Introduction Richard Broinowski, former diplomat and Adjunct Professor at the University of Sydney, argues that "without transparency from government about its plans Australians are left uninformed about what is really going on" concerning the Howard government's thinking about nuclear energy. "But, for speculation, there are a number of indicative straws blowing in the wind", with possibilities including enhanced exports, nuclear waste imports, uranium enrichment, nuclear waste reprocessing, and even nuclear power generation.
Broinowski concludes:
"Outlandish as it may seem to many Australians, the challenge may soon be to reassure Australia's neighbours, especially Indonesia, that Mr Howard has no plans to build nuclear weapons in Australia." ........................................ Paul Keating's government lost the general election of March 1996. Keating later claimed that if he had won, he would have taken the Commission's findings to the United Nations and discussed them with President Clinton and the leaders of other nuclear weapons states. But Australia's new conservative prime minister, John Howard, would do no such thing. He and his foreign minister, Alexander Downer, quietly buried the Commission's findings and it never met again. Downer later described the Commission as a political stunt, a sentiment in keeping with Howard's determination to distance himself from most things Keating had stood for.
Howard was not for the 'big picture', enmeshment with Asia, multilateralism or middle power activism. He would concentrate on 'common sense', 'realistic goals', and a 'hard-headed assessment'. He would re-orientate Australia's national interests and security concerns towards Europe and the United States. Particularly in foreign and defence policies, Howard wanted to accept Washington's big picture as Australia's own, especially when George W. Bush became president of the United States in February 2001.
On nuclear issues Howard began to demonstrate the same kind of disregard for established non-proliferation norms as his American patron. He contributed Australian technology and research towards Bush's National Missile Defence system - a sure-fire way to encourage regional nuclear proliferation. He supported Bush's decision to walk away from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. He applauded Bush's Nuclear Posture Review of December 2001 and National Security Strategy of September 2002, which together lowered traditional US barriers to the use of nuclear weapons by sanctioning their deployment against suspected adversaries including non nuclear weapons states. He supported Bush's illegal preventive war-fighting doctrine, or, as Condoleezza Rice called it, 'anticipatory self-defence'. He remained supportive of new US nuclear weapons research, even though it was directly contrary to the spirit and intention of Article VI of the NPT, a treaty that Foreign Affairs officials continued insisting that Australia still supported.
Informed answers are hard to come by because the federal government refuses to divulge specifically what it knows or wants. Without transparency from government about its plans, Australians are left uninformed about what is really going on. But, for speculation, there are a number of indicative straws blowing in the wind.
Meanwhile, a test of Howard's Asian diplomacy will be how his nuclear plans are interpreted in Australia's own region. In December 2002, he upset the leaders of many neighbouring countries by declaring that he was prepared to launch pre-emptive off-shore strikes to stop terrorists threatening Australia. The country's image as an aggressive neighbour was not diminished by military expeditions to East Timor and the Solomons, even though Australian forces were formally invited there. Planned Australian weapons acquisitions have not helped. These include naval and air transports that can move large contingents of ground forces outside Australia to participate anywhere in the global war against terrorism, and long-range air-to-surface cruise missiles for Australia's F-III and F A-18 aircraft. This issue is especially sensitive in Jakarta, where a Foreign Ministry spokesman said in 2004: 'Australia's government has, until now, been against the proliferation of advanced missile technologies in the region. There is a risk that raising the level of sophistication could lead to some kind of counter response'.
Outlandish as it may seem to many Australians, the challenge may soon be to reassure Australia's neighbours, especially Indonesia, that Mr Howard has no plans to build nuclear weapons in Australia, or to arm the Royal Australian Air Force's cruise missiles with them. But developments in Northeast Asia may make such an eventuality less outlandish. There is a high risk, even a probability, that if North Korea expands its inchoate nuclear weapons capability Japan, South Korea and Taiwan would quickly develop their own. This would put pressure on Australia to reconsider its nuclear options. Certainly, one way Howard could square the GNEP circle would be to walk away from the NPT and for Australia to become a nuclear weapons state itself.
