The global push to eliminate nuclear weapons is struggling, evidenced by the failure of the recent Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) RevCon to reach a consensus outcome and continued nuclear build-ups and sabre-rattling at hotspots across the world. These developments have drawn renewed criticism from nuclear disarmament advocates, who highlight the potential peace dividends of disarmament and nuclear weapons states’ obligations to disarm under the NPT.
A recently published piece in The Conversation by Dr Tilman Ruff at the University of Melbourne, for example, admonishes nuclear weapons states for failing to rein in their arsenals despite commitments under the NPT. On this basis, he suggests Australia could be doing more to push forward the disarmament agenda, recommending “ending Australia’s reliance on US nuclear weapons in our military policies, and ensuring there are no US nuclear weapons based at Australian facilities or Australian personnel contributing to their possible use.” In making this argument for Australian nuclear decoupling with the United States, Ruff draws attention to Australian plans to host US nuclear-capable bombers and submarines, and bilateral cooperation on intelligence collection at Pine Gap.
Presenting nuclear decoupling as a credible strategic option without examining the likely impacts on Australian security is a problematic omission.
Ruff’s piece is an important contribution to the public debate on nuclear weapons in Australian defence policy, but it has one critical flaw: it does not address the implications of Australia-US nuclear decoupling for Australian security. Leaving aside the question of whether such nuclear decoupling would exert any pressure on the United States to disarm (it will not), presenting nuclear decoupling as a credible strategic option without examining the likely impacts on Australian security is a problematic omission.
Similar oversights are apparent in the work of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a nuclear disarmament advocacy group promoting universal adoption of the nuclear ban treaty, which Ruff lauds in his piece. Claiming the imprimatur of “science and evidence-based policy decisions,” the ICAN website glosses over 80 years of nuanced analysis and debate by some of the world’s greatest minds to flatly declare nuclear deterrence a “scam.” The unhelpful suggestion is that governments and individuals that do not unreservedly support nuclear disarmament are simply not smart enough to see that nuclear deterrence does not and cannot work.
The reality is that nuclear weapons offer many potential strategic benefits: they can deter military aggression; reduce vulnerability to blackmail and coercion; obviate investments in costly conventional weapons systems; and provide security guarantees to allies, reducing allied demand for their own nuclear weapons. Continued investments in nuclear weapons and opposition to the nuclear ban treaty from nuclear-armed and protectorate states (including Australia) are calculated attempts to secure some of these strategic dividends for themselves. This does not mean that these states are ignorant of the potential long-term benefits of nuclear disarmament. They simply have to weigh these against short-term national security requirements.
A credible call for reform of Australia’s defence policy must engage with these strategic challenges to explain how Australia can advance its overarching goal of nuclear disarmament without unduly compromising national security.
These national security requirements loom large given deep strategic uncertainty from the return of great power competition, Chinese revisionism around Taiwan and the South China Sea, land war in Europe, and the weakening of regional security architectures. A credible call for reform of Australia’s defence policy must engage with these strategic challenges to explain how Australia can advance its overarching goal of nuclear disarmament without unduly compromising national security. Saying that Australia has not got this balance right is one thing. But failing to acknowledge the strategic trade-offs renders one’s recommendations unpersuasive and, ironically, impairs one’s own ability to diagnose and pursue the actual impediments to a world without nuclear weapons.
The desire for nuclear disarmament should not cause us to disengage from the complexities of its implementation. If nuclear disarmament is ever to move from aspiration to reality, we must grapple honestly with the security concerns that make states cling to these weapons in the first place. Overlooking these concerns does not eliminate them — it just ensures they go unaddressed.
