If Trump returns to the White House, Australia may need its own nukes
We very rarely talk about it, but Australia has lived under the protection of the US “nuclear umbrella” since the 1960s. The umbrella, however, has developed big holes. Behind the scenes, Australian and US officials quietly have started talking about the problem, and should again next week when Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles meet their US counterparts for the annual Ausmin consultations.
With the fancy name of “extended nuclear deterrence”, the idea always has been that the US would use its nuclear weapons to defend an ally. Australia willingly accepted the promise, then spent the next 60 years not thinking about it. After all, we were a low-risk target in the Cold War.
A former strategist for the Australian Defence Department, Paul Dibb, maintains that Soviet officials in the 1980s told him that Australia would be a target for Moscow in the event of a nuclear war. Why? Because Australia hosts US tracking and communications facilities in Pine Gap and North-West Cape vital to American war fighting.
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But the risk was low and their locations remote. No cities were at risk. And accepting America’s nuclear umbrella allowed Australia the best of all possible worlds – we didn’t have to worry about acquiring our own nukes, we could parade around the world preaching non-proliferation to everyone else, all the while feeling smugly protected by the US.
It was pretty cosy. And we didn’t like to talk about it. “Australia is unique among US allies in that it has largely preferred not to discuss US extended nuclear deterrence commitments publicly,” observes Kelsey Hartigan of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Others have been more sceptical. The original doubter was French president Charles de Gaulle. He challenged John F. Kennedy over the sincerity of the American guarantee in 1961: Would the US really be willing to “trade New York for Paris” if France were at risk of atomic attack from Moscow, as de Gaulle put it?
In other words, would Kennedy have fired nuclear warheads at Russia to protect Paris from Soviet attack even if it meant that Russian retaliation would destroy New York? De Gaulle didn’t think so. France built its own nuclear forces, which remain today.
We’d rather not even think about it, but as the world grows more dangerously uncertain, is the umbrella still extended protectively over Australia? Some of the foremost US experts today say it’s not. This includes some of the people who’d potentially be advising a future president on how to act in the event of a crisis.
“You know, there are no fallout shelters in Seattle, there are no civil defence drills,” says Elbridge Colby, who was the lead author of the US National Defence Strategy in 2018 in his capacity as deputy assistant secretary of defence for strategy and force development. “Right? If we actually were preparing to potentially lose a city because of something, you would see that evidence. And so it’s obviously not going to happen,” he tells me.
This observation has a commonsense quality. No US city is preparing for possible nuclear attack. So the US is not contemplating taking the risk involved in defending its allies.
Colby currently is affiliated with the Marathon Initiative, a strategy research think tank that he co-founded. But it’s widely speculated in Washington that he’d be appointed national security adviser or similar in a potential Trump administration.
Does Colby have a point? “I think he makes a good point,” says Nadia Schadlow, the chief architect of another key US government policy document, the 2017 National Security Strategy, complementary to but distinct from the defence strategy.
“It’s difficult to counter that point because it’s true – we don’t have civil defences around the country,” she tells me. “That could reduce the credibility of our commitment” of a US nuclear shield over Washington’s allies. “But there are other options, too, such as improved missile defence to protect the United States. It is figuring out the combination of capabilities we need to improve deterrence.”
Schadlow served as deputy national security adviser for strategy during the first year of the Trump White House.
Could it be there is no real risk of nuclear strike on any US ally? It’s actually a time of greater risk than at any since the end of the Cold War. Vladimir Putin repeatedly threatens nuclear attack against the US and its NATO allies in Europe. Russia has “weapons that can hit targets on their territory”, said Putin this year, and they were risking the “destruction of civilisation”.
Further, China has built 300 new nuclear silos in the past few years and the Pentagon estimates that, at its current rate, it could have 1000 nuclear weapons by 2030. And Russia is developing entirely new nuclear weapons systems.
“Matching China and Russia’s nuclear expansion goals missile-for-nuclear missile, warhead-for-nuclear warhead,” says Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Centre, “would require a tripling or more of America’s current nuclear deployments of 1770 nuclear weapons.” He doesn’t think that’s very plausible.
“Our closest allies know this,” says Sokolski, a former US Defence Department non-proliferation official. “South Korea, Japan and Poland want either the US to base nuclear weapons on their soil, or to get nuclear weapons of their own.”
They fear the current American umbrella is no longer enough; they are seeking more protection. And all of this is happening with a conventional US president in the White House. Joe Biden has been firm in supporting US allies worldwide. In the event of a return of the doctrine of “America First” with a recrudescent Trump, uncertainties for US allies would only escalate. Would anyone seriously expect a president operating under the rubric of “America First” to risk sacrificing New York for Berlin, or San Francisco for Seoul, or Miami for Melbourne?
“I don’t think there’s any way that the American president would actually risk losing, like five American cities, because of something that North Korea did, because the stakes are too low for Americans,” says Colby.
Among US allies in the Indo-Pacific, South Korea is most immediately exposed because of a bellicose North Korea. Japan is next most vulnerable; its air force scrambles to intercept Chinese air force intrusions at an average rate of every second day. Tokyo has announced a doubling of its defence budget but has no nuclear capability of its own.
Australia’s situation is “less acute”, says Colby, because Beijing’s first priority is to establish naval dominance in its nearer realms. But as Australia integrates more closely with the US military in the next few years, the nuclear question will grow more pressing and more uncomfortable.
We know about AUKUS. It involves more than Australia buying, then building, submarines, however. Increasingly, US forces will be using Australia as an operations base. For instance, Australia is spending $8 billion to upgrade the Stirling submarine base in Western Australia so that four US and one British nuclear-powered submarine can begin rotating through in a continuous relay starting in three years.
Australian governments, Coalition and Labor, welcome all and any US facilities. The more the US depends on Australia, the more likely it will defend it, runs the logic. The vaunted ANZUS treaty contains no security guarantee whatsoever. And the US enjoys the options that Australia presents. As China’s military reach expands, the US seeks to disperse its forces to make them harder for Beijing to obliterate. Australia, to the Pentagon, looks like an unsinkable, continent-sized aircraft carrier. And submarine base, missile base and communications base.
But, of course, the more valuable Australia is to the US military, the more tempting a target it presents to Beijing. We already know that Beijing’s underlying policy towards Australia is “hostile”, a word that both Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd have used to categorise it.
But neither Washington nor Canberra is ready for any hostility of the nuclear variety against Australia. Can’t Beijing and Washington get sensible? Negotiate some nuclear restraints, as the US and the Soviets did in the Cold War? No. Beijing is refusing to discuss the topic until it has reached nuclear parity with the US. So the danger is a reality, but the protection is a fiction.
“I think we’ve got to figure out something quickly,” says Colby. He doesn’t claim to have the answers, but he does say “we should put all the options on the table to preserve these vital Asian alliances”.
Options include a policy of US allies “sharing” – hosting – American nuclear weapons, or, most radically, acquiring their own nuclear weapons.
“We’ve got to be realistic and pragmatic,” says Colby. “Non-proliferation is fantastic, but it’s not working. If we ignore the problem, we court failure and disaster.”
Peter Hartcher is political and international editor.