Five Good Reasons that Nuclear-Powered Submarines Do Not Make Sense for Australia
The push-back against nuclear-powered submarines for Australia is gaining strength, and for good reason. The AUKUS security pact, with the United States and the UK, negotiated by Scott Morrison in September 2021, controversially includes a provision to provide nuclear-powered submarines for Australia; and both the conservative Coalition and the new Labor Government have endorsed the agreement. But the opposition is growing.
It begins like this. Nicholas Stuart, writing in The Canberra Times, points out that we simply can not afford them. Estimates of the cost of nuclear submarines run from $70 billion to perhaps $200 billion dollars. But our entire defence budget for the financial year 2021-2022 was only $48.6 billion. That was for everything: guns, all personnel, military bases, etc. --- not just for a single weapons system. We can’t afford them.
Second, ANU Vice Chancellor Brian Schmidt, who is in favour of nuclear submarines, correctly points out, that it would require Australia to build a domestic nuclear science industry to support such a decision. A physicist, he points out what that would mean: “This nuclear workforce will need to include not just engineers and physicists, but also lawyers, regulatory experts, specialist medical staff, naval architects and policy advisers to decision makers.” The problem, of course, is that such a project would take many years to accomplish and would require an immense investment in public funds and a fundamental re-shaping of the established intellectual and academic priorities. And it is not going to happen.
Third, Albert Palazzo shows that, even if we could afford to build nuclear submarines and put them into operation successfully, they would not enhance our national security. He writes that “Australia needs submarines, but conventional ones are more than adequate for the nation’s security.” Developments in sensor technology are making our oceans increasingly “fully transparent” to submarine hunters; and, meanwhile, Australia has more pressing security needs, like microchips, the critical component of all new military and civilian technologies.
Fourth, the Australian Labor Party is committed to a non-nuclear future for Australia. Successfully elected last May, the Albanese government campaigned in support for the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) notes that in “October 2022, Australia for the first time abstained from voting on an annual UN General Assembly resolution that welcomes the adoption of the TPNW and calls upon all states to sign, ratify, or accede to it ‘at the earliest possible date’. This move formally brought an end to five years of Australian opposition to the treaty.” How can a huge investment in nuclear submarines fit into Labor’s notion of a non-nuclear future? It doesn’t.
And, finally, the future of human civilization on the planet depends on our capacity and willingness to collaborate and cooperate with the world’s major powers, rather than to invest our scarce resources in new and expensive means to destroy one another. The key issues are climate, pandemic, and nuclear weapons. We must learn to work together to confront these problems or we will not survive. Investing in nuclear submarines is not going to help.
Sources:
ICAN, “Labor Policy and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,” https://icanw.org.au/laborpolicy/
Albert Palazzo, “The definitive argument against nuclear subs,” The Saturday Paper, November 12-18, 2022.
Brian Schmidt, “Australia can’t afford to delay when it comes to nuclear subs,” The Canberra Times, November 10, 2022.
Nicholas Stuart, “Labor must sink submarine plan,” The Canberra Times, November 14, 2022.
Peter Van Ness is a visiting fellow in the ANU Department of International Relations; and, most recently, editor, with Mel Gurtov, of Learning from Fukushima: Nuclear Power in East Asia (ANU Press, 2017).
This article was written 21 November 2022.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.
