuclear weapon states highlight their hypocrisy. As civilians are massacred in Ukraine and Gaza, developing nations are mobilising through the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court to end a culture of impunity for states that declare themselves democratic. •

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Resources minister Madeleine King announced that all activities at the site will end immediately, apologised for the “uncertainty” experienced by Kimba residents and acknowledged her regret for the “profound distress” experienced by Traditional Owners — the Barngarla people — during the decision-making process.

King’s announcement came less than a month after the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation’s campaign against the facility culminated in a breakthrough Federal Court verdict. Justice Natalie Charlesworth ruled that the decision to store Australia’s nuclear waste at Napandee was subject to “apprehended bias” and should thus be set aside. Her decision has been labelled a “king hit” for plans to dispose of Australia’s low- to intermediate-level nuclear waste.

But while many assume that the ruling rested on native title (an issue that was certainly discussed), the minister wanted to make clear that the “question raised in this case was about a decision-making process, not a claim of native title.” In reality, the judgement was a comment on consecutive Australian governments’ inability to take public anxieties about nuclear waste seriously, a tendency stretching back decades.

As Justice Charlesworth detailed, the evidence led her to conclude that former resources minister Keith Pitt had “already made up his mind about the selection of Napandee as the site” ahead of its formal determination. By making statements “to the effect that the Australian Government had made a commitment or promise to the people of Kimba that a radioactive waste facility would be situated at Napandee,” Pitt was judged to have shown apprehended bias — that is, his mind was “foreclosed” to the possibility that the post-nomination consultation would change the outcome.

Justice Charlesworth found that Pitt also displayed a “dismissive attitude to its key opponents, the Barngarla people.” Describing the judgement as the conclusion of a “David and Goliath” battle, the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation’s chair, Jason Bilney, reflected on the outcome in light of truth-telling: “It’s about listening to the First Nations people, and here we are today and we prevailed and we won.”

Napandee was a latecomer to the process of deciding where Australia’s nuclear waste would be stored. The first round of applications had resulted in just one suitable site: Wallerberdina Station, near Hawker, in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges. Seeking further options in late 2016, resources minister Matt Canavan approved an amendment to the nomination guidelines to allow private landholders to nominate their own properties for consideration. Early the following year, the federal government received several new sites for consideration; one of them was Napandee, a 160-hectare property put forward by owner Jeff Baldock.

With these new sites in contention, efforts began in Hawker and Kimba to gauge local support for the facility. Several ballots conducted as part of the consultation process returned a slim majority vote against hosting Australia’s nuclear waste in Hawker (48–52) and a majority for hosting it in Kimba (62–38). Both communities were divided, and in both cases the Traditional Owners argued they had been “locked out” of voting and not adequately consulted. Once Napandee was selected as the final location in 2020, the Barngarla committed to having the decision reversed.

Justice Charlesworth’s judgement might be a welcome one for the Traditional Owners but it by no means marks the end of the wider debate over the storage of Australia’s nuclear waste. After all, Australians have been here before and will undoubtedly find themselves here again.

If it feels as though the issue of radioactive waste has been in the news for a very long time, that’s because it has. For decades, politicians, experts and the public have debated the ins and outs of radioactive waste storage and disposal in Australia. As the debate rages on, the nation’s nuclear waste mounts.

Australia’s existing waste consists mainly of low-level radioactive waste products and contaminated materials used in medicine, industry and scientific research: contaminated PPE, for example, and unused radiopharmaceuticals and contaminated gowns and bedlinen. The nation’s radioactive waste burden is partly the consequence of saving countless lives: in 2022 alone, 300,000 nuclear medicine diagnostic exams were claimed on Medicare, each of them producing both low- and intermediate-level nuclear waste.

Regardless of radioactive materials’ positive uses, the mental leap from nuclear waste to barrels of toxic sludge, ballooning mushroom clouds and radiation sickness shouldn’t be dismissed. Uncertainty about radioactivity’s association with cancer and other serious health concerns, its impact on the environment and the contradictory way it appears to be handled and approached by authorities induce unease. Rather than treat these anxieties as baseless, decision-makers need to face them head-on and deal with them seriously.

This was exactly the advice given to the Keating government in the No Time to Waste report released by the Senate Select Committee on the Dangers of Radioactive Waste in 1996. The committee found that the rules and regulations governing nuclear waste storage were not only difficult to understand but were also inadequately enforced. The rules themselves hadn’t kept up with shifting international standards and appeared to operate differently from state to state. Coming after a nuclear waste spill at Port Augusta in 1991, these conclusions would only have increased public concern.

The more recent case of a radioactive capsule lost in remote Western Australia is a good reminder of why such concern prevails. Australians were told not to be concerned by the misplaced 8mm diameter capsule, but — in the same breath — were “urged” not to touch it. Chief health officer Andrew Robertson, who chairs the Radiological Council of Western Australia, warned that coming into contact with the tiny capsule “could cause radiation burns or severe illness.”

Once it was found, though, the public health risk associated with the capsule was reported as having been extremely remote. The contradictory messages, and the lapses of security with which they were associated, caused understandable apprehension.

But accidents like these don’t just fuel anxiety. They also fuel discussion of the need for a national remedy to the risks posed by the decentralised handling of potentially dangerous radioactive materials. At present, Australia’s nuclear waste is housed at over one hundred sites across the country — some of them in populous areas — including hospitals, universities, mines and the Lucas Heights reactor in Sydney. Proposals for national repositories to centralise these storages extend back at least to 1998.

The proposal most like the one successfully opposed last month came in 1998, when prime minister John Howard took up the Senate committee’s recommendation of two years earlier that the government begin seeking a site for a national, well-regulated waste repository. Opposition flowed thick and fast, laced with fears that placing the waste in the desert would merely put it “out of sight, out of mind.”

Ever conscious of the radioactive legacies of British nuclear testing at Maralinga and Emu Field, and also aware of the waste generated at the large-scale Olympic Dam mine, many South Australians resented the suggestion that theirs would become the nuclear waste state. But it wasn’t the state’s nuclear past that determined the repository’s fate; it was the government’s determination to stick to a “decide and defend” model of site location, as Griffith University’s Ian Lowe recently described it.

Cabinet papers released earlier this year detail the Howard government’s plans to defy opposition from South Australians. They reveal cabinet’s commitment to defending the government’s choice of site through “the compulsory acquisition of… native title rights and interests in the area” and the overriding of “any South Australian legislation which seeks to prohibit the establishment of the national repository.”

South Australia’s Rann government brought a Federal Court case against the Commonwealth in 2004, arguing that attempts to compulsorily acquire land in South Australia for nuclear waste storage were unlawful. As it did last month, the Federal Court ruled in favour of the applicants.

Howard subsequently announced the government’s decision to “abandon” the repository because of a “failure of the states and territories to cooperate with the Australian Government in finding a national solution for the safe and secure disposal of low level radioactive waste.” What might have been interpreted by Howard as a failure by the states to cooperate with his government would have been interpreted by affected communities as the federal government’s failure to cooperate with them. Precisely the same accusation was levelled by the Barngarla.

In light of this month’s ruling, and echoing Howard, Minister King last week reaffirmed her government’s commitment to safely storing and disposing of Australia’s nuclear waste. Looking ahead, though, AUKUS and Australia’s acquisition of nuclear submarines will profoundly affect this commitment. And only last week Nationals leader David Littleproud reaffirmed the Coalition’s view that Australia should go nuclear.

Larger-scale nuclear pursuits — including nuclear submarines — would undoubtedly complicate Australia’s nuclear waste disposal. To date, Australian governments, Coalition and Labor, have been unable to secure widespread public support for a national storage or disposal facility for low- to intermediate-level radioactive waste. Yet the AUKUS security pact makes Australia responsible for the storage of high-level waste produced by its submarine fleet.

Despite assurances that this won’t be a problem until at least the 2050s, the prospect is well worth considering in light of the Federal Court’s ruling. This judgement, like those that came before it, demonstrates that nuclear waste storage and disposal in Australia isn’t necessarily an issue of technical ability (though this remains up for debate); rather, it requires governments to both obtain community consent and allay public concerns.

As King made clear, a national waste facility “requires broad community support.” This doesn’t mean simply obtaining the support of ratepayers or property owners — it means the whole community. And while this is undoubtedly an immense task, if the recent and earlier judgements teach us anything, it is that an issue like this won’t be resolved until communities’ voices are heard and apprehensions adequately considered. •

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At their annual summit in July, island leaders appointed an independent five-member expert scientific panel to probe the project’s safety. Forum secretary-general Henry Puna, concerned about harm to the fishing industry in Japan and the wider Pacific region, has reinforced regional concern that the scientific data doesn’t justify the plan.

“Experts have advised a deferment to the impending discharge into the Pacific Ocean by Japan is necessary,” Puna said last month. “Based on that advice, our members encourage consideration for options other than discharge, while the independent panel of experts continue to further assess the safety of the discharge in light of the current data gaps.”

In a confidential report to the Pacific Islands Forum, the expert panel outlined detailed concerns about the project, arguing that any decision to proceed should be postponed. Even though Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority has given the go-ahead for construction, a growing number of scientists are warning about the long-term implications of dumping more than a million tonnes of water containing radioactive isotopes into the Pacific.

The waste problem goes back to March 2011, when three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were flooded after an offshore earthquake. A fourteen-metre tsunami hit the coast, causing massive damage to the reactors’ power supply and cooling systems. The partial meltdown of the reactor cores caused extensive damage as fuel rod assemblies burned through steel containment vessels and into the concrete base of the reactor buildings.

For more than a decade, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as TEPCO, has been using water to cool the excess heat still emanating from the melted fuel rods. The highly contaminated cooling water is then stored in more than a thousand tanks at the site. With more than a hundred tonnes of water collected every day, storage space is running out.

Japan proposes to dump this wastewater into the Pacific Ocean after passing it through an Advanced Liquid Processing System designed to remove most radioactive materials.

The cost of decommissioning the stricken Fukushima reactors has put TEPCO — and Japanese taxpayers — under massive pressure. Since 2011, more than ¥12 trillion (A$120 billion) has been spent on cleaning up the plant, decontaminating the site and compensating people affected by the accident. This accounts for half of the amount budgeted for work that must continue for many decades.

The Japanese government has already provided ¥10.2 trillion in no-interest loans to TEPCO. Last month Japan’s Board of Audit revealed that repayment of these loans will be delayed, highlighting TEPCO’s ongoing financial crisis.

Many analysts are concerned TEPCO is looking at ocean waste dumping as the cheapest option to resolve storage costs for the vast amounts of water contaminated with tritium and other radionuclides. As Benshuo Yang and Haojun Xu from the Ocean University of China report, alternatives include underground burial, controlled vapour release, and injection into the geosphere. Japan, they add, “has chosen the most cost-efficient, but most harmful one.”

Work on the ocean dumping plan is rushing ahead, ignoring international concern. In August, TEPCO began building the infrastructure needed to release the treated radioactive water into the sea, including a kilometre-long undersea tunnel and a complex of pipes to transfer the treated water from storage tanks.

Because Japan is a major donor to Pacific Island nations, some island governments are wary of directly condemning the plan. But anti-nuclear sentiment is strong in a region that still suffers from the radioactive legacies of fifty years of cold war–era nuclear testing, and many remember previous Japanese pledges to consult about plans to dump nuclear waste.

The expert panel was appointed to help bolster the islands’ dealings with Japan. Its five members have extensive expertise in the marine environment, nuclear radiation, reactor engineering and oceanography: Ken Buesseler works at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Antony Hooker is director of the Centre for Radiation Research, Education and Innovation at the University of Adelaide, Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress is with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Monterey, Robert Richmond is director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, or IEER.

TEPCO’s radiological impact assessment, released in November 2021, sidestepped many of the initial concerns raised by critics of the project. Throughout 2022, the expert panel held meetings with TEPCO and Japanese officials, receiving some data on the type of radionuclides held in storage by the company. The International Atomic Energy Agency has also contributed to the debate, with director-general Rafael Grossi visiting the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in May 2022 and briefing a Forum meeting in July.

For panel member Arjun Makhijani, a former nuclear engineer and IEER expert on nuclear safety, the lack of significant data is a crucial problem.

“From a scientific point of view, we as an expert panel felt there was really insufficient information to plan this huge operation,” he tells me. “We perceived early on that because most of the storage tanks had not been sampled, most of the radionuclides are not being sampled, and so there just wasn’t enough information to proceed.”

As time went on, says Dr Makhijani, the panel’s worries about the Japanese plans became stronger. “Do they know what they are doing? Do they have enough information? Have they done the measurements properly? Do they know if the capacity of the filtration system will be enough for the volume of liquids, so the concentration of radionuclides would be low enough? How long will it take if they have to repeatedly filter the liquids? There weren’t any clear answers to these questions.”

As they met with TEPCO and Japanese authorities, the expert panel began to raise a series of concerns: the failure to accurately sample different isotopes in the storage tanks, the level of radioactive contamination in sludge at the bottom of the tanks, and the models used to determine how elements like tritium will disperse and dilute in the vast Pacific Ocean.

For Dr Makhijani, the Japanese authorities have not provided enough information to ascertain what range and amounts of radionuclides will be found in each tank. Only nine of sixty-four radionuclides have been included in the data shared with the Forum.

“The vast majority of radionuclides are not being measured, according to the Japanese authorities themselves,” Dr Makhijani says. “In summary, most of the tanks have never been sampled. The sampling they do is non-representative of the water in the tanks and when they were stored. Are the measurements of what’s in the tanks accurate? The answer to this is no.”

The bulk of the radioactivity measured in the wastewater is from two isotopes: tritium and carbon-14. But current data also show a complex mix of other highly radioactive isotopes, including strontium-90, caesium-134, caesium-137, cobalt-60 and even tellurium-127, a fission product with a short half-life of nine hours that shouldn’t be present after years of storage.

The expert panel has noted that some tanks low in tritium are high in strontium-90, and vice versa, concluding that “the assumption that concentrations of the other radionuclides are constant is not correct and a full assessment of all radioisotopes is needed to evaluate the true risk factors.”

Also of concern is the fact that particles in the water may settle to the bottom of the storage tanks over time, creating contaminated sludge. Japanese authorities have confirmed that tanks filled with cooling water in the years immediately after the 2011 accident contain contaminated sediment of this kind.

“The sludges were not sampled then and have not been sampled since that time,” says Dr Makhijani. “How much of these sludges will be stirred up and complicate the filtration system as you pump out the water from the tanks? This issue has not been addressed.”

TEPCO plans to filter out most isotopes but dump vast amounts of tritium into the Pacific, relying on rapid dispersion and dilution. But many scientists are critical of the model used to measure the dilution of tritium in seawater, which is based on models using international standards for how much naturally occurring tritium can be safely ingested in drinking water. Environmental critics of the dumping plan are concerned tritium and other radioactive isotopes will accumulate in ocean sediments, fish and other marine biota.

According to Dr Makhijani, the expert panel was concerned that the proposed drinking water standard for tritium does not apply to ocean ecosystems. “The discharged concentration of tritium will be thousands of times the background level you find naturally or through historical nuclear testing,” he explains, “and then you’re going to discharge it for many decades.”

He believes a full modelling of the impact would include “an ecosystem assessment, both for sediments and for vegetal and animal biota that travel,” which hasn’t been done. “In TEPCO’s environmental impact assessment, they didn’t take account of any bioaccumulation of tritium, which does occur in all organisms. The question of bioconcentration in an ocean environment was totally ignored in the statement.”

In its report to Forum member governments in August, the expert panel concluded that Japan’s assessments of ecological effects and bioconcentration are seriously deficient and don’t provide a sound basis for estimating impact. Writing in the Japan Times, the five scientists noted:

The release of contaminated material from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant would take at least forty years, and decades longer if you include the anticipated accumulation of new water during the process. This would impact not only the interests and reputation of the Japanese fishing community, among others, but also the people and countries of the entire Pacific region. This needs to be considered as a transboundary and transgenerational issue.

Insufficient information is available to assess how environmental and human health would be affected, they argued, and issuing a permit at this time would be premature at best: “Having studied the scientific and ecological aspects of the matter, we have concluded that the decision to release the contaminated water should be indefinitely postponed and other options for the tank water revisited until we have more complete data to evaluate the economic, environmental and human health costs of ocean release.”

The potential for long-term damage to the ocean environment is echoed by expert panel member Robert Richmond from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

“This is truly a trans-boundary issue,” he says. “Fish don’t respect political lines, and neither do radionuclides or pollutants in the ocean. I really commend the members of the Pacific Islands Forum for recognising this is an issue they need additional information on.”

Soon after the 2011 Fukushima accident, scientists confirmed that Pacific bluefin tuna can transport radionuclides across the northern Pacific Ocean. A 2012 study from Stanford University reported tuna with traces of Fukushima-related contamination had been found on the shores of the United States.

“Pacific bluefin tuna can rapidly transport radionuclides from a point source in Japan to distant ecoregions and demonstrate the importance of migratory animals as transport vectors of radionuclides,” the study reported. “Other large, highly migratory marine animals make extensive use of waters around Japan, and these animals may also be transport vectors of Fukushima-derived radionuclides to distant regions of the North and South Pacific Oceans.”

Will perceptions of radioactive hazards from Japan’s ocean dumping damage the global market for tuna? Many island nations derive vital revenue from the deepwater fishing nations that pay to operate in Pacific Island exclusive economic zones, or EEZs.

Regional organisations have also sought to process and market tuna from the Pacific as another key source of revenue. For nearly a decade, island states have supported Pacifical, a brand that promotes sustainable distribution and marketing of skipjack and yellowfin tuna caught in their EEZs.

Speaking after her recent appointment as executive director of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, Rhea Moss-Christian highlighted the potential damage of Japan’s decades-long project: “This is a massive release and a big, big potential disaster if it’s not handled properly.”

Moss-Christian is the first Pacific woman to head the commission, which manages the largest tuna fishery in the world, representing nearly 60 per cent of global production.

“I wish that the Japanese government would take some more time before its release,” she told journalists at December’s commission meeting. “There are a number of outstanding questions that have yet to be fully answered. They have focused a lot on one particular radionuclide, and not very much on others that are also present in the wastewater.”

Moss-Christian is a citizen of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, an island nation living with the consequences of radioactive fallout from sixty-seven US atmospheric nuclear tests on Bikini and Enewetak Atolls. A former chair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission, she is deeply aware of this radioactive legacy. Her nation struggles to control radionuclides leaching into the marine environment from the Runit Dome, a nuclear waste site on Enewetak Atoll created by the United States in the 1970s.

“We have a lot of experience in the Marshall Islands with lingering radioactive waste,” Moss-Christian said. “We don’t want to find ourselves in another situation, not just in the Marshall Islands, but in general in the region, where we agree to something without knowing what could potentially happen in the future. What are the contingency plans? What are the compensation mechanisms?”

At a time of growing US–China tension, the Japanese government is seeking to boost its role in the islands region. Tokyo is building closer ties with Australia and the United States through increased military operations and joint investments in the islands. In November, for example, Tokyo and Washington agreed to contribute US$100 million to support Australian underwriting of Telstra’s purchase of Digicel, blocking Chinese investment in the Pacific’s key mobile phone network.

Even as the Japanese government seeks to win hearts and minds in the region, community anger about the nuclear threat is growing. Church and civil society groups, including the Pacific Conference of Churches, Pacific Islands Association of Non-Governmental Organisations and Pacific Network on Globalisation, have criticised the proposed wastewater dumping plan.

When Japanese foreign minister Yoshimasa Hayashi visited Fiji last May, these community groups argued the proposed ocean dumping breached international agreements like the London Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution. A joint civil society statement concluded, “We believe there is no scenario in which discharging nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean is justified for the health, wellbeing, and future safety of Pacific peoples and the environment.”

As Japan forges ahead with its plan and Australia works towards acquiring nuclear submarines under the AUKUS agreement, the gulf is growing between the two countries’ geopolitical agenda and the growing antinuclear sentiment across the Blue Pacific. •

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The protests against the wall-of-death drift-netting, against plans to dispose of nuclear wastes in the ocean, the incineration of chemical weapons on Johnston Island, the 1995 resumption of nuclear tests on Moruroa, and, most ominously, the specter of our atoll islands and low-lying coastal regions disappearing under the rising sea level, are instances of a regional united front against threats to our environment.

Now we can add AUKUS to that list, and the new danger of nuclear proliferation in the Pacific.

Last month US president Joe Biden, British prime minister Boris Johnson and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison announced AUKUS, “an enhanced trilateral security partnership” between the three countries. They professed “a shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.”

This strategic shift is much broader than the commitment to nuclear subs. The United States will deploy vessels, aircraft and US marines more often through Australia, and joint research efforts will focus on new frontiers, from the militarisation of space to “cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and additional undersea capabilities.”

The brutal abandonment of the $90 billion submarine contract with France’s Naval Group, meanwhile, sent Australia’s strategic think tanks into overdrive, to analyse the implications for Indo-Pacific relationships. Amid the reams of commentary, however, little attention focused on the response to AUKUS in the Pacific islands.

Partly this reflects the initially measured response of most regional leaders, who refrained from directly criticising the new Anglosphere partnership. But any hope that Australia’s island neighbours will welcome further nuclearisation of the region is folly. Even as they face current security challenges — including the climate emergency and the Covid-19 pandemic — island leaders are again talking about nuclear weapons, nuclear waste dumping and their desire for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific.

Scott Morrison likes to say that Australia has a vuvale relationship with its island neighbours. But vuvale, the Fijian word for “family,” carries deep cultural implications, involving bonds of reciprocity, respect and sharing. Respect towards island neighbours has been sorely lacking during climate negotiations, and regional anger over Canberra’s failed climate policy is likely to be exacerbated by the strategic shift under AUKUS.

Within days of the AUKUS announcement, a series of statements from Pacific leaders, community elders and media organisations highlighted the persistence of the deep antinuclear sentiment that Epeli Hau‘ofa identified as a central element of Pacific regionalism.

“Shame Australia, Shame,” tweeted the general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, Reverend James Bhagwan. “How can you call us your ‘vuvale’ when you know your ‘family’ stands for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific?”

Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Damukana Sogavare told the UN General Assembly that his nation “would like to keep our region nuclear-free and put the region’s nuclear legacy behind us… We do not support any form of militarisation in our region that could threaten regional and international peace and stability.”

Recalling British and US nuclear testing on Christmas Island, Kiribati president Taneti Maamau highlighted the trauma of i-Kiribati nuclear survivors: “With anything to do with nuclear, we thought it would be a courtesy to raise it, to discuss it with your neighbours… As small island states,” he added, “we thought we were part of the solution… we are in the Pacific family. We should be consulted.”

Newspapers like the Samoa Observer editorialised against Australia’s plans. “Signing up to a military pact behind the closet and then declaring we in the region will benefit from the peace and stability it would bring is not how friends treat each other,” declared Samoa’s leading newspaper.

In contrast to Canberra’s strategic shift, the New Zealand government quickly reaffirmed the longstanding, bipartisan legislation that has kept NZ ports free of nuclear visits since 1987. While avoiding any direct criticism of AUKUS and reiterating New Zealand’s commitment to ANZUS and the Five Eyes agreement, prime minister Jacinda Ardern pointedly reminded Australia that nuclear submarines are not welcome across the Tasman.

“Certainly they couldn’t come into our internal waters,” she said. “No vessels that are partially or fully powered by nuclear energy is able to enter our internal borders.”

Morrison claimed that under AUKUS “Australia is not seeking to establish nuclear weapons or establish a civil nuclear capability.” These claims were immediately undercut when the Minerals Council of Australia and leading members of his own government called for a domestic nuclear industry to help develop the skills needed to maintain and operate a nuclear-powered submarine fleet. Others are concerned that the AUKUS partnership will rekindle Australian efforts in the 1960s to acquire nuclear weapons, a debate already under way in Australian strategic think tanks.

Unlike Australia, New Zealand has joined nine Forum Island Countries to sign and ratify the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, which prohibits parties from “developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, acquiring, possessing, or stockpiling nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” As the Samoa Observer wrote, “It is a relief seeing Prime Minister Ardern continuing to maintain the tradition of her predecessors by promoting a nuclear-free Pacific; probably she is the only true friend of the Pacific Islands.”

For all of Scott Morrison’s talk of being a member of the “Pacific family,” he clearly doesn’t understand how many actual families were affected during the nuclear-testing era. The last of the more than 310 nuclear tests in the region was conducted twenty-five years ago, but outsiders often underestimate how deep the nuclear legacy is embedded in personal histories and oceanic culture.

Many past and present leaders have personal connections to the fifty years of cold war–era nuclear testing in Marshall Islands, Australia, Kiribati and French Polynesia. Former French Polynesian president Oscar Temaru worked on Moruroa Atoll as a customs officer, suffered family tragedy from the early death of a child and is a supporter of Moruroa e Tatou, the association of former Maohi workers who staffed the test sites during France’s 193 nuclear tests.

As a child in the 1950s, former Kiribati president Anote Tong lived on Fanning Island, close to Christmas Island where the British government conducted hydrogen bomb tests, dubbed Operation Grapple, in 1957–58.

Fiji was a British colony at this time, sending members of the Fiji Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve to support Britain’s H-bomb tests on Malden Island. The first contingent of Fijian sailors in 1957 was led by Ratu Inoke Bainimarama. Today, his son Josaia — known as Frank — is prime minister of Fiji. As a former rear-admiral and commander of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces, the younger Bainimarama is an unlikely champion for nuclear disarmament. But the Fijian politician — who led the military coup in 2006 and now serves as chair of the Pacific Islands Forum — has long stood by Fijian nuclear veterans.

“My father was among those soldiers,” Bainimarama tweeted a fortnight after the AUKUS announcement. “The nature of their mission was not totally clear to any of them until the bombs were going off. To honour the sacrifice of all those who have suffered due to these weapons, Fiji will never stop working towards a global nuclear ban.”

The timing of the AUKUS announcement added complications for the British government, which will host the COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow next month. Many leaders from the Small Island Developing States group watched in dismay as France and the AUKUS partners squabbled over arms contracts at a time when development and climate funding is desperately needed. As Bainimarama tartly noted, “If we can spend trillions on missiles, drones, and nuclear submarines, we can fund climate action.”

Even as he challenges the AUKUS partners to make more ambitious COP26 climate commitments, the Fijian PM has spent recent weeks speaking out about nuclear proliferation and the health and environmental legacies of nuclear testing. At the UN General Assembly he stressed that “the commitment of the Pacific Island nations to the elimination of nuclear weapons is not based on an abstraction. It is based on real experience with the consequences of nuclear fallout, and it is at the root of our sense of urgency.”

Announcing the AUKUS deal, Scott Morrison recklessly described the renewed ties to Britain and the United States as a “forever partnership” (no doubt raising eyebrows in Paris, after the Australia–France strategic partnership and a multibillion-dollar contract was sunk overnight by Anglo-American perfidy).

The range of issues contemplated under the AUKUS banner — from transfer of nuclear technology to cyberwarfare cooperation and logistics, transit and basing rights for American forces in Australia — highlights the potential for Australia to be even further integrated into US nuclear war–fighting strategies. Previous Coalition language about the need to “balance” economic ties with the People’s Republic of China and strategic ties with the United States has been abandoned.

Most of Australia’s Pacific island neighbours haven’t abandoned this balancing act, however. At a time of increasing US–Chinese strategic competition, many are wary of being forced into a choice between Washington and Beijing.

Like New Zealand, Vanuatu has declared its land and waters nuclear-free, and like Fiji it is a member of the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement. Other states like Papua New Guinea explicitly base their foreign policy on the objective “friends to all and enemies to none.”

Although PNG prime minister James Marape didn’t directly criticise the AUKUS announcement, he did tell ABC correspondent Natalie Whiting that “we will make sure our sovereignty is not influenced by what happens in Australia and elsewhere. [O]ur waters and our sovereignty will be protected by our own specific bilaterals we have with all nations.”

This tension is evident even among some of the United States’ closest allies in the northern Pacific. Although they are contemplating withdrawal from the Pacific Islands Forum, the five members of the Micronesian Presidents’ Summit continue to manoeuvre around longstanding China–Taiwan disputes in the Pacific. Nauru, Palau and Marshall Islands have diplomatic relations with Taipei; Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia, or FSM, recognise Beijing. All, however, are wary of a neat “for and against” logic, despite criticism by Taiwan-aligned leaders like Nauru president Lionel Aingimea and Palau’s Surangel Whipps Jr of Chinese human rights violations and China’s strategic advance.

Even as FSM extends its historical connection with Washington, president David Panuelo continues to support ongoing diplomatic ties with Beijing. In his address to the UN General Assembly in September, Panuelo said that FSM needed support from “all friends, allies and development partners in the global community.”

Micronesia is “family to the United States and a friend to the People’s Republic of China,” he went on, “just as Micronesia is a friend to the Maldives and to the United Kingdom, to the Netherlands and to Spain, to Nicaragua and to Australia, to New Zealand and to South Africa, to Israel and to Norway, to Japan and to Korea.” Friends to all, enemies to none.

In a new book on FSM’s foreign policy, Micronesian scholar Gonzaga Puas says his country “is learning from other Pacific Island nations to better position itself in regard to relations with China without offending the US.” Puas says that island nations like FSM have long dealt successfully with the outside world by drawing on internal social stability and mutual support rather than succumbing to different waves of colonisation. The vast think tank literature on Chinese influence in the Pacific islands often underestimates this skill.

Even so, the three Freely Associated States can’t avoid current regional tensions. FSM, the Republic of Palau and the Republic of Marshall Islands are renegotiating Compacts of Free Association with Washington by 2023, agreements that give the US Indo-Pacific Command strategic denial against third parties. As the United States mobilises against China in the region, US officials are discussing possible military-basing rights with Palau and FSM, as well as new deployments in the US territory of Guahan (Guam), which already hosts major US naval and air force bases.

The AUKUS partners seek the status of “security partner of choice” for island nations. But if they try to force “forever partnerships” on members of the Pacific Islands Forum, the pushback will be significant. As PNG’s James Marape said after the AUKUS announcement, “We have a very peaceful part of planet Earth, we want to protect that peace and serenity… In as far as securing peace is concerned, we’ve got no problem, but if such activities bring disharmony in the region, then we have an issue.”

Nuclear testing has played a major if unintended role in shaping the region’s political development over the past half-century. As Pacific Islands Forum secretary-general Henry Puna reminded participants in a recent Forum webinar to commemorate the UN International Day on Nuclear Tests, “nuclear testing was a key political driver for the establishment of our Pacific Islands Forum fifty years ago.”

For the former Cook Islands prime minister, the signing of the 1985 Rarotonga Treaty for a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, or SPNFZ, was a seminal moment for Pacific regionalism: “Despite thirty-six years of the Treaty of Rarotonga, and twenty-five years since the permanent cessation of nuclear testing in our region, the nuclear threat remains, exacerbated by the permanent, intergenerational consequences and impacts of nuclear weapons.”

Other veteran diplomats echo the importance of SPNFZ, which was developed in the midst of 1980s US–Soviet nuclear tensions. Samoa’s current high commissioner to Fiji, Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia, was a member of Samoa’s delegation at the August 1984 Forum meeting in Tuvalu that appointed the working group of officials to prepared the draft text of a Nuclear Free Zone Treaty. As I reported for Inside Story in 2013, declassified cabinet papers and leaked US diplomatic cables reveal the extent of the US–Australia collaboration at that time, to push back against island governments seeking to ban missile tests and visits or transit by nuclear-powered vessels.

Unlike China, Russia, Britain and France, the United States is the only major nuclear weapons state that still refuses to ratify the protocols of the SPNFZ treaty. Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia stresses that the next step is clear: “We don’t need to look far. The three Protocols of our own Rarotonga Treaty have yet to be ratified by the United States, despite some positive indications made earlier.”

Recent regional efforts have aimed to strengthen SPNFZ and other treaties. New Zealand and Vanuatu co-hosted a conference in December 2018, issuing the Auckland Statement on TPNW to encourage more island countries to sign and ratify the nuclear ban treaty. This push was echoed by the Fijian prime minister at last month’s General Assembly meeting, when Bainimarama urged “all Member States to join and ratify the new TPNW, to free the world of nuclear weapons.”

Signatories to the Rarotonga Treaty held their first-ever meeting of states parties in December last year, more than thirty-five years after the treaty was signed. The Forum has created a Nuclear Legacies Task Force to assist nuclear survivors in Marshall Islands and Kiribati. Since his election last February, secretary-general Puna has reached out to OPANAL — the Latin American secretariat that manages the 1967 Tlatelolco nuclear-weapon-free zone. In a speech to OPANAL on 1 October, Puna offered to host “a meeting of nuclear-weapon-free zones in the Blue Pacific” in 2022, bringing together governments that have created zones across the whole land area of the southern hemisphere.

Australian diplomats, by contrast, regard US extended nuclear deterrence as a central feature of Australian defence policy. They have campaigned against the TPNW and ensured that British nuclear testing at Monte Bello, Maralinga and Emu Field is not on the agenda of the regional Nuclear Legacies Task Force. Meanwhile, UK prime minister Boris Johnson has announced three major changes to Britain’s nuclear posture: to increase the upper limit on its nuclear warhead stockpile by 44 per cent, reduce transparency about the makeup of the arsenal and extend the strategic circumstances in which British nuclear weapons might be used. The United States continues to upgrade its nuclear arsenal, even as the number of nuclear warheads shrinks.

Scott Morrison now wants to go further. If they are ever built and crewed in coming decades (no small problem), the proposed AUKUS nuclear submarines will integrate the Royal Australian Navy more deeply into US nuclear war–fighting strategies, through potential missions such as undersea intelligence collection within China’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

The Rarotonga Treaty also bans the dumping of radioactive nuclear waste in the SPNFZ zone, as well as assisting or encouraging any nation to dump waste in the region. For Henry Puna, the treaty “distinctly ensures that we are a nuclear-free zone, and not just a nuclear-weapon-free zone… the intentional omission of ‘weapon’ from the title of our treaty reflects the desire of states parties to engage on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation in a holistic fashion.”

For this reason, the proposed ocean dumping of contaminated waste water from the stricken Fukushima nuclear reactor is a major diplomatic setback for Japan in the islands. In recent years, Japan has joined other “Quad” members — Australia, India and the United States — to coordinate pushback against Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific. But the Japanese government angered Pacific communities last April by announcing plans to discharge more than 1.2 million tonnes of treated radioactive waste water into the Pacific, starting in 2023. The unilateral proposal breaches previous commitments to consult with island leaders before any dumping is undertaken.

“Japan’s announcement to discharge treated water into the Pacific Ocean has sounded the alarm bells again,” says Samoa’s Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia. “We need independent and verifiable scientific assessment that this method of discharge is indeed safe-proof.” The final communiqué of the ninth Pacific Area Leaders Meeting, in July, highlighted “the priority of ensuring international consultation, international law, and independent and verifiable scientific assessments.” As Henry Puna said, “Only the disclosure of information based on science will satisfy and appease the members.”

The links between climate change, nuclear contaminants and human rights for indigenous peoples are highlighted by the energetic diplomacy of the Republic of Marshall Islands. Marshallese diplomats are active on many fronts: championing the successful effort at the UN Human Rights Council to create a special rapporteur on climate change and human rights; lobbying at the International Maritime Organization for climate levies on bunker fuel; and raising the call at COP26 for “1.5 to stay alive” through the Climate Vulnerable Forum and Higher Ambition Coalition. The Marshall Islands government has created a National Nuclear Commission to coordinate effective responses to the legacies of sixty-seven US nuclear tests in their lands and waters.

Successive Marshall Islands leaders have highlighted the connection between nuclear and climate threats. The poem “Anointed” by Marshallese writer and activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner captures local concern that rising sea levels will leach radioactive isotopes into the marine environment from the Runit Dome on Enewetak Atoll — a relic of twentieth-century nuclear testing. Today, Jetnil-Kijiner is a climate envoy for her nation, contributing to a National Adaptation Plan that uniquely links climate and nuclear concerns. “It’s going to be one of the few National Adaptation Plans that takes into consideration the nuclear legacy,” she says, “and how the nuclear legacy can inform how we plan for climate change action.”

Marshall Islands president David Kabua has called on UN agencies to assist in dealing with these legacies within the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework. Kabua sees UN action as a small recompense for the betrayal of Micronesian rights when his nation was under UN Trusteeship after the second world war, “where — despite our warnings at the time — two Trusteeship Council resolutions remain the only instance in history where any UN organ ever specifically authorised nuclear detonations.” The legacy of these tests, he said, “remains a very contemporary threat, in our waters, our lands and our bodies.”

As Australians debate the costs and consequences of acquiring AUKUS nuclear submarines, David Kabua’s words ring out: “We tirelessly underscore that no people or nation should ever have to bear a burden such as ours, and that no effort should be spared to move towards a world free of nuclear weapons and nuclear risk.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post AUKUS disrupts “a very peaceful part of planet Earth” appeared first on Inside Story.

So what went so terribly wrong? What could possibly explain last week’s sudden and abrupt decision to throw the project overboard and substitute a vague promise of embarking on a new build in two year’s time? Defence analysts increasingly believe the only way to make sense of the move is to see it as the first step in the creation of an independent nuclear deterrent.

The key is in the vessels themselves.

It’s evident the new submarine must offer something pretty special, although there’s been no indication, so far, of exactly what this might be. The public statements have been anodyne, simply emphasising the advantages of nuclear propulsion and building on an existing design. Both points are accurate. Conventional submarines regularly have to “snort,” rising to the surface to take in oxygen and expel contaminants, increasing the risk they’ll be located. Nuclear vessels don’t. They can remain on station for months and possess far greater range than normal subs. There’s much more to it, though, than just this.

These new submarines will be nuclear-powered general-purpose attack submarines, or SSNs. The critical issue is capability. The design that’s been abandoned, the so-called “Attack class,” would have delivered (roughly) 5300 tonne vessels with six torpedo tubes capable of firing Harpoon anti-ship missiles, which have a thirty-four-centimetre diameter and range of about 300 kilometres. At 7400 tonnes, however, the Astute class (on which the new design will be based) is much larger and with size comes huge potential. They carry larger, fifty-two-centimetre diameter silos capable of holding Tomahawk Block IV cruise missiles. As well as accurately hitting a small target (something the size of a house) from more than 1600 kilometres away, the route of these weapons can be changed in flight.

Perhaps most crucially, they can also be fitted with nuclear warheads.

The massive range of the weapon dramatically changes the nature of the boat’s capabilities. Instead of being forced to sail close in, where it becomes vulnerable, the vessel stands off, lurking deep in the ocean well away from land. This submarine represents a sudden escalation in Australia’s strategic capability, which perhaps explains why concern has come not only from China but more particularly from Indonesia and Malaysia. They understand how this decision could change the world.

There are, of course, no current plans to acquire nuclear missiles. Indeed, such a capability hasn’t been mentioned in all the speeches and interviews. But that’s not the point.

What’s relevant is that owning this sort of submarine is a game changer. It opens up options Scott Morrison (and, perhaps more particularly, defence minister Peter Dutton) are well aware of, and are probably seeking.

Perhaps this is the vital background to why the French project was abandoned.

Both weapons systems are potent. But the shift can’t be explained away as simply an acknowledgement that Australia’s submarines need to be nuclear-powered. If this was the only requirement, talks would have already begun with the French, who produce highly sophisticated nuclear vessels. Indeed, we’ve been working hard to convert one of their nuclear subs to a conventionally powered boat, so swapping in a new engine block would have been simple.

The only way to make any sense of the move is to understand it as, quite possibly, the most significant strategic decision Canberra has made since the second world war, wedding the country decisively to a US/UK alliance and catapulting Australia into the ranks of potentially nuclear-armed states.

This also explains the initial silence from navy officers who were surprised — or perhaps stunned is a better word — by Morrison’s out-of-the-blue announcement.

At press conferences like last week’s, viewers would normally expect politicians to be surrounded by a phalanx of uniformed commanders, bedecked with medals. But the military was conspicuous by its absence, underlining the implicit change in the strategic role such vessels might have and lending weight to the thesis that the change originated with the politicians rather than the strategists. Similarly, the lack of a plan to immediately commence work doesn’t sound like the way the navy would initiate work on the submarines. In fact, absolutely nothing other than “scoping” — perhaps another submarine analogy — will be done for at least eighteen months.

The other possibility — one that’s almost too depressing to contemplate — is that Morrison was persuaded to overturn decades of careful defence planning by a couple of determined advocates in his own inner circle of advisers. The remarkable secrecy surrounding this announcement suggests the PM’s office was well aware it faced the danger of significant pushback. Perhaps that’s why the deal was presented as very much a fait accompli. The possibility remains that Morrison has just tossed away billions of dollars and years of research, in return for vague promises of future cooperation on subs that will, inevitably, be built overseas.

The best way to understand what’s happened is to go back to the very beginnings of the fraught program that Defence once labelled SEA 1000: the project to build twelve “regionally superior” conventional submarines in Adelaide. Back in 2009 Kevin Rudd promised (with trademark aplomb, if slightly less engagement with possible realities) to build a fleet that would not merely defend the sea lanes but also provide a foundation for industry and kick-start a vibrant technological and scientific future. What was not to like?

It offered a single, neat solution to a multiplicity of different issues — defence, industrial and intellectual. It was about using knowledge to do things better.

But then, just two years later (and before any work on fleshing out ideas had begun) Rudd was gone, replaced by Julia Gillard. She didn’t hesitate to shelve the project and concentrating instead on budget repair. Then it was Tony Abbott’s turn to move the project forward. He chose to adopt a Japanese design only to have his plan aborted when a Liberal senator from South Australia threatened to vote against the government if the build didn’t remain in Adelaide.

Having caved in, Abbott bequeathed the problem to yet another PM, Malcolm Turnbull. By 2016 the prospect of building a dozen world-leading conventional submarines as a cornerstone of the country’s defence had become deeply problematic but the big difference was Turnbull had an energetic “can do” defence minister in Christopher Pyne.

Pyne engaged again with the original problem, never for a moment doubting that he could pull a solution out of the hat and, if it was one nobody else had thought of, well, so much the better. He looked around again, noticed the French, and liked what he saw. Voilà!

Naval Group — once known as Direction des Constructions Navales — had been around, in one form or another, since Cardinal Richelieu had taken command of France’s shipbuilding policy back in 1624. It had produced France’s ultimate deterrent, when Le Redoutable entered service as a ballistic missile submarine in 1971. It made everything from aircraft carriers to drones and, to Pyne, appeared as reliable as a good glass of fine Bordeaux.

Australia had already dated, and discarded, Japanese, German, and Swedish partners. A second-rate French conventional design — not the one that would be perused by Pyne — had already been ruled out as inadequate. Canberra’s traditional allies, London and Washington, only made nuclear submarines and, as these were out of contention, a flirtation with the French began. Perhaps they would be prepared to convert their nuclear boat to a conventional one?

Of course there would be problems because that’s what relationships are like. But “how hard,” Christopher asked, “how hard could it really be to pull out the nuclear power-plant and slip in a conventional engine?” Naval Group was willing.

There was enthusiasm, excitement, on both sides: a preparedness to experiment and, who knows, even the prospect of a massive breakthrough in submarine technology.

But the detail of the abandoned project reveals much more about Canberra’s incapacity to focus on the future than it does about the failure of a huge company to listen, or the simple preference of the French for a long lunch and fine wine. If this breakdown is the result of a culture clash, well, there were certainly two parties at fault.

It’s difficult to determine the exact moment disillusion entered the union.

Perhaps it was because this was never, really, a partnership of equals. Although both sides — the French builders and the Royal Australian Navy — wanted to end up in what was the same place, there were still fundamental theoretical disagreements about exactly where this might be. The rapid speed of technical progress further complicated issues. A pre-2020s design was attempting to anticipate an operating environment some twenty or thirty years into the future, but the constricting envelope of the submarine meant that difficult decisions needed to be made early in the process.

One simple example was propulsion. Obviously the system would involve some form of battery — but which type? The tested and reliable solution was lead-acid, but new advances in lithium–ion technology looked as if they’d soon offer significant advantages. It wouldn’t be simply possible to rip one type out and replace it with the other, though. The boats’ weight, trim and basic stability would be dramatically altered.

Technical arguments raged over this and other issues, including what used to be called torpedo tubes, or the way missiles would be launched from the vessel. Should these be located forward, in the bow, or would upward, as in the original design, and appropriate for firing a ballistic missile? How many and what size of missile would be stowed?

With limited space available choices like these inevitably affected not merely the capacity of magazines but also the number and type of weapons that could be carried. These questions are critical because they went to the task and possible missions the boats could be sent on. It was a given that there would never be enough space, so what should the room that was available be allocated to? Spare missiles, or room for commando teams and food? Extra diesel, or more batteries?

The real problem was there were no “right” answers, simply choices that would result in different outcomes. Fundamental disagreements were inevitable, and festered until minor cultural difficulties had grown to become seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

The French team felt the Australians were making impossible demands, but they adopted the new requirements and the cost kept growing. The navy felt Naval Group wasn’t listening or working with them to achieve a positive result. Feelers were put out to SAAB Australia, the company that had built the earlier (and initially trouble-plagued) Collins class submarines and was now working on an interim refit of these vessels.

Details of what was happening were scarce — submariners aren’t called the “silent service” for nothing — but it was obvious big issues were in play. The original contract with the French had been broken into different parts precisely so that either side could opt out at fixed points. The conclusion of the design phase appeared to be the obvious point to make the breach final. As that came and went, however, it appeared as if both sides had reconciled their differences and would move forward together.

That was not to be.

On 13 June this year Morrison was in Cornwall, where he’d been invited as a guest to attend a scheduled meeting of G7 leaders. There, beside the sands, Morrison quietly sealed a deal with British PM Boris Johnson and US President Joe Biden to scrap the French team’s efforts. Macron was also in town but had no idea a plot was being hatched behind his back to dump Naval.

Exactly what had happened is still obscure. Naval Group makes the damaging charge that it was string along while secret negotiations began with the British, first, and the United States second. They believe Morrison, prodded by new defence minister Peter Dutton, had already made a firm decision to switch builder long before he finally met French president Emmanuel Macron for private talks in Paris on his way home from Britain.

It was all smiles and warmth as the two leaders reviewed ranks of be-plumed soldiers from the steps of the Elysée Palace. Macron even dispensed with the cold elbow-bump and instead pulled the Australian PM into a traditional Gallic embrace. Incredibly, Morrison seems to have said nothing of his plans to his host. If he’d intended to give any hint to Macron that an irreparable breach was imminent, he failed badly. It’s the secrecy accompanying the Australian manoeuvre — together with the way the sudden switch to build a nuclear submarine was announced without any consultation or pre-warning — that’s more than partly responsible for the almost universal negative worldwide reaction.

What changed in Canberra was the political leadership. Morrison didn’t share Turnbull’s appreciation of the French or nuanced understanding of international issues. He and Dutton brought a new determination to make things happen and to do so in their own way. They looked for allies where they were comfortable; they found them in the Anglo-sphere.

The only other alternative is to assume the government really is completely incompetent and has been sold a pup.

This story really ends where it began — in politics, driven by personality.

Sometimes, huge defence industrial projects — like Australia’s attempt to build the best conventional submarine in the world — simply fail. And sometimes there’s more to the story than first appears. Nobody will, or is even likely to provide the full facts in the middle of all the acrimony. All one is left with are questions — but one, in particular, stands out.

After spending massive sums of money attempting to convert a nuclear submarine into a conventional one, if all that was required was a nuclear powered boat, then why not just revert to the original successful French design? What extra oomph did the British vessel (widely believed to be the frontrunner as replacement) offer to make it worth the angst and furore that’s accompanied the decision to scrap the project? Is it really worth a close to $3 billion write-off, simply so we can pay more to get an Anglo design that will probably be built overseas anyway?

This is especially the case when the British boats have been plagued for years with their own technical problems and also suffered (in the case of their first submarine) similarly huge cost blowouts.

Apportioning blame for what’s happened is as pointless as pontificating on the breakdown of a bad marriage. Perhaps, in the end, each partner just wanted something different and it simply took a while to work it out. Maybe in the end there were so many reasons cascading together, large and small, that dissolution became inevitable.

If so, the problem appears to spring from an attitude that seems to encapsulate Scott Morrison’s entire approach to politics. Change partners swiftly, strike and never look back; whether your aim is to become PM or buy a new submarine. By partnering in AUKUS, Australia’s back in an older, much more familiar relationship — and, what’s more, a threesome! What’s not to like about that? It comes with all the excitement and hope that springs from the sudden blooming of a whirlwind romance.

What could possibly go wrong? •

The post Going nuclear appeared first on Inside Story.

No such meltdown is known to have occurred among the navies that have operated nuclear-powered submarines over the past sixty-five years, not even aboard the USS Thresher, which was lost with all hands during deep-diving tests in 1963. Even so, a lot of public reassurance will be needed following Scott Morrison’s joint announcement with US president Joe Biden and British PM Boris Johnson that nuclear-powered submarines will be built and maintained by the Australian Submarine Corporation, or ASC, at Osborne, just outside Adelaide.

As independent senator Rex Patrick, a former submariner himself, points out, this means “nuclear reactors sitting on hard-stands at Osborne and moored in the Port River.”

American and British nuclear submarines are understood to use highly enriched uranium fuel that is close to bomb grade. With only one small nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights near Sydney, used for making medical and industrial isotopes, Australia will need to have made a big investment in nuclear expertise by the time these submarines arrive.

Morrison’s surprise decision to dump Australia’s commitment to twelve diesel-electric submarines designed by France’s Naval Group in favour of eight US or British nuclear-powered vessels is still being analysed and debated. But one thing is clear. “This is a strategic decision, not a commercial one,” says Steve Ludlam, a former managing director of ASC and, before that, head of Rolls-Royce’s program of modernising Britain’s submarines.

No one is hiding the fact that the new Australian–UK–US technology agreement, AUKUS — which also includes cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other frontier science — is about facing up to China, although none of the three leaders mentioned the fact at this week’s announcement.

“If there was any doubt about what Australia would do in an armed conflict between the US and China over Taiwan or the South China Sea, that’s now gone,” Marcus Hellyer, a senior analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, wrote on Friday. “The US doesn’t provide you with the crown jewels of its military technology if you are not going to use them when it calls for help.”

But we would have been expected to sign up anyway. It is a popular misconception that the navy needs these nuclear submarines to help out in Northeast Asia. Its existing Collins-class boats, and the Oberon-class before them, have operated in that region. Silent conventional submarines like the Collins-class and India’s and Vietnam’s Russian Kilo-class are said to have successfully stalked and “sunk” US nuclear submarines and major surface ships in exercises.

As Canberra strategist Hugh White points out, for the money likely to be spent on the nuclear submarines — exceeding the $90 billion price tag on the twelve French vessels — the navy could have got twenty-four smaller conventional submarines suited to defence of Australia. The twenty-four ultra-quiet subs could also be deployed further afield with replenishment from bases like Singapore, Guam or Japan’s Sasebo.

The latest British and US nuclear submarines benefit from pump-jet propulsion rather than propellers, quieter engines and battery power for lurking, though, and are big enough and powerful enough to carry autonomous underwater vehicles and other new weapons.

Regardless of the technical issues, Thursday’s announcement leaves Scott Morrison with several fires to put out.

China’s reaction to the agreement so far uses routine language to accuse the AUKUS allies of a “cold war mentality.” As the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor has observed, Beijing must be aware its own defence build-up has helped create this level of alarm.

Trade issues might anyway be more pressing for the Chinese. The night before the AUKUS announcement, the Chinese commerce ministry fired another salvo in the US–China strategic contest by lodging a formal application to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a free-trade deal that links eleven countries including Australia. Although the timing appears entirely coincidental, the request painted the United States and its allies as preoccupied with military matters.

Pushed by George W. Bush’s administration, the original TPP was pursued by Barack Obama and negotiated to signature in 2016 by the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Brunei, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Chile, Peru and Vietnam. Then, after the Republicans stalled ratification in the US Senate, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2017. Malcolm Turnbull and Japan’s Shinzo Abe got the remaining parties to hang in, hoping for a change of mind in Washington. Biden says the agreement will need to be modified for this to happen.

The Chinese application sits oddly with Xi Jinping’s move back to promoting state-owned enterprises, subsidising selected industries, and separating off China’s internet and cloud storage — each of which would breach the terms of the TPP. But it will throw attention back on Washington’s position when Morrison and Japan’s Yoshihide Suga meet Biden on 24 September.

A more immediate challenge is the rift with France. Morrison has said he started thinking about the switch to nuclear submarines eighteen months ago. It wasn’t until June this year that he broached the idea with Biden — who has final say over transfers of the US nuclear-propulsion technology previously shared only with Britain — at his meeting with the US president and Johnson on the fringes of the G7 meeting. Morrison went on to Paris for an effusive meeting with Emmanuel Macron at which he made no mention of the impending decision. Eventually — about ten hours before the announcement, and after the first leaks by Morrison’s office started appearing in the media — defence minister Peter Dutton notified his French counterpart.

The rift throws into doubt the strategic spin-off from the cancelled submarine contract. France controls vast swathes of the Pacific through its territories’ economic exclusion zones, and French forces add to the West’s array of power in the Indo-Pacific. The political future of New Caledonia and French Polynesia are consequently being closely watched.

The French ambassador to Canberra, Jean-Pierre Thebault — recalled to Paris this week, along with his counterpart in Washington, over what the French foreign minister called “a stab in the back” — has revealed that France had offered Australia the nuclear version of its submarine. The agreed Shortfin Barracuda was actually a diesel-electric version of the Barracuda nuclear attack submarine, the first of which is now operating.

Thebault told the Sydney Morning Herald that his government had asked “at the very high level” whether Australia would be interested in nuclear-powered submarines and had “received no answer.” France had “a high level of expertise in nuclear reactors,” he pointed out. Seventy per cent of the country’s electricity is generated by nuclear plants.

Though closer, at 5000 tonnes, to the size originally sought by the Australian navy, the nuclear Barracuda had three disadvantages. It would not directly contribute to closer strategic engagement with the United States, symbolised by being entrusted with America’s nuclear-propulsion knowledge, nor would it help Boris Johnson’s vision of a post-Brexit “Global Britain” beloved of Anglophiles in Coalition circles like Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer. And, unlike the American and British submarines, whose highly enriched fuel is believed to last the lifetime of the submarines, the French systems are believed to use less-enriched fuel that needs to be replaced every ten years. And the French submarines would not be attached to a nuclear umbrella.

That brings us to the domestic promises Scott Morrison has made about the new submarines: that they will be built in Adelaide, that no civil nuclear power industry needs to be developed to support them, and that the submarines don’t breach the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, signed by Australia, which bars the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Already the first promise is being watered down. The local content requirement for the submarines now seems to be 40 per cent — no doubt to the fury of Naval Group, which was being held to 60 per cent for the Shortfin Barracuda. Canberra briefings are also testing the idea of building the first one or two lead submarines in the United States or Britain to speed up the program. Meanwhile, about one hundred Australian workers who moved their families to France, and numerous Naval Group staff and contractors living in Adelaide, face a long gap before a new submarine program starts.

Steve Ludlam, the former ASC chief, has no doubt the Osborne yard could handle construction of either of the two most likely models of the Shortfin Barracuda, America’s Virginia-class, which in its latest “Block V” version is 10,200 tonnes and 140 metres long, or Britain’s Astute-class, which is about 7000 tonnes and ninety-seven metres long.

An American naval expert told me that the hull section, which contains the highly secret reactor plant, could be shipped to Adelaide for assembly with the other hull sections. This is already done between the two shipyards building the Virginia-class for the US navy. “Every Virginia-class boat has been built this way, so this approach is well established,” the expert said.

Most Canberra reports suggest the Virginia-class will be the choice of the panel Morrison has set up to advise within eighteen months. But the American naval expert thinks the Astute-class will be favoured. The British boat is about the same length as the Barracuda and, importantly for the Australian navy, has fewer crew requirements — ninety-eight officers and sailors against 135 — than the Virginia-class.

Those who know about these things are cagey about the fuel endurance of the two submarines. Choosing the Barracuda would have required Australia either to build its own uranium enrichment and fuel-rod fabrication plants or to rely on French sources. But the expert said that a US or British design wouldn’t necessarily have fuel rods installed for the submarine’s lifetime.

Ludlam says the naval nuclear capability could be developed without a civilian industry, but that Australia already had expertise in the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, which runs Lucas Heights and manages nuclear waste. “We are capable of doing it,” he says. “We haven’t got the same experience as the UK or US, but that’s the value of the partnership.”

The American expert agrees, while observing that it might make the naval program more expensive and pointing out that the US navy’s nuclear-propulsion program is run separately from the nuclear power industry.

But there are those who think a civil nuclear industry will follow, despite Morrison’s promise. “On the issue of nuclear power plants, don’t believe him,” Giles Parkinson, editor of Renew Economy, wrote on Friday. He points out that a poll by the Australian found that forty-eight of the Coalition’s 112 federal MPs and senators support nuclear energy.

“The nuclear lobby will say it is bizarre that Australia could be the only country in the world planning to sustain a nuclear-powered submarine fleet without a civil nuclear industry,” says Parkinson, noting that the Minerals Council of Australia has declared this to be “an incredible opportunity for Australia’s economy — not only will we develop the skills and infrastructure to support this naval technology, but it connects us to the growing global nuclear power industry and its supply chains.”

All these messy details can be pushed into the eighteen-month study behind closed doors, however, along with the costing. Construction in the United States or Britain would probably get eight boats for about US$40 billion (A$55 billion unless China undermines the Australian dollar by buying iron ore elsewhere), though the figure will be much higher if they’re built here.

And on Morrison’s third promise, Washington officials are saying the nuclear-propulsion transfer comes with an insistence the submarines will never carry nuclear weapons. Putting nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard a submarine, even a conventional one as Israel does, would be the most attainable delivery system for Australia. That now seems ruled out.

The doubts among Australia’s hard realists will no doubt remain: would the Americans really risk a Chinese nuclear strike for us?

Morrison, meanwhile, will be counting on his political fortunes being boosted by what his officials are describing in journalists’ briefings as a pivotal strategic decision to protect Australia. He might be hoping to get the same electoral bounce that some believe Robert Menzies received in 1963, recovering from his near defeat in 1961, after he announced the acquisition of the F-111 bomber. By the time the F-111s went into service in 1973 the threat from Indonesian president Sukarno’s fevered anti-Western posture had disappeared, and the aircraft never saw action.

The new submarines won’t start operating until about 2040 — well after the 2035 date Xi Jinping seems to have set for his own retirement, aged eighty-two, after he has settled the status of Taiwan and other outstanding issues. •

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Twice this month, large numbers of people have gathered at demonstrations in French Polynesia’s capital Papeete. As they prepare for Macron’s arrival, church and community organisations have joined with the independence party Tāvini Huira’atira nō Te Ao Mäòhi to call for action on the health and environmental consequences of thirty years of atmospheric and underground testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls. Under the banner “Mäòhi Lives Matter!” thousands of people have rallied seeking reparations for people affected by the radioactive fallout that spread across French Polynesia’s five archipelagos.

During a 2016 visit to Tahiti, Macron’s predecessor François Hollande pledged action — still incomplete — on nuclear clean-up and compensation. Now it’s Macron’s turn to make the same pilgrimage. More pledges are expected from the French president, but many locals fear he won’t be able to fulfil his commitments before the next presidential election in April 2022.

To frame the president’s three-day tour of the Marquesas Islands, the Tuamotu archipelago and Tahiti, the French government organised a roundtable on nuclear issues in Paris on 1–2 July. But the idea of discussing nuclear legacies in Paris rather than Papeete raised hackles among nuclear survivors.

The leaders of Moruroa e Tatou, an association uniting Mäòhi workers who staffed the nuclear test sites, announced they would boycott the meeting. They were joined by church leaders and Association 193, an organisation that aids nuclear survivors and educates a younger generation. Reverend François Pihaate, president of the Église Protestante Mäòhi — the largest religious denomination in French Polynesia — joined other Mäòhi leaders to dismiss pledges from François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron.

“It’s always the same song, it’s just the singer that changes,” says Pihaate. “The health and dignity of the Mäòhi people, scarred by these tests, is not negotiable at a roundtable.”

Opposition politicians Gaston Flosse and Oscar Manutahi Temaru — both former presidents of French Polynesia — condemned the roundtable as a stunt. Two of French Polynesia’s deputies in the French National Assembly also refused to attend: Moetai Brotherson of the opposition Tāvini Huira’atira party and Nicole Sanquer of the governing Tapura Huira’atira.

Announcing her boycott just days before the roundtable, Sanquer made clear her disagreement with the leader of her party, French Polynesian president Édouard Fritch. “The delegation organised by President Fritch to participate in this meeting is not representative of our country,” she said in a statement. “The community associations and political movements that have fought for several decades to obtain more truth on this question will not participate, for legitimate reasons that they have already indicated or simply because they haven’t even been invited. It is necessary to state that behind all the speeches and the posturing, little has really changed.”

Moetai Brotherson tells me he was initially undecided about attending. “On the one hand, I don’t usually support a policy of ‘the empty chair,’” he says. “I thought it might be important to be a direct witness of what was happening behind closed doors. But now I’ve seen what happened, I’m so glad I didn’t participate in this farce, with the total lack of respect to the Polynesian people and to the victims of the nuclear tests.”

Despite these criticisms, President Fritch and an eighteen-member delegation attended the roundtable. The Reko Tiko (“speaking the truth”) delegation joined a series of discussions chaired by French health minister Olivier Véran, overseas minister Sébastien Lecornu and Geneviève Darrieussecq, who goes by the impressive title of “Minister Delegate to the Minister of the Armed Forces, in charge of Memory and Veterans.”

The differing perspectives and priorities among participants quickly became clear. The French government may have a minister in charge of memory, but it wants to ignore the passions that still drive the survivors of thirty years of nuclear testing.

French officials briefed the media that the meeting would study the issues “without emotion,” in an “objective” manner. The overseas ministry pledged an open book, proposing “the objective of sharing information without taboos, both on the period of the tests and on the impacts of the bomb in French Polynesia, in a meeting held under the banner of transparency.” The health ministry wanted to develop an up-to-date body of knowledge “because there is a need to rely on scientific knowledge to objectify and reduce uncertainties and misunderstandings.”

While Darrieussecq acknowledged that “we must take responsibility for all the consequences, human, societal, health, environmental and economic,” she said there would be no apology from France. “We are not at all in the business of forgiveness. We are addressing national matters and the construction of our national defence. French Polynesia continues to be an essential link in our military forces today.”

On the sidelines of the meeting, Darrieussecq briefed Agence France-Presse that “there had been no lies by the State.” It is this claim that so annoys most French Polynesians — especially coming from a minister responsible for “memory.”

Even as a loyal supporter of the French Republic, president Édouard Fritch has acknowledged that many politicians lied about the hazards of the testing program. As he told the Assembly of French Polynesia in November 2018, “For thirty years we lied to the people that the tests were clean. We lied. I was part of this gang. Why did we lie when our own leader saw a bomb go off? When you see an atomic bomb go off, I think you realise that it can’t help but hurt. For thirty years we said the truth is ‘it was clean.’ This is the reason why I am investing myself enormously today in this affair, recognising I owe a lot to my people.”

Other Mäòhi recall the silencing of those who dared to challenge the nuclear build-up, including the unjust conviction and exile of Tahitian nationalist Pouvana’a a Oopa in the 1950s, and the 1985 sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, an act of state terrorism that caused the death of Fernando Pereira. Today, in Aotearoa New Zealand and across the region, people have not forgotten: Auckland Museum has just launched an exhibition on “Remembering Moruroa.”

France’s claims of transparency are also belied by the ongoing debate about the declassification of archival documents from the nuclear testing era. For decades, many crucial documents — especially those detailing levels of radioactive contamination — have been inaccessible to independent researchers, medical experts and even the government of French Polynesia.

Darrieussecq pledged after the roundtable that a working group “including a Polynesian representative” would be established in Paris in September to look at how to open up the nuclear archives. “We have nothing to hide,” she added, “apart from information that could be used for weapons proliferation and which endangers the security of France and the world.”

For French Polynesian deputy Moetai Brotherson, this pledge is sleight of hand, given that a longstanding legal case to open up the national archives was already before France’s highest administrative court. “It has nothing to do with the roundtable,” says Brotherson. “This was already in the pipeline, pending at the Conseil d’État.”

At the same time as the roundtable, the Conseil d’État overturned provisions of 2011 legislation that had extended the classification of documents from twenty-five to fifty years, especially those related to national security. One objectionable provision of the law was that any document with a classified stamp had to be restamped “declassified” before it could be released, but that action could only be undertaken by the agency that classified the document in the first place. The fifty-year timeline was measured from the last, not the first, document contained in a file.

Many French historians and researchers remain sceptical that the army and defence ministry will open up their archives in a timely way to fill in the gaps in what’s known about the nuclear program. Will French bureaucrats be eager to reveal the sorry history of public disinformation issued by successive governments over many decades?

This debate over paperwork angers many former Moruroa workers, whose compensation claims are repeatedly rejected because they can’t provide documentary evidence of their work on the test sites. The classification of radiation dose levels makes it hard to prove a connection between their service on Moruroa and current cancers, leukaemia or other health effects.

Debate about the radioactive legacies of French nuclear testing exploded again last March, after the publication of Toxique, a book by investigative journalist Tomas Statius and Sébastien Philippe, a researcher at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. Statius and Philippe analyse more than 2000 documents from the French defence ministry, now made available on the Moruroa Files website. While much of the book draws on work by previous researchers, it re-evaluates the extent of the radioactive contamination between 1966 and 1974. It shows, for example, that the 17 July 1974 test codenamed Centaure spread fallout as far as Tahiti, exposing the 80,000 inhabitants of Papeete to hazardous levels of ionising radiation.

Toxique has caused a stir in France, although the authors were not invited to the recent roundtable to discuss their work. Many people in French Polynesia, however, have been documenting this reality for many years. Before his death in 2017, researcher Bruno Barrillot published a series of books detailing the exposure levels of workers at Moruroa and hazards to communities on neighbouring islands.

Barrillot also served as key technical adviser to a 2005 inquiry into nuclear testing conducted by the Assembly of French Polynesia. This parliamentary commission, chaired by Assembly member Unutea Hirshon, published two volumes of findings the following year that drew on the testimony of nuclear survivors as well as official archives. Hirshon says the inquiry was only possible after the local elections that brought independence leader Oscar Temaru to the presidency in 2004, an era known as the Taui (change).

“A few weeks after we won the elections, I was given the opportunity to preside over the special committee into the consequences of atmospheric nuclear testing,” she recalls. “Because this inquiry was within the parliament, it was very hard for the French or the local authorities to prevent us asking people to testify: whether they were involved at that time, or people from the weather bureau, scientists and specialists.”

The time was right for the inquiry, she adds, because people felt safe to testify. “Many were local people who knew a lot about the testing, but they had been scared. There was like a cloud: ‘You don’t talk!’ So it was during the Taui, this time of change, that we could show there had been impacts on the population and damage to the environment.”

Back in Paris, one of the few positives to come out of the roundtable was a government commitment to increase resources for the Comité d’Indemnisation des Victimes des Essais Nucléaires, or CIVEN, a commission established in 2010 to evaluate compensation claims for civilian and military personnel who staffed the test sites. Over its first five years of operation, CIVEN approved only 2 per cent of claims. Changes to the law since 2017 have improved the compensation process, but political and community leaders in French Polynesia continue to push for further reforms.

In June, Moetai Brotherson put forward draft legislation to the French National Assembly seeking support from Macron’s La République En Marche party to increase funding to French Polynesia’s Caisse de Prévoyance Sociale, or CPS, the fund that provides medical pensions and social security for French Polynesians. Pledges at the July roundtable mean little, he says, alongside the brusque rejection of this legislation.

“I had a law proposal that tried to encompass the main requests from the victims, the associations and our CPS social security system,” says Brotherson. “I worked for two years on this proposal that was presented on 17 June. But of course it was dismissed by the majority here.”

Patrick Galenon, the former CPS chair, joined the Reko Tiko delegation at this month’s roundtable. Speaking to journalists in Paris, he highlighted the striking burden of cancer facing many Polynesians: “According to our CPS data, Polynesian women aged between forty and fifty years old have the highest rate of thyroid cancer in the world.” Back in Tahiti, Galenon says he was disappointed by how the discussions unfolded: “We have provided the French state with a lot of data concerning the situation of CPS, how the twenty-three radiation-induced diseases have cost the community more than eighty billion Pacific francs since 1985.”

Today, the French Polynesian government is seeking reimbursement of this massive A$1 billion cost. Community organisations are also calling for France to fund research into the possible intergenerational impact of radiation on the children and grandchildren of Mäòhi workers who staffed the test sites.

Medical researchers want more resources to track the burden of cancer among French Polynesians. Earlier this year, the French medical research agency Inserm released a major report on the health impacts of the nuclear testing program and called for a more comprehensive cancer register in Tahiti and better documentation of cardiovascular and congenital abnormalities among French Polynesians.

Will President Macron use his visit to recommit to the pledges by successive governments over many years? Moetai Brotherson worries that “the message delivered by Emmanuel Macron when he comes to Tahiti will have very little to do with the Polynesians — in fact, it will have much more to do with the interests of France in the region.” •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

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Australia rarely diverges from Washington on sensitive strategic issues, but in this case we firmly sided with those calling on the US president to stick with the Iran deal. Foreign minister Julie Bishop is reported to have told the US administration that its attempt to stop North Korea’s nuclear program would lose credibility if it overturned the UN Security Council–backed Iran deal. “The United States no longer makes empty threats,” President Trump responded in his 8 May statement:

When I make promises, I keep them. In fact, at this very moment, Secretary Pompeo is on his way to North Korea in preparation for my upcoming meeting with Kim Jong-un. Plans are being made. Relationships are building. Hopefully, a deal will happen and, with the help of China, South Korea, and Japan, a future of great prosperity and security can be achieved for everyone.

The message to North Korea is that Washington will stand by its undertakings, regardless of the decision on Iran. But that offers no assurance that Trump’s successor will stick to any deal he concludes — just as happened, it could be argued, to previous US deals with Pyongyang.

According to President Trump, the deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program was “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into,” so this week’s announcement shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The White House statement said that the agreement had “failed to protect America’s national security interests” and that, accordingly, the United States would be withdrawing and reimposing sanctions.

The president can argue that he is simply implementing a campaign commitment. But this administration has been very selective about which pledges it has followed through with, and mainstream US political and expert opinion seemed to favour honouring the Obama-era deal. Some of the president’s closest foreign allies also appealed to him not to abandon the deal, most recently and publicly the French president during a state visit to Washington early this month. Just days later came a last-minute appeal by Britain’s foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, who argued that it was “right to see the flaws in the deal” but that they could be fixed.

In the Asia-Pacific region, too, US allies Japan and South Korea urged the United States to stay the course. Like Australia, they argued that the credibility of American commitments was at stake and expressed concern about the lessons that North Korea would draw.

The 2015 deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, was designed to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program would be exclusively peaceful. It was brokered by the Obama administration but involves all five permanent members of the Security Council — China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States — as well as Germany and the European Union. Negotiated over several years, it exchanged limitations on Iran’s nuclear program for an easing of sanctions.

The provisions of the deal are complex. It permits Iran to continue specified nuclear activities but bans or limits others. Adherence has been guaranteed by the most intrusive international verification regime implemented anywhere in the world. During 2017, the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, invested 3000 days of inspection in Iran and declared the country to be essentially compliant.

The Trump administration says that it doubts the verification measures will contain Iran’s nuclear program in the longer term. More fundamentally, it has condemned the agreement for failing to deal with Iran’s other “malign” behaviours. Developing long-range ballistic missiles, supporting terrorism and suppressing its own people are just a few items from the lengthy list offered in the White House statement.

The key question now is whether the JCPOA is viable without the United States. The other parties have had time to reflect on this and clearly want to try to salvage the deal. Much will depend on how far the United States will press its sanctions: if Boeing sales to Iran are banned, for instance, will Europe be able to sell Airbus aircraft with US components? The scope for new trade tensions and further stresses on the transatlantic alliance is clear.

The immediate response from Iran also appears to be one of hope that the deal can survive. But much will depend on Iran’s friends, Russia and China. Russia, in particular, will no doubt see a great opportunity to gain from the US decision.

No country has an interest in allowing a restart of the Iranian nuclear weapons program or the regional proliferation cascade it would undoubtedly generate. But, as Boris Johnson remarked, “Plan B does not seem, to me, to be particularly well developed at this stage.” What we do know from Trump’s statement is that the reapplication of sanctions is designed to apply maximum pressure on Iran to return to the table and negotiate a better deal. “As we exit the Iran deal,” it reads, “we will be working with our allies to find a real, comprehensive, and lasting solution to the Iranian nuclear threat.”

The statement was notably free of military threats. But Trump’s crediting of Israel with providing the “definitive proof” of Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions will only aggravate tensions in the region, increase the risk of an Iranian breakout, and ultimately raise the prospect of the use of force.

More broadly, the decision can only be harmful to global non-proliferation efforts. A UN Security Council–blessed “success story” is severely jeopardised. The International Atomic Energy Agency, in finding no material fault with Iran’s adherence to the JCPOA, will suffer reputational damage from a seeming vote of no confidence from the United States. This potentially weakens the Agency’s hand in dealing with its existing global suite of verification demands, as well as in taking up its potentially huge role in any Korean Peninsula verification arrangement.

For Australia and the region, it needs be underlined that Iran is not North Korea. North Korea already has nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery, and that poses an immediate and direct threat to mainland United States. More generally, the domestic US pressures will be very different. The JCPOA was always strongly opposed in some quarters in Washington, fanned by the intense opposition of Israel. Americans are likely to be less divided on a North Korean deal, though the acute sensitivities in South Korea and Japan mean that the Trump administration will face major alliance management issues.

Given the fate of previous agreements on the Korean Peninsula, and given what has happened to the JCPOA, we can assume that Pyongyang will be looking for much greater assurance than that offered under previous arrangements — matching the very high standards the United States will necessarily demand of North Korea.

While the JCPOA introduced groundbreaking advances in intrusive verification, we can expect any Korean settlement to enter significantly more tracts of uncharted territory, with high costs. And if there is a simple moral to the Iran story it is that the United States will not accept a resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue without addressing missiles, proliferation activity, human rights and even social development.

This could be a massive grand bargain with a big price tag — and regional allies and others will assuredly be called on to contribute generously. Australia would do well to decide what it would like to offer, and most benefit from, rather than waiting — as we usually do — until we receive a request that suits the interests of others. •

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Ri’s declaration is the latest contribution to an unprecedented war of words between Washington and Pyongyang. But if the North Koreans were to carry out “the most powerful detonation of an H-bomb,” in Ri’s words, it wouldn’t be the first time that a thermonuclear weapon has been launched by missile to detonate over the Pacific.

Fifty-five years ago, in the lead-up to the Cuban missile crisis, the United States launched a series of missiles from Johnston Atoll in the central Pacific, detonating hydrogen bombs that lit up the sky across the Pacific. Washington had already conducted atomic and hydrogen bomb tests in the area: sixty-seven of them between 1946 and 1958 on Bikini and Enewetak Atolls in the Marshall Islands.

In 1962, after a brief moratorium on nuclear testing, president John F. Kennedy pushed ahead with this further series of tests, just in time to avoid the terms of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which ended nuclear testing in the atmosphere by the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain.

Map by John Waddingham

Operation Dominic, the 1962 series, involved atmospheric nuclear tests on Christmas (Kiritimati) Island in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (today, the Pacific nation of Kiribati). Rocket launches codenamed Operation Fishbowl were made from Johnston Atoll. The first phase of the US program was conducted in a rush. Between 25 April and 11 July 1962, twenty-four atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted at Christmas Island, with weapons dropped from US aircraft.

In October 1962, five more airdrops were detonated in the vicinity of Johnston Atoll, a US possession located between the Marshall Islands and Hawaii. Johnston (known to the indigenous Kanaka Maoli people as Kalama) had been claimed for the Kingdom of Hawaii in July 1858, with the support of King Kamehameha. With the US takeover of Hawaii in 1898, Johnston effectively became a US possession, although the Territory of Hawaii continued to claim jurisdiction over both Kalama Island and neighbouring Sand Island well into the twentieth century.

Johnston Atoll had first been used for US nuclear missile tests in 1958. Two rocket launches from Johnston, codenamed Teak and Orange, both involved 3.8-megaton explosions from missile-borne nuclear warheads.

The Dominic series included five successful attempts to loft rockets into the atmosphere from Johnston Island and create high-altitude nuclear air bursts: Starfish Prime (8 July), Checkmate (19 October), Bluegill Triple Prime (25 October), Kingfish (1 November) and Tightrope (3 November). These rocket-launched tests, collectively designated Operation Fishbowl, were designed to study the effects of nuclear detonations as defensive weapons against incoming ballistic missiles.

The 1.4-megaton high-level explosion from Starfish Prime lit the sky from Australia to Hawaii, causing an enormous electromagnetic pulse that put out streetlights in Honolulu, 1300 kilometres away. The blast pumped radiation into the Van Allen belts, destroying or seriously degrading the orbit of seven satellites.

Not all the Fishbowl tests went smoothly. The successful operations were preceded by a number of aborted nuclear missile launches from Johnston, including three that caused the plutonium contamination that still lingers on the island today.

The first failed test, Bluegill, was aborted on 2 June 1962 when radar lost track of the Thor missile carrying the warhead. Range safety officers ordered that the missile and warhead be destroyed.

The next Starfish test on 19 June led to massive contamination of Johnston Atoll. The launch was aborted just one minute into its flight, and a self-destruct order blew the missile apart at about 30,000 feet. Large pieces of radioactive debris (including pieces of the booster rocket, engine, re-entry vehicle and missile parts) fell back to the island.

In 2000, the impact of this test was assessed by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which conducted the Johnston Atoll Radiological Survey, or JARS:

More debris landed in the surrounding waters and on adjacent Sand Island, where residual plutonium from the test device was found. A large collection of alpha contaminated scrap was isolated during the initial clean-up… It is likely that some portion of the plutonium was pulverised and consequently dispersed in the winds occurring between the destruct altitude and the ground and thus did not contribute to contamination at Johnston Atoll. It is, however, also likely that residual plutonium, in addition to that recovered from Sand Island, fell into the waters of Johnston Atoll.

The most serious contamination came in July 1962 as a result of the test codenamed Bluegill Prime. After ignition, but before the rocket had lifted off, officials destroyed the rocket by remote control because of a malfunction on the launch pad. The JARS reports that the explosion of the Thor missile scattered debris in all directions:

Plutonium material, mixed with the flaming fuel, drained into trench cables and was carried away in the smoke from several fires. This resulted in a deposition of alpha contamination on the launch pad complex that represented a major contamination problem. Contaminated debris was scattered throughout the wire-enclosed pad area and neighbouring areas. Metal revetment buildings were highly contaminated with alpha activity.

Burning fuel flowing through cable trenches caused contamination on the interior of the revetments and all equipment contained therein. Fuel, which spilled and flowed over the compacted coral surrounding the launch mount and revetments, resulted in highly contaminated areas. Prevailing winds at the time of the destruction caused general contamination of all areas downwind of the launch mount.

In an effort to continue with the testing program, US troops were sent in to do a rapid clean-up. The troops scrubbed down the revetments and launch pad, carted away debris and removed the top layer of coral around the contaminated launch pad. The plutonium-contaminated rubbish was dumped in the lagoon, polluting the surrounding marine environment. The JARS report politely notes:

Sea disposal of radioactive waste for control of the radiological hazard was then considered expedient and proper… [T]here was no effort made to analyse the magnitude and extent of the radiological hazard resulting from the destruction of a nuclear device on a launch complex.

At the time of the Bluegill Prime disaster, the top-fill around the launch pad was scraped by a bulldozer and grader. It was then dumped into the lagoon to make a ramp so that the rest of the debris could be loaded onto landing craft to be dumped out into the ocean. An estimated 10 per cent of the plutonium from the test device was in the fill used to make the ramp. The ramp was covered during later dredging to extend the island. (The lagoon was dredged in 1963–64, with sediment used to expand Johnston Island from 220 acres to 625 acres.)

According to the JARS report:

Much of these [contaminated] sediments may have been incorporated back into the islands in the 1964 dredging and filling work, and thus much of the plutonium contamination from Bluegill Prime may have been redeposited on the island. Any contamination not redeposited on the island through dredge and fill still contaminates the lagoon.

The Bluegill Prime disaster seriously affected the health of US Naval Air Force personnel who were present at Johnston Island. Crew-member Michael Thomas reported that the flight crew and ground support staff were trapped on the island following the destruction of the nuclear warhead.

In later years, the squadron members present during that episode suffered an 85 per cent casualty rate of illness and cancers: non-Hodgkin lymphoma was the biggest killer, followed by thyroid cancer, throat cancer, oesophageal cancer, kidney cancer, multiple myeloma, and various skin cancers. Nearly 30 per cent of the crew experienced reproductive problems, with their wives suffering stillbirth or giving birth to babies with deformities.

On 15 October 1962, another test misfired. In this test, the Bluegill Double Prime, the rocket was destroyed at a height of 109,000 feet after it malfunctioned ninety seconds into the flight. US Defense Department officials confirmed that when the rocket was destroyed, it contributed to the radioactive pollution on the island.

The following day, 16 October, the United States and Soviet Union began the ten days that threatened to destroy the planet — the Cuban missile crisis. •

This is an edited extract from Nic Maclellan’s new book Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests, published by ANU Press.

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The history of the Summer project exemplifies the pattern. Its two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were expected to cost US$9.8 billion and go online in 2017 and 2018. A series of delays and contractual disputes saw the price blow out to more than US$14 billion and the estimated completion date deferred to the 2020s.

The final blow came when Westinghouse, the firm responsible for design and construction, was forced into bankruptcy by its owner Toshiba, which is itself threatened with bankruptcy because of Westinghouse’s losses. To get out of the Summer project, Toshiba offered the owners, SCANA and Santee Cooper, an unconditional payment of US$2.2 billion. Rather than use the funds to finish the project, SCANA and Santee Cooper have decided to cut their losses and move on.

The Westinghouse bankruptcy has also threatened the only other nuclear reactors currently under construction in the United States, at the Vogtle plant in Georgia. The owner, Southern Nuclear, has taken over the project from Westinghouse and is pushing on, at least for the moment.

Whether or not Vogtle is ultimately completed, the US nuclear renaissance is clearly over. The dozens of proposals put forward in the early 2000s have been either abandoned or put on hold indefinitely. Almost certainly, there will never be another conventional nuclear power plant built in the United States.

None of the usual excuses for the failure of nuclear power apply here. The Summer project had the benefit of tax subsidies and a favourable regulatory environment. Environmentalists may have been unenthusiastic, but with their attention focused on coal they didn’t campaign against new reactors with any vigour. The only significant protests against the Summer plant came from electricity consumers angry at having to pay for a project they correctly believed was not needed and might never be built.

The big enemy was simple economics. While the cost of gas has fallen, and that of solar photovoltaics has plummeted, nuclear power plants have become increasingly expensive. Crucially, concerns about the variability of renewable electricity supplies have abated. A combination of larger and more sophisticated electricity grids, innovative pricing and advances in storage has made variations in output much easier to manage, putting an end to the perceived need for the “baseload” supply provided by coal or nuclear plants.

The one remaining hope for nuclear power is the idea of small nuclear reactors, which would be manufactured in large numbers in factories, shipped to sites, and assembled to create a power plant. The leading proposal is the NuScale Small Modular Reactor, or SMR, currently under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The SMR has plenty of promise. But it is still in the early prototype stage, with no guarantee that costs will fall to a level that will make it competitive with renewables. Even if everything goes to plan, the SMR won’t be deployed at the scale needed to make a difference until the 2030s, at the earliest.

Every country’s electricity supply is different, but all are subject to common trends. Some countries, like Germany, have hastened the end of nuclear power by shutting down plants that still have years of life left. Others, like Britain, have done their best to keep the nuclear dream alive. Almost everywhere, however, the vision of safe, cheap nuclear power has proved unattainable.

The one historical success story, still told and retold by nuclear power advocates, is that of France in the 1970s. From a standing start, the country built fifty-eight nuclear reactors and secured its energy independence for decades. Sadly, the success has not continued. The only reactor currently under construction in France, at Flamanville, is far behind schedule and way over budget, just like its US counterparts.

The reasons for the rise and fall of French nuclear power are still being debated. Almost certainly, a strong centralised state, with a clear commitment to a nuclear strategy and a willingness to provide low-cost finance for high-risk projects, played a critical role. As these conditions changed, construction costs rose steadily.

The only place where anything like these conditions exists today is China. With twenty-one plants under construction and more planned, China is the last remaining hope for a nuclear renaissance. Even there, though, the prospects are limited. While nuclear plans have been scaled back over time, investment in solar photovoltaics has soared. And given the variability of Chinese construction standards, it’s hard to ignore the risk that a nuclear accident will derail the program once and for all.

But the dream dies hard. Despite decades of evidence to the contrary, the idea that nuclear fission offers a cheap, safe and reliable source of electricity, obstructed only by the irrational fears of environmentalists, remains strong. What the shareholders of Toshiba, Westinghouse and SCANA, and the electricity consumers of South Carolina have learned, like others before them, is that this is a costly illusion. •

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The announcement allowed one exception: cases in which all the other nuclear-weapon parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, “have also consented to the jurisdiction of the Court and are party to the proceedings in question.” It came just weeks before more than 130 non-nuclear countries began meeting at the United Nations to negotiate a nuclear weapons ban treaty. Those talks resume this week.

This isn’t the first time the British government has taken such a step. Sixty years ago, facing condemnation of its proposed hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific, it also withdrew from compulsory ICJ jurisdiction. In the Brexit era, is Britain heading back to the 1950s?

In its July 1996 advisory opinion on nuclear weapons, the ICJ determined that nuclear-weapon states are obliged by Article VI of the NPT “to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective control.” In a unanimous decision, the court has also recognised an equivalent rule under customary law, requiring each nuclear power to engage in disarmament talks.

More than twenty years later, the NPT nuclear-weapon countries are still in breach of those obligations. No multilateral disarmament talks are under way, nor even talks about talks, in UN forums such as the Committee on Disarmament. Nuclear-armed governments outside the NPT, including Israel and India, are also refusing to abide by customary law on disarmament.

Britain’s latest decision is a setback for the push for a treaty banning nuclear weapons, which is being spearheaded by non-nuclear countries. Britain isn’t alone: the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council, together with Israel and North Korea, already refuse to accept compulsory ICJ jurisdiction on disarmament. (By contrast, India and Pakistan have both accepted this jurisdiction, even though they are not NPT signatories.)

According to the non-government British American Security Information Council, or BASIC, Britain’s decision to reject compulsory ICJ jurisdiction is designed to stop “frustrated non-nuclear weapon states from bringing fresh cases against the UK for alleged failure to negotiate on the cessation of the nuclear arms race.” Britain’s declaration means that the court can only rule on nuclear disarmament disputes when the proceedings involve all five of the NPT nuclear-armed states. Announcing the move to the House of Commons, the foreign and Commonwealth affairs minister Alan Duncan said that “the government does not believe the United Kingdom’s actions in respect of such weapons and nuclear disarmament can meaningfully be judged in isolation.”

Another effect of Britain’s decision is to advance the cut-off date for historical cases to 1987. Restricting cases to the past thirty years may affect claims related to British nuclear testing in Australia (1952–57) and Kiribati (1957–58), or disputes arising from the 1985 royal commission into British nuclear testing in Australia.

The decision will also have the effect of banning governments from bringing repeat cases. In April 2014, the Republic of the Marshall Islands filed landmark lawsuits in the ICJ challenging all nine nuclear-armed nations for failing to comply with their NPT obligation to negotiate the total elimination of nuclear weapons. Because they accepted compulsory jurisdiction at the time, the cases against India, Pakistan and Britain proceeded to preliminary submissions.

By eight votes to eight (on the president’s casting vote), the ICJ dismissed the suit against Britain last October, ruling that there was insufficient evidence of a dispute between the Marshall Islands and Britain. (Is it a coincidence that six of the eight judges who found no dispute are nationals of nuclear-weapon states, while all the minority judges are from non-nuclear states?) Several judges stressed that the case was ending at a technical stage rather than after its substance had been examined.

The ICJ also ruled that the Marshall Islands has “special reasons for concern” about nuclear disarmament, because it is living with the health and environmental effects of sixty-seven nuclear tests. As BASIC notes, “The UK government’s 2017 decision would appear to cut off any possibility of the Marshall Islands bringing another case and succeeding, and likely shows that it is not confident that the court’s decision would be favourable if the substance of the case were discussed.”

Britain’s similar decision more than sixty years ago came in the face of protests across the Asia-Pacific region over its proposed nuclear-testing program at Christmas Island. The British government decided in 1956 to test thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bombs on Christmas Island and Malden Island in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony – today, part of the Republic of Kiribati. Public opposition was especially intense in Japan, where popular anger over Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been strengthened by the March 1954 US hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, codename Bravo, which irradiated the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon.

A nationwide signature campaign against nuclear testing, initiated on Hiroshima Day 1954, gathered more than thirty-two million signatures. The following year, peace activists founded the national peace organisation Gensuikyo (the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs). Britain’s announcement of H-bomb tests in mid-1956 fuelled the concerns.

By early 1957, the British embassy in Tokyo was sending regular reports to London, detailing rising protests against the proposed atmospheric testing program. Fearful that Japan might take a case to the ICJ to stop the Christmas Island tests, the British government temporarily withdrew from compulsory ICJ jurisdiction.

Whenever the interests of the nuclear powers are challenged, whether it’s 1957 or 2017, a similar disdain for law becomes clear. Tony Blair went to war in Iraq in 2003 on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction, exacerbating chaos and terrorism in the Middle East. Today, London calls on states like Iran to adhere to law on nuclear weapons but refuses to act on its own NPT disarmament obligations.

Despite its concerns over the ICJ, the UK Ministry of Defence has been prepared to defend nuclear cases in domestic courts. A 2004 case lodged by British, New Zealand and Fijian veterans of the 1950s Christmas Island tests spent ten years working its way through the British courts, with the authorities resisting every inch of the way. Defence officials appealed every temporary victory by the veterans in lower courts and refused to negotiate an out-of-court settlement. Dozens of the original litigants had died before the case was finally rejected 5–4 by the UK Supreme Court.

As talks recommence this week in New York for a nuclear weapons ban treaty, Britain’s refusal to commit to compulsory ICJ jurisdiction shows that efforts for a nuclear ban are beginning to bite. When it comes to nukes, London is running scared. •

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AT THE height of the nuclear arms race between the United States and Soviet Union, a treaty to create a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, or SPNFZ, was opened for signature on Hiroshima Day, 6 August 1985, at the Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Rarotonga.

Twenty-eight years after it was signed on that day by Australia, New Zealand and island nations, the United States still hasn’t ratified its protocols, in spite of a request from president Barack Obama to the US Senate more than two years ago.

Next week, as Forum leaders gather in the Marshall Islands – site of sixty-seven US nuclear tests at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls – the US government will be eager to keep nuclear issues off the agenda, as it has been since the Treaty was first mooted. Declassified documents from the National Archives of Australia, and US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, highlight longstanding opposition in Canberra and Washington to a comprehensive nuclear-free zone that might hamper US nuclear deployments in the Pacific.

The Forum meeting, and the US Senate’s continued stalling, coincide with on-going concerns that Australia’s decision to sell uranium to India threatens to breach Australian treaty obligations.

AS CONSERVATIVE Australian governments in the 1960s debated the acquisition of nuclear weapons and purchased aircraft capable of delivering nuclear strikes in Southeast Asia, the labour movement across the region proposed a nuclear free zone designed to ban the bomb in this part of the world. The SPNFZ Treaty was finally negotiated in the 1980s after decades of campaigning by unions, Pacific churches and the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement.

Under the treaty, countries in the zone commit never to develop nuclear weapons. Under three protocols, nuclear states with territories in the zone (France, Britain and the United States) agree to apply the treaty to their territories. In accepting the protocols, all nuclear powers also undertake not to use or threaten to use any nuclear device against countries in the zone, and not to test nuclear devices in the zone.

Russia and China were first to sign the protocols, in 1986 and 1987 respectively, pledging not to store or test nuclear weapons in the region or use them against Australia, New Zealand or island nations. France, Britain and the United States refused to sign the treaty protocols for a decade, only signing on 25 March 1996 after the end of French nuclear testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls.

Until now, however, the US government has refused to ratify its signature by passing legislation through the US Senate. President Obama formally called on the US Senate to ratify the SPNFZ protocols the day after a US Special Forces unit shot and killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011. “Ratification of Protocols 1, 2, and 3 to the Treaty would fully support US non-proliferation policy and goals,” he told the Senate, “and I am convinced that it is in the best interest of the United States to ratify these Protocols.”

But the Senate has failed to act on President Obama’s request. On 2 May 2011, the Senate referred the treaty to its Committee on Foreign Relations “pursuant to the removal of the injunction of secrecy.” The committee hasn’t yet discussed the legislation, even though Obama’s Democratic Party has held a majority of its membership since 2007.

The US Embassy in Canberra has confirmed that no hearings are scheduled to discuss the ratification. “There is no time period for ratification,” said an embassy official. “For example, it took the Senate thirty years to ratify the Genocide Convention. The Committee has many other treaties under consideration, so there is no way to tell how long it will be before this treaty is approved by the Committee and referred to the full Senate for its advice and consent.”

THE delay reflects longstanding American opposition to limits on its nuclear deployments in the region. US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show Washington’s opposition to SPNFZ dating back to the 1970s, when the New Zealand government considered taking up the issue.

After the unexpected death in 1974 of NZ prime minister Norman Kirk, a firm supporter of a Nuclear Free Zone, incoming prime minister Bill Rowling took up the issue. Rowling initiated discussions with Australia’s prime minister, Gough Whitlam, in early 1975, a decade before SPNFZ was finally signed by most Forum member countries.

In March 1975, the classified New Zealand SPNFZ proposal was leaked to the US Embassy in Wellington. A US diplomatic cable that month notes: “Source indicated he thought GoA [Government of Australia] Foreign Affairs and Defence officials remained opposed to SPNFZ, but allowed the possibility that proposal might find some acceptability at Cabinet level.” The cable goes on to note: “Without indicating US knowledge of latest GNZ [Government of New Zealand] proposal, Embassy believes Deputy Secretary Defence Clements should firmly impress upon GoA our opposition to SPNFZ.”

The March 1975 US Embassy cable highlights support in Australia’s Foreign Affairs bureaucracy for delaying any action. “Likely outcome of Rowling–Whitlam talks would be to refer agreement to officials for further study… If this is the case then GNZ expects little of it and would be quite willing to see it discussed by officials more or less ad infinitum.”

Further US cables from September 1975 show Whitlam supported the proposal in public but privately told the US Embassy that he only did so because he “feels obliged to give token support” to a “beleaguered” NZ government.

The replacement of the Whitlam Labor government by Malcolm Fraser’s conservative Coalition after the November 1975 constitutional crisis saw the end of any discussion of SPNFZ until Labor was re-elected in 1983 under Bob Hawke. Hawke’s government revived the concept of a nuclear free zone at the 1983 South Pacific Forum leaders meeting in Canberra. The following year, meeting in Tuvalu, the Forum endorsed a set of principles proposed by Australia as the basis for establishing a zone. Forum leaders also appointed a working group to draft the treaty text, which met five times in Suva, Canberra and Wellington between November 1984 and June 1985.

Declassified documents from the National Archives of Australia, including the 1985 Cabinet minute about the SPNFZ Treaty, show clearly that Australia designed the treaty to protect US interests in the Pacific, including the deployment of nuclear-armed warships and the testing of nuclear missiles. As an April 1985 submission by Foreign Minister Bill Hayden to Cabinet notes, “The proposal is designed to maintain the security advantages afforded to the South West Pacific through the ANZUS Treaty and the United States security presence in the region.”

At the time, the Hawke government was embroiled in debate over a US proposal to test-fire two MX inter-continental ballistic missiles into Pacific waters east of Tasmania. Hayden’s cabinet submission includes details of Australian negotiating positions in the final months before the treaty was signed:

(iii) Australia oppose the inclusion in the draft SPNFZ Treaty of a ban on missile tests.

(iv) Australia oppose the inclusion in the draft SPNFZ Treaty of a ban on the facilitation of the stationing of nuclear weapons, and limit the proposed non-facilitation provisions on the testing and acquisition of nuclear weapons to practical measures consistent with established Australian government positions.

The archives include a draft version of the treaty dated 10 April 1985, just before a May 1985 working group meeting in Suva finalised the text for leaders to sign in August that year.

The draft text notes in article three that: “Each Party undertakes:… (b) not to [provide], seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture or acquisition of any nuclear explosive device.” The word “provide” was removed from the final text after Australia sought successfully to retain the right to provide support for the manufacture of nuclear weapons (such as the export of uranium to nuclear weapons states).

The Australian cabinet submission highlights divisions within the Forum, with Melanesian countries eager to create a more comprehensive nuclear free zone than many smaller Polynesian nations.

“In general,” says Hayden’s cabinet submission, “the Melanesians (PNG, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands) have supported a treaty which is broad in scope. They have expressed interest, for instance, in the possibility of including in the treaty bans on missile testing and ‘nuclear related’ facilities such as the Joint Facilities. Nauru has supported them. The Polynesians (Fiji, Tuvalu, Cook Islands, Niue and Western Samoa) on the other hand support a treaty that is essentially limited to the principles endorsed by the Heads of Government in the communiqué of the [1984] Tuvalu Forum.”

AT THE time the treaty was negotiated in the mid 1980s, three Micronesian countries were still under US administration through the UN strategic Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Republic of Palau.

Because SPNFZ was finalised a year before the Micronesian states achieved self-government under a Compact of Free Association with the United States, they were not included within the zone. As well as protecting the crucial US missile testing base at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the US government was trying to overcome popular anti-nuclear sentiment in Palau, which had included a “nuclear free” clause in their Constitution (the clause was eventually removed, allowing Palau’s Compact with the United States to come into force in 1994).

Ratification of SPNFZ by the US Senate could open the way to review and extend the treaty north of the Equator. This would clearly match the aspirations of South Pacific countries at the time the treaty was drafted.

In June 1985, a report from the drafting team for the SPNFZ treaty was submitted to Forum leaders. Countries like Papua New Guinea argued that the treaty should be called the Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, to include territories north of the Equator. Instead, the report noted:

Inclusion of the United States Trust Territory in the zone could complicate current negotiations on the constitutional future of these territories, especially since nuclear issues were a major element in these negotiations… Papua New Guinea, while acknowledging the reasons that had led the Working Group to settle for the northern boundary as described in the draft Treaty, asked that its continuing preference for the South Pacific Commission boundary be recorded. It was recognised by all delegations that the SPNFZ Treaty should allow for the inclusion in the zone of future members of the South Pacific Forum who wished to and were in a position to become parties to the Treaty.

At the 2010 review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Marshall Islands foreign minister Phillip Muller told the United Nations that the Republic of the Marshall Islands has “eventual aspirations to join with our Pacific neighbours in supporting a Pacific free of nuclear weapons in a manner consistent with security.”

Since the SPNFZ treaty was signed in 1985, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and Palau have all joined the Pacific Islands Forum and the United Nations. Today, the Rarotonga Treaty could be amended to include them in its boundaries – if the United States allowed it.

THOSE decisions during the 1980s have important implications today, at a time when Australia is proposing to sell uranium to India, a country that has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Bill Hayden’s 1985 cabinet submission notes that the Department of Defence “considers that Australia should seek to have a withdrawal clause included in the treaty and that the right of withdrawal should not be limited to the situation where the Treaty has been breached by another party.” This advice was rejected in the final version of the treaty. Countries cannot withdraw from the SPNFZ unless there is a clear breach of treaty provisions by another party.

International legal experts, including Don Rothwell, professor of law at the Australian National University, have raised concerns that uranium sales to India would breach Australia’s obligations under the treaty. Rothwell has prepared a legal opinion stating that the SPNFZ Treaty prohibits members from selling uranium to countries that do not accept full-scope nuclear safeguards under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

This is consistent with past Australian government policy. In 1996, Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer observed that “Article 4(a) of the SPNFZ Treaty imposes a legal obligation not to provide nuclear material unless subject to the safeguards required by Article III.1 of the NPT; that is full scope safeguards.”

In spite of this, the Gillard government commenced discussions on uranium sales to India in 2012, even though Delhi still refuses to open its nuclear facilities – civilian as well as military – to inspectors, as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Rothwell’s legal advice concludes:

If India does not agree to Article III.1 Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards and Australia were to export uranium to India, Australia would be in violation of its Treaty of Rarotonga obligations. If Australia’s action were in breach of the Treaty, Australia could be exposed to the complaints procedure of Annex 4 of the Treaty initiated by other state parties to the Treaty of Rarotonga.

Since the SPNFZ was created in 1986, there has not been a formal review of the Rarotonga Treaty by Forum member countries, even though it includes provisions for a consultative committee to discuss “any matter arising in relation to this Treaty or for reviewing its operation.” This committee must convene “at the request of any Party,” so any Forum member country could call for a SPNFZ review conference.

Today, island governments are focused on climate change as the greatest threat to their national security. But with 17,000 nuclear weapons still held in arsenals around the world, maybe it’s time to revive longstanding regional opposition to the threat of nuclear war. •

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ON 19 APRIL this year, the day India launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile, US State Department spokesman Mark Toner faced a barrage of questions from journalists. The successful test flight of Agni V had exploded into the headlines that day, and Toner’s interrogators demanded to know what it meant for the world. His response was curious. He didn’t dwell on the fact that Agni V was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead for distances of up to 5000 kilometres. He omitted to mention that the missile put major Chinese cities within striking distance of Indian nuclear weapons. He didn’t speculate about India’s military aims and intentions. Instead, he did something quite baffling: he launched into praise. India, he said, had been “very much engaged in the community and nonproliferation issues,” had attended nuclear security summits, and could demonstrate a “solid nonproliferation record.”

The contrast with the alarm and condemnation triggered by North Korea’s failed rocket launch less than a week earlier was striking. India’s testing of a nuclear-capable long-range missile had given its jubilant leadership two causes for celebration. Agni V not only delivered a world-class ranking among the handful of states with ICBM technology, it also provided clear evidence of a critical diplomatic triumph – evidence that emerged more slowly and subtly than the deafening roar of the launch.

India had won tacit US support for its nuclear missile program.

THE launch of India’s first ICBM, and the subdued and oblique response of the United States, is only the latest chapter in India’s perplexing nuclear history. In 1998, when India tested nuclear weapons and became an overtly nuclear-armed state, the widespread condemnation and sanctions placed it firmly in the category of nuclear pariah. Yet Indian fortunes shifted not long after. Relations with Washington warmed, and seemingly overnight New Delhi received unprecedented rights to civil nuclear trade with the United States. By 2008 a civil nuclear agreement was in force between the two countries, and India had been granted significant trading allowances by key non-proliferation institutions. India had turned into a nuclear friend. As the journalist Ravi Nessman commented on the day of the Agni V test, “The world has grown to accept India as a responsible and stable nuclear power.”

A historical perspective can often shed light on puzzles like this one. But the further you look back in time the more paradoxical India’s promotion to privileged nuclear partner of the United States appears. In 1968, India refused to become a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT. Its key complaint was that the treaty was discriminatory, since it permitted countries that had tested nuclear weapons before 1 January 1967 – the so-called Nuclear Weapons States – to retain them, even as it foreclosed the nuclear option to everyone else. But India was equally keen to defend its legal right to develop and test nuclear weapons. In 1974 it exercised this right in defiance of the community, and conducted a “peaceful nuclear explosion,” which New Delhi claimed was not a weapon. The reading of the test was different, and the United States led the way in consolidating global non-proliferation laws and barring India from multilateral trade in a range of sensitive technologies, including nuclear ones.

The campaign against “nuclear India” continued. Well into the 1990s, any kind of nuclear trade or collaboration between India and the global nuclear community was unthinkable. And when New Delhi startled the world with its tests in 1998, the United States emerged as one of its most vociferous critics. Washington’s angry response reverberated far and wide: in the G8, which blocked assistance to India from financial institutions, and in the UN Security Council, which made it clear that India, tests or no tests, would be denied formal NPT recognition as a Nuclear Weapons State, even if it signed.

For decades, it seemed, India had existed firmly outside the written and unwritten rules of the global nuclear game, a game largely devised, played and refereed by the United States. The civil nuclear agreement concluded between Washington and New Delhi a decade after India’s tests was exceptional not simply because it symbolised a turning point in a relationship that had long been hostile. In giving India the right to civil nuclear trade, the United States now explicitly recognised India as a “responsible nuclear state” in the global nuclear game, which was tantamount to both picking it for the team, and letting it onto the pitch.

Washington aimed to ensure that New Delhi would acquire “the same benefits and advantages” as other states with “advanced nuclear technology,” effectively granting it a similar status to the Nuclear Weapons States. But perhaps the most striking part of the deal was that India had still not signed the NPT, ratified a test ban treaty or agreed to any other significant constraints on its nuclear weapons program. It was being offered civil nuclear trade and technology with no real guarantee that its weapons program wouldn’t indirectly benefit. The kinds of legal exceptions granted to India outside the NPT were unprecedented. Not only was India being invited to play, but a very special set of rules was being created to accommodate it.

EXPLAINING the acceptance of a nuclear India requires a much closer look at India’s complex nuclear past, or more precisely, the two curiously contradictory histories that the Indian state has interwoven since independence. While the usual questions asked about India’s pathway to the bomb are concerned with why India went nuclear and tested its weapons when it did, the equally compelling story of why India did not test for so many years is seldom explored.

The story begins soon after independence in 1947, when the country’s early leaders were ardent advocates of nuclear disarmament. Both the first UN document to suggest halting nuclear tests and the first study of the consequences of nuclear weapon use were initiatives of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, in the mid-1950s. Indian diplomats played a significant role in drawing up the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which prohibited countries from testing in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water, but not underground. India was the fourth signatory after the top nuclear powers of the time, the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain.

From India’s vantage point, success at global disarmament activism could deliver a number of rewards. Disarmament promised a reduction in global tensions and the removal of the danger of nuclear war. Developing countries such as India would be able to devote resources to economic development rather than to a costly arms race. But disarmament would only be feasible if the major powers with nuclear weapons could be coaxed into letting them go. In the context of the Cold War, a successful role for India in persuading the world’s most powerful enemies to disarm would bring an enormous boost to India’s prestige. Championing disarmament was not only about security, it was about status.

India’s campaigns continued for decades. In global forums, Indian diplomats pushed again and again for the world to renounce nuclear weapons. At the same time, Indian scientists were developing ever more sophisticated atomic energy technology, and with it, a nuclear weapons capability. While the twin efforts at disarmament and nuclear development appeared contradictory, they made perfect sense. For an emerging post-colonial state that saw sophisticated technology as an important proving ground, mastering the atom was a way of demonstrating modern scientific and technological credentials, both at home and to the world. The official line was that the development of nuclear capabilities needn’t be at odds with India’s disarmament aims. India could develop nuclear material and expertise but was restrained enough not to turn it into usable weapons. Indeed, in their pro-disarmament speeches, Indian diplomats foregrounded this uniquely principled approach to the atom as something the rest of the world could observe and learn from.

Once a moral stance on the nuclear issue had been adopted, it was difficult to back away from. India’s adherence to principle in part explains why it didn’t test nuclear weapons for nearly a quarter of a century, despite being well able to do so. Moreover, the repeating refrain of nuclear restraint meant that New Delhi’s nuclear policy implicitly followed many of the rules of the global nuclear game, even though India had not signed the NPT. Though in possession of nuclear know-how, India did not test between 1974 and 1998, and it did not export that know-how to others. Up until 1998, India was building a record of restrained nuclear behaviour and a pro-peace image that would one day prove crucial in facilitating a positive reading of its nuclear past.

A number of motives help explain why India suddenly decided to break the pattern in 1998. Certainly, the existence of nuclear threats, overt and covert, from China and Pakistan and pressure to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the mid-1990s were factors. Domestic politics, in the form of a strategically minded Hindu nationalist leadership hoping to harden India’s “soft” image, was another. But it was also clear from the jubilant response of the Indian urban public to the first nuclear tests in May 1998 that the bomb had enormous domestic value as a symbol of global prestige. Overnight it placed India on the same level as a select club of nuclear-armed states, at the top of the global hierarchy.

Perhaps more interesting than the “why?” of India’s tests however, is the question of how India managed to make its new position mesh with its longstanding claims to nuclear responsibility and restraint. In the wake of the tests New Delhi was at pains to reassure: India had peaceful intentions, would voluntarily abstain from further nuclear testing, would limit itself to the minimum number of weapons needed for a credible nuclear deterrent, and would never be the first to use those weapons. Above all, it was claimed, India had an excellent track record of non-proliferation, never having sold or traded its nuclear secrets or technologies with others.

Although India’s curious mix of demonstrations of strength and declarations of restraint in 1998 puzzled and frustrated onlookers, the swiftly painted portrait of a principled, responsible nuclear power was ultimately persuasive beyond India’s borders. In 2007, as Washington worked together with New Delhi to formulate the terms of the civil nuclear deal, a key interlocutor for the United States, R. Nicholas Burns, described India as “a largely responsible steward of its nuclear material” that “had played by the rules of a system to which it did not belong.” India’s nuclear self-narrative had suddenly emerged in the unlikeliest of places: official US policy discourse.

CERTAINLY, there are several drivers behind the blossoming friendship between the United States and India. Since India’s economy began to gain momentum from the early 1990s, the benefits of closer economic engagement have weighed heavily in US calculations. US leaders have also begun to appreciate the potential of India’s growing influence in Asia, possibly as a balance to that of China. Moreover, the US-India relationship has been helped by India’s neat fit into the category of a “friendly” democracy and its role as a valuable global partner in key areas such as counter-terrorism. As former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal argued just days after the launch of Agni V, the absence of American disapproval over the test suggests that India’s missile program is broadly in line with US interests. Yet interests cannot explain everything. They cannot explain why India merits a different kind of thinking when it comes to the highly sensitive area of nuclear cooperation, especially given New Delhi’s continued refusal to sign the NPT. Above all, they cannot explain how the United States has come to trust India with the bomb.

The key difference between India and North Korea, or India and Iran, is that New Delhi has persistently and successfully cultivated an image as a responsible nuclear power. The credibility of this image would have been unthinkable without the great Indian diplomatic resource of decades of “restrained” behaviour and principled policy discourse. Put differently, by drawing on its complex nuclear history, India has worked at persuading the United States that its nuclear intentions are benign.

Current research as part of a larger UK-based project on The Challenges to Trust-Building in Nuclear Worlds is exploring exactly how this trusting relationship with the United States came about. It shows how trust was built both interpersonally within high-level negotiations between senior US and Indian officials, and between powerful political, business and civil-society communities in both countries. Intensified trade linkages, Track II (or informal) diplomacy and the efforts of US-based Indian diaspora groups all contributed to knitting the two leaderships closer together. Teaching and learning about India’s nuclear past was a central part of this broad-based engagement. Less than a decade after the 1998 tests, the exceptional nuclear deal between India and the United States signalled that India had drawn resourcefully on its history to complete the journey from nuclear rogue to nuclear partner.

Much of the wider community, too, has accepted the line that India is a responsible nuclear power. The original civil nuclear agreement with the United States had the support of Russia, France and Britain. In September 2008, the forty-five members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group reached a consensus and backed their assessment of India’s nuclear trustworthiness by granting exceptional trading privileges. These privileges meant that India became the first nuclear-armed state outside the NPT permitted to engage in nuclear commerce with the rest of the world. Even the Australian government softened its line when it agreed to the sale of uranium to India in December 2011.

China and Pakistan, naturally, remain a resistant barrier to the spread of nuclear goodwill towards India. As India’s historic rivals in Asia, this is hardly surprising. Both are potential targets of India’s nuclear weapons and missiles. An early official justification for India’s 1998 nuclear tests was that India perceived a nuclear threat from both countries, although subsequent statements aimed to reassure the world that India would never play the role of aggressor in a nuclear exchange. India’s official line on the Agni V test was that the missile was “not any country-specific.” Yet reading between the lines, many have inferred that strategic Chinese cities are potential targets within its extended range. The striking distance of previous versions of the Agni missile covered the territory of Pakistan.

China, in particular, has voiced disapproval over the concessions granted to India outside the NPT. The September 2008 meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which granted India privileged trading rights, faced strong opposition from China, but US pressure finally tipped the balance of the group towards consensus. Increasingly, Beijing appears to be treading carefully when it comes to official commentary on India’s nuclear-related activities. It is as eager as India to project and maintain an image as responsible emerging power. This helps to explain the official response to the Agni V test, in which the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin stated that India and China were “not competitors but partners.” Different sentiments appear to simmer within, however. China’s influential tabloid, Global Times, ominously warned that “India should not overestimate its strength” and would not profit “from being arrogant during disputes with China.”

Pakistan, for its part, appeared to answer to Agni V with a missile test of its own. The shorter range but newly upgraded Hatf IV Shaheen 1A ballistic missile was launched on 25 April amidst Pakistani claims that it was “not a direct response to Agni V.” Whether or not Pakistan’s missile was an exercise in military posturing, it was undertaken with an appropriate measure of responsibility. Before Shaheen 1A took to the skies, Pakistan had taken care to inform India of its plan to test.

India’s successful launch of Agni V has underscored the increasingly free hand it has won since 1998 over its own nuclear destiny. The test signalled India’s entry into an elite club of only six other states with ICBM capabilities. But more significantly, it reaffirmed the success of a recent Indian diplomatic project. India has earned a different kind of global prestige through the broad-based acceptance of its status as a responsible nuclear power. When it comes to testing nuclear missiles, it pays first to make friends in high places. •

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THE biggest threat facing humanity is the uncontrolled spread of nuclear weapons. Because it is the custodian of the world’s largest reserves of uranium, Australia has a special responsibility to help protect the global rules containing this danger. But you wouldn’t know this from reading Julia Gillard’s announcement backing the sale of uranium to India, or from listening to the subsequent comments from the opposition’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop. Both were remarkably inward-looking.

Before we look at the shrinking horizons of our politicians, some background is necessary. The system designed to stop the spread of the bomb is anchored in the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which says that those countries that already had the bomb – the United States, the then Soviet Union, Britain, France and China – could keep it, at least for the time being. All other signatories agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons – on the condition that they could develop civil nuclear energy programs.

The NPT-based system is arguably the most successful arms control regime in history. It has an enormous membership (over 180 states), nearly all of whom are acting in good faith. The treaty is one reason why most countries that could build the bomb have opted not to do so.

But some states refused to sign up, most notably Israel, Pakistan and India. For decades it was understood that these states should be kept on the outer as far as nuclear trade was concerned. This arrangement was institutionalised by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which was established after India’s cynically labelled “peaceful nuclear explosion” of 1974. In the Group’s words, the 1974 explosion “demonstrated that nuclear technology transferred for peaceful purposes could be misused.” Under the guise of a civil nuclear program, India had gate-crashed its way into the nuclear weapons club.

In response, the Group laid down strict conditions for the sale of nuclear material and technology. Customers had to accept comprehensive safeguards as required by the NPT. Apart from containing proliferation, this system was intended to underline the advantages of treaty membership and highlight the disadvantages of staying outside. Making access to nuclear trade conditional on NPT rules was part of the glue holding the system together.

Over the past decade or so this system has been weakened by key players who are keen to get closer to India. The story starts when President George W. Bush, sensing the growing commercial opportunities, redrew US policy and signed a nuclear trade deal with Delhi. Some advocates of the change in policy also claimed to be concerned about global warming. Washington also wanted to draw India nearer as a de-facto ally while reinforcing it as a counter to growing Chinese power. Then there was a legal point: because India had never signed the NPT, it could not be considered in breach of it – this, and the fact that Delhi was not implicated in selling nuclear weapons capabilities, put India in a different light from, for instance, NPT renegades like North Korea.

Nevertheless, arms control experts were apprehensive about Bush’s stance for three overlapping reasons. First, they saw the development as part of a broader story of Bush’s generally contemptuous attitude towards multilateralism. The context here was alarming. It included Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq on the basis of a disturbingly elastic definition of self-defence, and his scuttling of a verification protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention. Anxious critics fretted that the Bush administration was sending out signals that Washington was ready to break with the post–second world war rules-based approach to world order.

Second, Washington was damaging the consensus that underpinned the NPT. Bush’s neoconservative supporters sometimes talked as though the treaty was obsolete debris from a bygone age (a view partly fed by worries that the treaty could not manage rogue states). As part of its lurch toward unilateralism Washington said it wouldn’t be bound by previous agreements it made at NPT meetings. This was brought home when, almost alone, it voted against a UN call for a ban on nuclear testing and was the only country to vote against tighter restrictions on the first-use of nuclear weapons.

Third, although the US–Indian nuclear deal was limited to civilian products, critics argued this would free up other Indian sources of supply for military uses and facilitate an expansion of India’s nuclear arsenal. This could then fuel an arms race between India and Pakistan, and between India and China.

Bush brushed aside these concerns. As part of the understanding with Delhi, the United States went further still, agreeing to urge its allies to back the idea of nuclear trade with India. This urging (reports suggest “pressure” is a more accurate description) worked. Soon, John Howard’s Coalition government made an in-principle decision to sell uranium to India. Then, in 2008, the recently elected Rudd Labor government sided with the Americans and voted to rewrite the Nuclear Suppliers Group rule book on India’s behalf.

But this left Labor in an awkward, and apparently contradictory, place. On the one hand, it agreed India should be granted open access to global nuclear trade despite not being a member of the NPT. On the other hand, Labor ministers remained adamant that, because it had not signed this treaty, India could not buy Australian uranium. Presumably it hoped that this formula would simultaneously satisfy Washington, appease India, and preserve what was left of Labor’s purity.

In reality, however, the drift of events had opened up a hole into core Labor policy. Predictably, the Indian government and the Australian opposition inserted a painful political lever into the gap. Labor was tied up in knots. Without firm and clear advocacy, Labor’s position would be become an increasingly unsustainable muddle.

Where was this leadership? Well, at about the same time as he acquiesced in the administrative erosion of a key pillar of Canberra’s NPT policy, Prime Minister Rudd was publicly big-noting his firm commitment to the treaty. For example, with much fanfare he set up the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, led by former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans. This was billed as a body to advise the world’s governments on why and how they should strengthen the NPT and then move towards getting rid of all their nuclear arms.

In the context of recent developments, though, Evans’s well-intentioned mission may go into the history books as part of Rudd’s grandiose window dressing. The real action was being played out behind the scenes in the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Rudd’s aim may have been to deftly balance principle and pragmatism, but Labor ended up looking like it was stranded in a mushy no man’s land in which both principle and pragmatism appeared elusive.

THE stage was set for Gillard’s part in the drama. Her role was to finish the script begun by Bush; she was to do this by advocating Australian uranium sales to India. Conservatives can be excused their smirking at the irony. From where they stood here was a left-wing Australian politician delivering on a policy devised by American neo-conservatives whom the Left had previously portrayed as simple-minded rednecks intent on wrecking global rules.

As Gillard worked on her lines, she appeared uninterested in the wider narrative. (Her brazen and domestically oriented refusal to inform her own foreign minister – who seems to know vastly more about the subject than her – about her decision deepened a perception she wasn’t interested in the broader picture.) Her call for uranium exports to India was dominated by economic considerations. There was one sentence to the effect that Australian uranium wouldn’t end up in Indian bombs, but that was the end of the matter as far as arms control was concerned. No mention of the NPT; no engagement with the underlying logic of the global non-proliferation regime.

Within hours Gillard’s announcement was followed by a statement from Julie Bishop. She reaffirmed Coalition support for the exports and then, with tiresome predictability, engaged in political point-scoring. On a day potentially marking a new direction in Australia’s place on the world stage, the messages from our leaders had a distinctly parochial character.

When Bishop did touch on arms control her analysis was underwhelming. She recycled Delhi’s slogan that India’s record on non-proliferation has been “exemplary.” Along with other advocates of uranium sales, Bishop apparently believes that if this slogan is chanted enough times it will be accepted as true. In the background, armchair strategists mutter that given the rise of the so-called Asian century, we mustn’t cause any offence to India; if anything, we ought to help puff up Delhi’s rather high opinion of itself.

But Bishop’s mantra about India’s exemplary behaviour is historically illiterate. Apart from refusing to sign the NPT in the 1970s, India duped its overseas suppliers of “civil” nuclear technology, lying its way to nuclear weapons capability. Indian policy also encouraged counter-proliferation from Pakistan. The tale continued into the 1990s when India not only obstructed agreement on a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) but also engaged in a series of inflammatory test explosions. This was despite the fact that successive Australian governments declared the test ban vital to our national interests and global security.

Bishop should brush off some old speeches on the topic from former Liberal foreign minister Alexander Downer (or at least those he made before Washington’s switch in policy on India). Perhaps she could then try to explain why Downer’s criticisms of Delhi’s nuclear behaviour in the late 1990s no longer carry weight; after all, India has still not signed up to the CTBT, although over 190 other states have.

The NPT is not perfect. But the world is a better place with it than without it. The treaty needs to be kept in sound repair, which requires hard work and good faith. Some people sincerely argue that the best way to keep it in shape is to modernise it by formally recognising that India now has a legitimate place as a responsible nuclear weapons state: best to have India inside the tent.

Perhaps there’s something to be said for this. But the idea of integrating a nuclear armed India into the non-proliferation regime needs serious reflection and a significant rejigging of the system, not a dash to sign contracts. The purpose and integrity of this regime are under enough strain without adding to the problem. One way to develop the modernisation and integration themes would be to make Indian entry into the tent conditional on its ratifying the CTBT. After all, a prudent revamp of global non-proliferation rules should raise, not lower, the bar on nuclear-related sales.

Unfortunately, however, the argument about updating the non-proliferation regime by including India is often simply cover for more narrowly motivated policy. Key players in the saga seem not to care much about either the NPT or the CTBT. They are content to look the other way while both treaties die the death of a thousand cuts. Their interests and vision lie elsewhere. For them the stuff of politics has a more immediate form, one readily summed up in soundbites and more easily grasped by the punters than imagining what the non-proliferation regime might look like to future generations.

For the moment, the leaders of both main Australian political parties seem content to shrug their shoulders and help Delhi push the NPT and CTBT out of the way. Not much room here for what used to be called good international citizenship, especially if it gets in the way of jobs, investment, profits and taxes.

A focus on the economy is certainly required of politicians. But good leadership sets this into a bigger picture and provides a sense of the sort of world we would like to help build in the coming decades. This has been lacking. Let’s not kid ourselves that the latest effort to cash in on uranium is shaped by lofty ideals about what Australia’s main political parties stand for.

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THIS WEEK Barack Obama edged towards his declared goal of abolishing nuclear weapons by signing a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, cutting US and Russian nuclear forces. But don’t open the champagne yet. The deal was tougher to negotiate than expected, took months longer than Obama’s original deadline, and only goes a small way to achieving his ambition. And although it was a hard slog, negotiating the treaty was by far the easiest part of the president’s challenge. Enormously more difficult steps will need to be taken before we get to abolition.

At the end of the cold war the United States and the Soviet Union each had over 20,000 nuclear warheads. In subsequent years both countries agreed to reduce their “deployed strategic nuclear warheads” to 2200 each. This was real progress, but not quite as impressive as it sounds. The agreement failed to count thousands of “non-deployed” and “non-strategic” warheads, most of which are in storage. Although these labels make the weapons seem less significant, many are ten times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb and together they could flatten every city on the planet.

The new START calls for the number of deployed strategic warheads to be reduced to 1550 each. But it still fails to get to grips with the other bombs. So, in practice, each side could still decide to keep, say, 4000 nuclear warheads and yet remain within the terms of the treaty. So, twenty years after the end of the cold war the new START may be a move in the right direction, but it only changes things marginally. It is not a fundamental breakthrough.

IF START really is part of a process leading to complete nuclear disarmament, what further steps are required to get to the goal? Many reports on the topic have been produced over the years by individual experts and a range of groups and panels from the United States, Sweden and Australia; there is even a draft of a convention banning nuclear weapons. We are not short of ideas, and there is no mystery about the basic conceptual, technical and political measures we must adopt to reach zero. The deficiency lies in the lack of political will and involves a set of so-far intractable political challenges.

The first step on the long road to abolition is to get START ratified. The spotlight here will be on Congress because the US constitution requires all treaties to be approved by two-thirds of the Senate. This means Obama cannot push the issue on party lines, and needs to bring a large body of Republicans with him. A complication here is that the Senate has often shown a preference for setting the bar very high on treaty verification, sometimes higher even than the US military; moreover, many senators are wary of arms control in general and could easily slow down matters, perhaps indefinitely. As a sign that he needs and wants to accommodate conservatives, Obama’s recent budget provided for an increase in spending on the nuclear weapons establishment. He did this because he has to prove to the American mainstream that downsizing the nuclear arsenal is not synonymous with neglecting it. This makes him a target for the left, and provides cynics with ammunition, but it seems the only way he can move his agenda through the US political system.

The second step is to sign a deal that covers the thousands of so-far uncounted US and Russian warheads. This might be tricky. The non-strategic (or “tactical”) weapons pose a notoriously difficult verification challenge: they are less tied to large fixed military bases and are easier to move around and hide. On top of that, there are uncertainties over basic accounting; in particular, it is difficult to get a precise figure for the total number of non-strategic warheads held by Moscow. This overlaps with the question of how to define a warhead, especially if its different components are stored separately or are going through maintenance. So, even if a treaty is negotiated to deal with these weapons, the US Senate may deem it impossible to verify and so refuse ratification.

The third and fourth steps are the long-awaited ratification of the nuclear test ban and a treaty on a verifiable halt to the production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. Both measures were opposed by the Bush administration, but Obama has reversed this foolishness and has now pointed US policy in the right direction. He will still need to get the Senate on board, though, and it should not be forgotten that the senators recklessly shot down the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in the 1990s.

The fifth step is to provide first aid to the battered Non-Proliferation Treaty. The NPT remains the best multilateral platform available for moving forward, and Obama will try hard at an international summit later this year to breathe new life into it. His presentational skills will be very useful, but after years of US hypocrisy sharp-eyed observers will be looking for more than an inspirational speech. Obama knows this and will be hoping that START and the just-released Nuclear Posture Review will demonstrate he is acting in good faith.

The sixth step is to get deeper backing for the idea of abolition. Although the idea has gathered increased support over recent years, there are two overlapping groups of hold-outs. These include those who consider nuclear disarmament impossible because they don’t think the political conditions necessary for the project will ever emerge. These people can’t foresee a day when trust will be universal, which means, they say, that deterrence will always be deemed necessary. Then there are those who think disarmament is undesirable because it would destroy deterrence, turning the clock back to before 1945 and increasing the risk of conventional wars between great powers. So, while many strategic experts and politicians give lip service to the idea of abolition, some also have serious reservations.

This is true even within Obama’s administration. The president had trouble getting his own side to endorse his idea that nuclear weapons should have a radically more restricted role. Leaks in relation to the Nuclear Posture Review showed the Pentagon was divided over whether deterring others from using nuclear weapons ought to be the “sole” or “primary” role of US nuclear weapons (the word primary being code for the notion there could be other reasons for having the bombs, such as first use). In the end Obama’s review floated the idea that deterrence of nuclear attack could eventually be the “sole” role for US nuclear forces but then declined to endorse it as his policy. In practical terms this means Obama has failed to fundamentally change American nuclear strategy. After all, deterring a nuclear attack on the United States has always been the primary role of US nuclear forces, even under bellicose presidents, such as Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s and George W. Bush more recently. Of course, this didn’t stop Washington’s employing nuclear threats for other, “secondary,” reasons, such as implicitly threatening Iran and North Korea with the prospect of a first strike. Indeed, a careful reading of the Nuclear Posture Review shows that Obama continues to reserve the option to attack these and similar countries with nuclear bombs, even if they have not used their own nuclear capabilities.

Yet universal commitment to nuclear no-first-use would seem to be a precondition for fundamental progress towards abolition. The reason some US analysts resist such a move is simple: they see American nuclear weapons as having a continuing place in the management of world order. Here conservatives can take comfort from Obama’s realisation that he will never be in a position to move to abolition. Indeed, although the Nuclear Posture Review reiterates Obama’s declared commitment to work toward a world without the bomb, it also states a need to maintain the nation’s nuclear infrastructure for “several decades or more.” So the next generation will see a less bloated, but still enormous and deadly US nuclear force structure. Moreover, embedded in the logic of the review is the claim that further restrictions on the role of US nuclear weapons will have to await improvements in America’s already massive, and massively expensive, conventional forces.

But back to the steps that would need to be taken if abolition were to be achieved. Step seven would be the broadening out of arms control to include the other official members of the nuclear club: China, France and Britain. Traditionally, each of these countries has tried hard to keep out of formal limits on nuclear arms, with each insisting they already have only the minimal forces needed for their national security (an argument that is itself an incitement to others to proliferate).

Assuming that Beijing, Paris and London can be brought into the formal arms reduction process, we could move to step eight. This is the requirement to bring in the “outsiders” – those nuclear armed states that refuse to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty: Israel, India, and Pakistan (and North Korea, which first signed, then unsigned). But each of these states has nuclear weapons for its own reasons, and each believes that security factors make nuclear weapons essential. It’s difficult to see how they can be persuaded to change their minds without resolving deep-seated problems in the Middle East and South Asia. Policies aimed at getting rid of nuclear weapons have to face up to the reasons why these weapons were developed in the first place.

Lastly, at step nine, we will need an effective mechanism for managing the final move to zero nuclear weapons. This is likely to be the hardest part. Going from, say, 8000 to 800 warheads globally will be very hard but relatively easy compared to going from 800 to zero. The mechanism for managing the move will need to (a) oversee dismantlement of the last remaining weapons; (b) verify, for the rest of time, that weapons are not being rebuilt; and (c) establish enforcement measures, to punish cheaters and reverse any proliferation that occurs. This mechanism might be built on the United Nations and International Atomic Energy Agency, but it would need to be capable of taking more robust action than those institutions have managed so far. States as diverse as North Korea, Iran, Israel, the United States and France would have to be kept in line with far more than stern UN resolutions.

This mechanism would also have to tackle the strategic challenge posed by expanding civil nuclear energy programs around the world. The problems illustrated by Iran’s bloody-minded policy, which blurs civil and military nuclear technologies, are just a taste of the difficulties involved in dealing with such “virtual” proliferation.

TOGETHER, these nine steps would constitute a revolution in global politics. No wonder Obama acknowledges abolition might not happen in his lifetime. Meanwhile, he should keep taking incremental steps, like START, which reduce the dangers associated with the weapons and make it easier for his successors to advance the longer-term goal of nuclear disarmament.

This goal might look like an unrealisable dream, but it is also a moral imperative. Notwithstanding the publicity given to global warming, these weapons represent the greatest threat to humanity there is. •

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Barack Obama is learning that opponents can be found in many different places, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the corridors of the Pentagon. His enemies in Afghanistan are well known, but this week it was reported that some American defence officials are opposing Obama’s promise of a radical reshaping of US nuclear weapons policy. His reaffirmation of the promise in the United Nations Security Council on Thursday suggests we may be in for some interesting Washington in-fighting.

The basic problem seems to be that the president believes the Pentagon hasn’t fully woken up to the end of the cold war – that it seems incapable of shaking off an anachronistic over-reliance on nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the more conservative Pentagon officials feel that some of the strategies inherited from the old days remain vital to national and security.

Clearly, some historical context is needed here. During the cold war Washington’s vision of world order was partly defined by nuclear weapons. Although there was an obvious need to deter the Soviet Union from using the bomb against American cities, the nuclearisation of US thinking went beyond this narrow view of deterrence. Other factors, which still resonate in Washington, affected nuclear policy.

Most importantly, politics dictated the need for “extended deterrence”, which is jargon for the US nuclear umbrella covering alliances such as NATO. This involved more than the threat of nuclear retaliation to dissuade Moscow from using its nuclear forces; it also explicitly rested on the possible first-use of nuclear weapons to deter or defeat conventional attacks in Europe and Asia. Extended deterrence had other advantages for Washington as well. For example, it reduced pressures for nuclear proliferation in allied countries, especially West Germany and Japan: the more Washington reassured them they would be looked after, the less their need to develop their own deterrents. It was assumed this network of deterrence and reassurance injected stability into the system. Another plus was that US control of the west’s nuclear button underlined its leadership status; it was one of the things that made it a superpower.

The end of the cold war required a rethinking of the link between US nuclear forces and world order. This was complicated by uncertainty about what the emerging order was going to look like. No one knew how Russia would turn out five or twenty years down the track. Pentagon officials also seemed resistant to radical change for more bureaucratic reasons, reinforced by a feeling that since the US cold war strategy had apparently been vindicated, why fix a policy that wasn’t broken?

But some sort of re-examination was inevitable. This was conducted during the Clinton presidency in a 1994 Nuclear Posture Review that embraced a policy of “leading and hedging.” “Leading” was about advancing arms control; “hedging” referred to the need to maintain powerful nuclear forces in case the scene took a turn for the worse. Clinton’s supporters tended to advocate leading, as this looked more in keeping with the changed times. But a hard core of defence officials emphasised hedging, which suited their professional concerns and fitted well with a conservative, or “realist,” world view. On balance, hedging won out. This was illustrated by the fact that the first-use option was kept despite the evaporation of its original cold war rationale; in addition, many thousands of nuclear weapons were retained, far more than made sense (even though many thousands were also cut, which showed just how much overkill there had been all along).

So the old pros in and around the Pentagon outflanked the reformers. This was easy to do because in the 1990s three concerns shaped American nuclear planning. First, there was the need to retain some insurance in case of the emergence of militant Russian nationalism. Second, there was a need to maintain superiority over Beijing, to deter and perhaps defeat Chinese power (in the event of things going badly over Taiwan, for example). Third, there was the question of how US nuclear weapons could help in dealing with rogue states in the Third World. During the cold war US nuclear forces were a type of equaliser, offsetting Soviet numerical superiority in conventional forces. But after the cold war, it was Third World nuclear forces, and sometimes biological and chemical weapons, that were seen as equalisers to US conventional superiority. A type of role reversal had occurred.

The weapons of mass destruction in these rogue states posed a threat to regional stability and a constraint on US policy premised on the possibility and plausibility of American intervention. If American nuclear weapons had deterred cold war Soviet adventurism, why couldn’t rogue state WMDs deter post–cold war US adventurism? In response to this changed setting, US nuclear strategy was adjusted to deter rogue states from using WMD against US troops and allies. US nuclear threats would keep the field open for using conventional power in places like the Middle East. In theory, Washington could deter hostile states from using WMD even while the US military defeated them on the conventional battlefield.

This thinking was reinforced by a particular reading of the 1991 Gulf War – that Saddam Hussein accepted a conventional defeat rather than escalate to the use of chemical weapons because he feared US nuclear retaliation. (An alternative explanation is that Saddam feared that if he used chemical weapons then Washington would broaden its war aims to include regime change in Baghdad.)

THE 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 led the Bush administration to stretch US nuclear strategy to help deal with the so-called “Axis of Evil,” which was short-hand for the idea of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea teaming-up with terrorists. This provided part of the context for Bush’s Nuclear Posture Review, which was completed at the end of 2001. According to the Review, Washington wouldn’t allow arms control to constrain US strategy, it would retain the first-use option, and states of interest (Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Libya) would be monitored by American nuclear war planners. Emphasis was also given to “adaptive planning” for nuclear attacks, which called for greater weapons accuracy, an improved capacity to target weapons rapidly, enhanced command and control arrangements, and weapons able to “hold at risk” (or blow up) a wide spectrum of targets. Adaptive planning implied the need for a new generation of nuclear weapons as well as a program for testing them.

The idea was that hostile states would recognise it was hopeless and dangerous to compete with Washington. Not only would they realise this was a no-contest, but they would also be sobered by the risk that their WMD program could be a lightning rod for an American attack.

Critics worried that the Review reflected a militarisation of policy and “lowered the nuclear threshold” – in other words, that it made nuclear weapons more usable, and thus more likely to be used, in a wider range of circumstances. This overlapped with a worry that Washington was blurring the line between nuclear and conventional forces, that it wanted to normalise or “conventionalise” nuclear weapons. Bush’s often negative stance on arms control, his 2003 invasion of Iraq, and his implicit threat to extend “pre-emptive” war to Iran and North Korea, provided a context for the Nuclear Posture Review’s implementation that alarmed observers. American nuclear strategy became implicated in an approach to global security (including a refusal to rule out nuclear first-use against Iran) that many found unsettling rather than reassuring.

Obama came into office promising to change all this. Suddenly multilateralism was back in fashion, which meant paying more attention to the views of the broader membership of the nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty, or NPT. Under the terms of the treaty well over a hundred non-nuclear states agree not to acquire the weapons if the members of the nuclear club (the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain) promise to limit their nuclear strategies and move towards complete nuclear disarmament. But the nuclear club has never been sincere about their side of the bargain. The United States saw nuclear weapons as too useful to surrender and the goal of global nuclear disarmament as a naive and reckless basis for policy development.

Obama claims this has changed. He says he wants a world free of all nuclear weapons (an objective that has gathered significant global support recently, as illustrated by the work of Gareth Evans’s International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament). But Obama also says he will be prudent and adopt a step-by-step approach; in particular, the United States will maintain a robust nuclear deterrent until complete nuclear disarmament arrives – which, of course, may never happen. In the meantime, Obama recognises there is much that can be done to move things forward, such as ratifying a ban on the testing of nuclear weapons and making more cuts to the numbers of nuclear weapons. Then there is related policy that can positively affect the political atmosphere, such as his decision to shelve Bush’s scheme for a missile defence system based in central Europe.

But what about the guidance the Obama administration gives to the military about the purpose of the nuclear weapons stockpile and how it might be used? In particular, what about first-use? Most of the NPT membership want a clear statement of no-first-use. They want all nuclear threats de-legitimised, and they have no time for Washington’s old claim that its first-use option is a foundation of world order. They have had enough of what they see as American hypocrisy.

Pentagon hardliners, and their allies in conservative think-tanks, don’t like what they are hearing. Old-school analysts fear a policy of no-first-use would unravel the world order that has evolved since the 1950s. They worry the result would be to encourage rogue states to push their luck, and possibly to spook countries like Japan into building their own nuclear weapons. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to Obama or anyone else. Although the Pentagon is required to follow presidential instructions, it isn’t the Department of Defense’s job simply to assume that a benign security environment will emerge and make radical disarmament sensible. And part of the Pentagon sees its core business as protecting an existing nuclear order which it views as essential for stability.

Where does all this leave us? For Obama, making large cuts to nuclear force levels will be easy, as everyone agrees the arsenal is too bloated. Just how far the cuts should go is a matter of opinion, although the precise numbers needed are a second-order issue. But abolishing nuclear weapons is impossible for many years to come, so Obama will not invest his limited political capital trying, although he will stress elimination as a long-term aspiration.

The most interesting area of potential change concerns the missions assigned to nuclear weapons. This is where the real fight could be. Deciding on the role of the weapons is a more profound issue than whether Obama leaves office overseeing an arsenal of 1000 or 4000 nuclear warheads. The central question is whether or not these weapons should be reined in and kept only to deter nuclear attack by others. Or should they continue to have a wider purpose? Should they continue to be seen as a tool for managing world order, which has meant using them to threaten countries like Iran as a way of underlining US hegemony and, supposedly, providing additional discipline to the system?

Obama apparently believes business as usual is unwise, immoral and unsustainable. One reason for this is that inaction could contribute to the NPT’s disintegration. The treaty is already under pressure, partly because of the collapse of US credibility under the previous administration. Today there is enormous hope that Obama can repair the damage; the sense is that it requires someone of his standing to restore faith in American non-proliferation diplomacy.

But this could require knocking into line anyone in the Pentagon continuing to insist that it is useful for the United States to threaten to start a nuclear war. Only time will tell whether Obama has the political room and stamina to do this while also addressing the financial mess, healthcare reform, global warming, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. •

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ALTHOUGH BARACK OBAMA has moved quickly to point US national security policy in a new direction, change will not be as radical as his more lofty rhetoric has suggested or his more ardent followers hope. Despite significant differences between them, it’s likely there will be more continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations than is commonly imagined.

This is partly because US security policy is entrenched within a presumption that Washington’s strategic primacy is essentially benign and must be perpetuated. This idea has deep roots in the nation’s history, political culture and psychology. Moreover, it’s a presumption that Obama has neither the inclination nor the political room to shake America free from.

Sure, the concept of “soft power,” which mostly means diplomacy, will be emphasized over “hard power.” Less grating language will be used to smooth over the menacing tones attached to Bush’s idea of military dominance. But the notion that America should remain top dog will continue to mark the Obama presidency.

This strategic primacy rests on four pillars: nuclear deterrence; conventional military superiority; a capacity for armed intervention in troublesome countries; and (implicit in those three) a readiness to use force. How does Obama approach these four pillars? The packaging has certainly been altered, but in some areas the substance of policy is being more adjusted than transformed.

Regarding the first pillar, nuclear deterrence, Obama sounds sharply different from his predecessor. The new president has abandoned Bush’s sometimes asinine refusal to engage with the arms control agenda. Obama considers much of the neoconservative opposition to this agenda to be ideological ranting, damaging to both US interests and the global common good. His repair work will include an effort to charm, inspire and cajole Congress into ratifying the nuclear test ban. He also wants a treaty to verifiably end the production of weapons-grade fissile material, and he is working with Russia to reduce nuclear forces. He has also hinted Washington will abandon its option for nuclear first-use. Finally, the president says he’s aiming for the abolition of nuclear weapons, a declaration intended to ensure next year’s summit of the Non-Proliferation Treaty starts off on the right foot.

These are all positive measures which should provide badly needed ballast and direction to global non-proliferation efforts. But before we get too carried away, a few points should be made. First, Obama is not the first US president to proclaim the abolition of nuclear weapons as a goal. Second, in his recent Prague speech Obama claimed too much in saying he is starting the task of reducing America’s nuclear arsenal; this task was begun many years ago, with presidents Bush senior, Clinton and Bush junior each making large cuts to America’s bloated Cold War nuclear forces. Third, between today’s grim reality and a possible nuclear-free tomorrow are many obstacles (such as getting a non-platitudinous United Nations consensus about how to handle North Korea) as well as pressing distractions (for example, the global financial crisis). Fourth, Obama has understandably insisted that Washington retain a strong nuclear deterrent for the foreseeable future. It’s unsurprising he says abolition might have to wait until after his lifetime.

The second pillar of US strategic primacy is conventional military superiority. This means ensuring the balance of power is heavily weighted towards Washington – or, more accurately, ensuring there is an overwhelming imbalance in America’s favour. Here Obama will mostly let the Pentagon keep following its familiar track. Some outrageously expensive weapons will be cut as Obama tries to bring the Defense Department’s budget under control. Aspects of the strategic guidance given to Pentagon planners will be revised. But don’t expect to see US defence spending dipping below twice the combined totals for Russia and China. Contrary to some messages coming out of Washington, most of this sum has nothing to do with combating terrorists. The military tools for fighting al Qaeda and similarly minded groups cost only a fraction of the US$650 billion-plus in annual defence spending Obama has asked from Congress (which is, by the way, US$100bn more than the Pentagon spent three years ago).

Nevertheless, Washington’s capacity to fight in “non-traditional” operations, such as combating terrorists and insurgents, has obviously become a key focus of military planning; it must now be counted as the third pillar of strategic primacy. Here Obama has made serious attempts to differentiate himself from Bush. He has announced troop withdrawals from Iraq. He’s marked-out the moral high ground by ordering the eventual closure of Guantánamo Bay prison and ending torture-as-policy. He is emphasising support for civilian state-building in Afghanistan. Most importantly, compared to Bush, Obama seems far more capable of winning the war of ideas with al Qaeda. He has a better story to tell, and a better way of telling it. Much of the world hopes Obama’s deft handling of the contest over competing narratives to be enough to swing the struggle decisively away from Islamist fanatics.

But Obama doesn’t enter this contest with a clean sheet of paper; it has Bush’s smudge marks all over it. And much more pain is to come – over sixty US soldiers and numerous civilians have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since Obama took office. There will probably still be many American troops in Iraq at the end of next year; more troops are going into Afghanistan; and Obama has signalled a willingness to continue, and perhaps escalate, the bombing of parts of Pakistan.

Much of this activity is about hunting down terrorists and helping democracy take root in unlikely terrain. This can be viewed as an honorable effort to do the right thing for bloodied nations in desperate need of help. But there’s an additional aspect to the story, which brings us to the fourth pillar mentioned above: a readiness to use force (against rogue states, rebels, pirates and so on) as a signifier of primacy. Counter-insurgency is now partly about preventing a collapse of American credibility. An unsettling implication here is that over the coming years American soldiers will be killing and dying in Afghanistan partly because before them other American soldiers have killed and died. Put another way, it will be about searching for ways to vindicate earlier sacrifice and demonstrate that Washington is still in the business of being a superpower.

Today, counter-insurgency represents the pointy end of US strategy. Strip away the euphemistic jargon and this type of operation calls for Americans to use violence to restructure sometimes recalcitrant societies in far-away lands. This can be dirty and frustrating work. It’s easy to imagine circumstances emerging which suck in more US soldiers, or tempt officers on the ground to escalate the destructiveness of their operations. There is no guarantee Obama will be able to control the dark and messy side of these conflicts; he knows they have the potential to go off-script and drain the life out of his administration. The matter is complicated by the fact that in Iraq and Afghanistan the commander-in-chief finds himself at different points along a counter-insurgency spectrum. In Iraq there seems to be a tendency towards letting local events take their course; in Afghanistan, the United States looks more like it is trying to take control of events. But is either approach sustainable? All we know for sure is that the challenges promise to require awkward decisions over the next few years about how to manage the nexus between military power and foreign policy.

To sum up: Obama’s project to re-shape American national security policy is a welcome change in direction but isn’t as radical as some people think; furthermore, he is working within considerable constraints. For example, he can signal an eventual shift away from nuclear deterrence, but he can’t complete the move himself; if this move is ever made, it will be made by a future president. In addition, Obama does not, and shouldn’t be expected to, show any sign of surrendering US conventional military superiority. Finally, Obama is working in a world being shaped partly by intrastate conflicts, some of which seem to require the wielding of US military force.

Given all of this, it will be difficult for the president to meet the enormous hopes that have been invested in him as the symbol of a new, better and less militarised global order. Although Obama appears more able than most to handle the challenge, he has to balance the ideals of his supporters with the putative requirements of US strategic primacy. His task is complicated by the fact that upholding primacy over the coming years will have implications for the use of force which are still unfolding and certainly can’t yet be fully defined. •

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