According to Jim Walsh (1997), who has written one of the most thorough and useful accounts of the historical interest in weapons acquisition or manufacture in Australia, the rejection of nuclear weapons from the 1970s is one of the "untold successes of the nuclear age".
Walsh is far too generous. By virtue of the US alliance, Australia is a nuclear weapons state by proxy. As Ron Gray from the Australian Peace Committee put it in a letter to The Australian (May 15, 1998) after the Indian weapons tests in 1998: "The Federal Government can, of course, adopt a "holier than thou" attitude over the Indian Government's decision, as we have signed the NPT and are not considering developing nuclear weapons. We don't need to, however, as by hosting the United States bases in Australia we shelter under the US nuclear umbrella and, indeed, are part of the US nuclear war fighting machine. Hooray for hypocrisy."
https://www.foe.org.au/anti-nuclear/issues/oz/ozbombs
More than 16,000 Australian workers were also exposed. A key government-funded study belatedly followed these veterans over an 18-year period from 1982. Despite the difficulties of conducting a study decades later with incomplete data, it found they had 23% higher rates of cancer and 18% more deaths from cancers than the general population.
https://theconversation.com/315-nuclear-bombs-and-ongoing-suffering-the-shameful-history-of-nuclear-testing-in-australia-and-the-pacific-148909
Yes Moon, the poms " owe " us, and yet IMO, we need them, and their closer to us than the yanks- " the ties that bind ".RaiderGet started123freevectors.com
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