Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Australia

  • The Caretaker and the Plague: British Nuclear Weapons Testing in Australia

    Ursula Gelis, Executive director of the ‘Global Women’s Association against Nuclear Testing’ works for the rights and needs of victims of nuclear weapons explosions and nuclear testing. Her partners are in Kazakhstan and other states, affected by the long-term effects of nuclear weapons testing. At the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in December 2014[1], she interviewed an anti-nuclear activist and nuclear test victim from Australia.

    Sue Haseldine
    Sue Haseldine in front of the Black Death column in Vienna in December 2014. Photo: Ursula Gelis

    The Plague column in Vienna convincingly depicts human suffering; in this case – the tragedy of the Black Death epidemic from 1679 in Austria which killed about 30 000 to 75 000 souls. A Black Death does not distinguish between a noble and a beggar, and a nuclear weapon explosion does not either.

    In today’s Australia, Aboriginal communities are still suffering from European racism that came in the aftermath of Captain Cook (1770) who looked at the Aborigines as lucky people, even if they did not own many material goods!

    The first inhabitants of Australia, the people who were there ab origine, from the beginning, were food-gathering and hunting people. They arrived about 50,000 years ago.[2]

    From region to region, Aboriginal tribes have clear cultural distinctions and their ability to co-exist with nature in a sustainable way could serve as a paradigm for human survival.

    Western cultures, still proud of their technological achievements, and apparently committed to poison and to destroy the whole Earth, should listen to indigenous civilizations in order to prevent human extinction.

    Aborigines survived best by avoiding contact with ‘White people’. The invaders brought diseases indigenous people had no immunity to resist. Children were taken away by missionaries, claiming that the parents were infidels.[3] Interestingly enough, the church and social Darwinism partnered in suppressing Aborigines. Evolution theory served to justify any brutality: massacres, plundering of goods, rape, etc. The ‘savage’ had to be domesticated and was defined as a race doomed to be extinct.[4]

    In 1947 the British government decided to develop their own nuclear weapons program. “In August 1954, the Australian Cabinet agreed to the establishment of a permanent testing ground at a site that became named Maralinga, […] in southwestern South Australia.”[5]

    The United Kingdom conducted 12 atmospheric tests between 1952 and 1957 on Australian territories at Maralinga, Emu Fields and Monte Bello Islands. […] During the testing period, roughly 16,000 Australian civilians and servicemen involved in the tests and 22,000 British servicemen were exposed to nuclear fallout.[6]

    “Aboriginal people living downwind of the tests and other Australians more distant […] came into contact with airborne radioactivity.”[7]

    “Plutonium and uranium fallout […] contaminated Aboriginal lands. Although the British government declared the Maralinga site safe following a 1967 cleanup, surveys in the 1980s proved otherwise, prompting a new cleanup project. Conflicts of interest, cost-cutting measures, shallow burials of radioactive waste, and other management “compromises” have left hundreds of square kilometers of Aboriginal lands contaminated and unfit for rehabilitation.”[8]

    Civil disobedience

    Sue Coleman-Haseldine (64) from the Kokatha-Mula nation is a survivor of British nuclear weapon testing and spoke at the Vienna conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons in December 2014[9].

    Sue was born in Ceduna, a city about 1000 kilometers straight west from Adelaide, South Australia. Her community, including the local farmers, consists of approximately 4000 people. She grew up nearby, lived in the region all her life and can trace back the family’s history up to her great grand-mother.

    “Our knowledge about colonialism started with Captain Cook. My grand grand-father was an Irish man who eventually went back to the white people. Our old people told us not to hate him. They were singing Irish songs to us around the camp fire. My first language was Kokatha, which is also my tribe’s name. Later at school, we had to learn English.”

    Sue’s mother’s generation had to follow the colonizer’s order of only speaking English, so Sue was educated to speak her native tongue by her grand-parents as the cultural tradition-keeper. She went to an English school and grew up at a German mission.[10]

    Sue always tried to combine traditional life-style with the governmental request of following the ‘British way’. She went out in the bush, kept Aboriginal traditions and educated herself and others. “This was maybe already an act of resistance, I guess”, she said smiling. Sue won the South Australian premier’s award for excellence in indigenous leadership in 2007 for her work as an activist, cultural teacher and environmental defender.[11]

    “The elderly people had talked about the Nullarbor[12] dust storm, not knowing that they had seen the fall-out from Maralinga. I knew about Maralinga and started questioning the amount of cancer deaths. This was at the time when I started my own family.

    More and more people were dying of leukemia and thyroid cancer. I had doctors remove my thyroids. My grand-daughter got it as well. The official city doctors offered us a radioactive drink to kill the cancer cells but we refused. My husband has heart problems and his family members died from leukemia too. Sometimes people die from ‘unknown causes’.

    We learned that the effects of radiation can pass from one generation to the other and can also ‘jump further’ to the third one. When I taught about bush food I felt terribly guilty because I knew about the contamination of the soil. When I spoke to our doctor he simply said that I should carry on teaching about traditional food because we could not do anything about the contamination.”

    Entertaining workers of the nuclear program

    British servicemen could feel at home among friendly people from the Kokatha-Mula nation. Soldiers were accompanied to the beach during their holidays and Sue vividly remembers those encounters. “They were just ordinary soldiers, away from home and lonely. We became simply friendly with them. Also they had been misused as guinea-pigs. We had no clue that dying might have been already begun.

    We were just innocent. We were not allowed to go to Maralinga. I know that the area was poisoned yet we did not know a lot. The old people could feel it, I guess.” –

    Recently, “a […] case-control study examined miscarriage in wives and congenital conditions in offspring of the 2007 membership of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association, a group of ex-servicemen who were stationed at atmospheric nuclear weapon test sites between 1952-67 [was conducted]…”[13]

    Sue talks about the ‘Seven Sisters’, the Pleiades star constellation which plays also a role in Aboriginal traditions. The stars are girls who were travelling through Australia being chased by a man. One was caught and killed. Eventually she went up to the skies, followed by her free sisters.

    “When we see them from September to March in the Australian skies, we think of them as strong. We are saying that what the sisters bury, man should never dig up because everything buried was poisoned.

    My people are still living on contaminated land, because clean-up operations were not sufficient. Before testing, we had to leave our territories. Officials told us that our displacement is for governmental purposes. We had no idea what really was going on in terms of nuclear explosions.

    After testing people were sent back, for instance to a place called ‘Old Valley’ on Maralinga lands but Maralinga village was closed off. The government is now thinking to open it as a tourist site.

    In terms of measuring radioactivity we are totally cut off from acquiring information because it is illegal to have a Geiger counter! We are particular concerned of the uranium mining industry, exploiting sands found near the former testing site. Plutonium testing took place at the Woomera rocket range site. The place is military territory and we do not know what actually is going on there.”

    Overturning the doctrine of terra nullius (land belonging to no-one)

    “There was a fellow called Eddie Koiki Mabo fighting for that the native Australians had a prior title to land” ‘taken by the Crown since Cook’s declaration of possession in 1770’.[14]

    “Normally rules are not very nice for Aboriginal people. Property rights are splitting communities and devastate families. The government wanted us to prove that we had lived on our land for the last two hundred years. I said no, because this land was given to me by birth and not by the British government. So finally we could seek recognition but the minerals belong to the Crown.”

    The Australian Nuclear Free Alliance. ANFA (http://anfa.org.au).

    “Our alliance is well connected and once a month the community leaders link up by phone and we talk about what to do next. During meetings, governmental people are absent. We have international visitors from France, Japan and so on. People from all over the world should know that we do exist, that we are humans (laughter).

    We want to stop uranium mining, let us start with banning it for a year first. Then we could probably breathe better…and of course, I do not want any nuclear weapon testing. Nuclear weapons should not exist.

    In order to understand our complex societies, it is best to be with us for a while. Our strong connection to the land might be valuable for you to experience. We do not own the land, the land owns us. Come over, a week is plenty of time to convert you into one of us.”

    Endnotes

    [1]http://www.bmeia.gv.at/fileadmin/user_upload/Zentrale/Aussenpolitik/Abruestung/HINW14/HINW14_Austrian_Pledge.pdf.

    [2] (http://www.visitmungo.com.au/aboriginal-remains).

    [3] Gerhard Leitner. Die Aborigines Australiens. München 2006, p. 8.

    [4] Leitner, p. 21/22.

    [5] Chapter 16: A toxic legacy: British nuclear weapons testing in Australia. Published in:
    Wayward governance : illegality and its control in the public sector / P N Grabosky
    Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 1989 (Australian studies in law, crime and justice series); pp. 235-253. http://aic.gov.au/publications/previous%20series/lcj/1-20/wayward/ch16.html.

    [6] From 1957 to 1958, nine atmospheric tests followed over Christmas Island (Kiritimati) and Malden Island in the central Pacific Ocean, some of which were considerably more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The remaining 24 UK nuclear tests were conducted jointly with the United States at the Nevada Test Site.

    [7] http://aic.gov.au/publications/previous%20series/lcj/1-20/wayward/ch16.html.

    [8] M&GS 2002;7:77-81. http://www.ippnw.org/pdf/mgs/7-2-parkinson.pdf.

    [9] http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/vienna-2014/8Dec_Coleman.pdf.

    [10] Occasional Paper 3: The struggle for souls and science, constructing the fifth continent: German missionaries and scientists in Australia. The 16 papers in this volume, edited by Professor Walter Veit, explore the contribution of late nineteenth and early twentieth century German scientists and missionaries in the emerging fields of Australian ethnography and linguistics.

    Themes within the papers include the study of Aboriginal religion, language, and art, and the conflict between missionaries and the emerging discipline of academic anthropology in Australia and Britain.

    Occasional Papers Number 3 also addresses the academic influences, research agendas and methodologies of the German scholars who worked in Australia, as well as the extent to which those scholars dominated the creation of an image of Australia in Europe in both theory and practice. http://artsandmuseums.nt.gov.au/museums/strehlow/manuscripts/publications.

    [11] Black Mist. The Impact of Nuclear Weapons on Australia. http://www.icanw.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/BlackMist-FINAL-Web.pdf.

    [12] http://www.exploringaustralia.com.au/showplace.php?p=176.

    [13] http://omicsonline.org/epidemiology-open-access-abstract.php?abstract_id=30829.

    [14] The Mabo decision altered the foundation of land law in Australia by overturning the doctrine of terra nullius (land belonging to no-one) on which British claims to possession of Australia were based. This recognition inserted the legal doctrine of native title into Australian law. The judgments of the High Court in the Mabo case recognized the traditional rights of the Meriam people to their islands in the eastern Torres Strait. The Court also held that native title existed for all Indigenous people in Australia prior to the establishment of the British Colony of New South Wales in 1788. In recognizing that Indigenous people in Australia had a prior title to land taken by the Crown since Cook’s declaration of possession in 1770, the Court held that this title exists today in any portion of land where it has not legally been extinguished. The decision of the High Court was swiftly followed by the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) which attempted to codify the implications of the decision and set out a legislative regime under which Australia’s Indigenous people could seek recognition of their native title rights.

    http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/_files/ntru/resources/resourceissues/mabo.pdf.

  • Nuclear Disarmament’s Midnight Hour

    This article was published by Project Syndicate.


    Gareth EvansLast month, the Doomsday Clock’s hands were moved a minute closer to midnight by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the respected global organization that for decades has tracked the risk of a nuclear-weapons catastrophe, whether caused by accident or design, state or terrorist, fission bomb or dirty radiological bomb.


    Few around the world seemed to be listening. The story – as others like it since the end of the Cold War ­– came and went within a half-day’s news cycle. But the Scientists’ argument was sobering, and demands attention. Progress since 2007 – when the Clock’s hands were last set at five minutes to midnight – has stalled, and political leadership has gone missing on all of the critical issues: disarmament, non-proliferation, and key building blocks needed for both.


    On disarmament, the balloon has well and truly deflated. The New START treaty, signed by the United States and Russia in 2010, reduced the number of deployed strategic weapons, but left both sides’ actual stockpiles intact, their high-alert status undisturbed,  weapons-modernization programs in place, disagreements about missile defense and conventional-arms imbalances unresolved – and talks on further draw-downs going nowhere.


    With no further movement by the US and Russia, which together hold 95% of the world’s total of more than 20,000 nuclear weapons, no other nuclear-armed state has felt pressure to reduce its own stocks significantly, and some – China, India, and Pakistan – have been increasing them.


    The 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference was a modest success, mainly because it did not collapse in disarray, as had the previous one in 2005. But it could not agree on measures to strengthen the regime; its push for talks on a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East has so far gathered no momentum; North Korea is no closer to being put back in its NPT box; and Iran is closer than ever to jumping out of it, with consequences that would ricochet around the region – and the global economy – if it makes that decision.


    Despite President Barack Obama’s good intentions, the US Senate is no closer to ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, while China, India, and Pakistan, among others, take shelter behind that inaction, with a fragile voluntary moratorium the only obstacle to resumed testing. And negotiations on another crucial building block for both disarmament and non-proliferation – a treaty to ban further production of weapons-grade fissile material – remain at an impasse.


    The only half-way good news is that progress continues on a third building block: ensuring that weapons-usable materials, and weapons themselves, currently stored in multiple locations in 32 countries, do not fall into the hands of rogue states or terrorists. At the end of March, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak will host a follow-up meeting to Obama’s successful Nuclear Security Summit in 2010, which brought together 47 government leaders to agree on a comprehensive program aimed at securing all such materials within four years. High on the agenda will be the security implications of nuclear safety: the Fukushima catastrophe showed that nuclear-power plants may be vulnerable not only to natural disaster, but also to terrorist sabotage.


    But nuclear security is only one small part of what must be done to eliminate nuclear threats once and for all, and summit fatigue will make it difficult to sustain key world leaders’ commitment to meeting for so narrow a purpose. New thinking is urgently needed on how to recover the momentum of just two years ago.


    To achieve that requires meeting three conditions. First, political leaders and civil-society leaders must restate, ad nauseam if necessary, the case for “global zero” – a world without nuclear weapons – and map a credible step-by-step path for getting there.


    Second, new mechanisms are needed to energize policymakers and publics. One is to develop and promote a draft Nuclear Weapons Convention as a framework for action. Another is a “State of Play” report card that pulls no punches in assessing which states are meeting their disarmament and non-proliferation commitments, and which are not (the Nuclear Materials Security Index, just published by Senator Sam Nunn’s Nuclear Threat Initiative, is one example). Advocacy-focused leadership networks, such as those now operating in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, comprising well-known former leaders and other senior figures, could also help.


    Third, sustaining high-level policy attention to the entire nuclear agenda requires an institutional setting. The Nuclear Security Summit’s focus is too narrow for this role; the International Atomic Energy Agency’s formal mandate is too restricted; the NPT Review Conference meets too irregularly; and the United Nations Security Council’s membership is too limited. The best forum for norm-building may prove to be the G-20, whose members embrace both North and South, account for most of the world’s population, GDP, and all but a handful of its nuclear weapons, and whose heads of government meet regularly.


    With its foreign ministers meeting in Mexico this month to discuss broader global governance issues, the G-20 is beginning to move beyond a narrow economic focus. That is to be welcomed. Economic destruction causes immense and intolerable human misery. But there are only two global threats that, if mishandled, can destroy life on this planet as we know it. And nuclear weapons can kill us a lot faster than CO2 can.

  • We All Share the Duty to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons

    Malcolm Fraser


    This article was originally published by the Sydney Morning Herald.


    If international law as an institution is to have any relevance, it must apply to critical issues. Nuclear weapons do not fall beyond its scope – indeed they pose its most critical test.


    These instruments of terror, through their ordinary use, cause indiscriminate human suffering on an unimaginable scale. They violate fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, as well as treaties protecting human rights and the environment.


    Their continued existence in the thousands undermines the very notion of the rule of law, reinforcing instead a system of rule by force, whereby a small number of nations threaten to inflict mass destruction on others – and themselves to boot – to achieve political objectives.


    Fifteen years ago today, the International Court of Justice – the highest legal authority in the world – declared it illegal to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons, and ruled that all nations have a duty to eliminate their nuclear forces, whether or not they are parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.


    Today there are more than 20,000 nuclear weapons across the globe with an average explosive yield 20 to 30 times greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb. Roughly 2000 are maintained on high-alert status – ready to wreak havoc at any moment by accident or design.


    A single nuclear bomb, if detonated on a large city, could kill millions of people. No effective humanitarian response would be possible, with most medical infrastructure in the city destroyed and any outside relief efforts severely hampered by high levels of radioactivity – a silent, scentless, invisible and persistent killer.


    The only sane path is to eliminate these monstrous weapons from all national arsenals without delay. Nuclear disarmament is not just an option; it is mandated by international law. But nuclear powers and their allies, including Australia, are resisting progress towards abolition.


    A comprehensive convention banning the nuclear bomb is long overdue.  Australia should drive the international push for negotiations – just as the Labor Party promised it would do prior to winning government in 2007.


    Similar agreements have been concluded to outlaw and eliminate other categories of weapons deemed by the international community to cause unacceptable humanitarian harm – from biological and chemical weapons to land mines and cluster bombs. All of these treaties have changed state practice and resulted in meaningful disarmament.


    The New START agreement recently concluded by Russia and the United States is a move in the right direction, but it will only result in modest cuts to the two nations’ sizeable arsenals. The three other NPT nuclear weapon states – Britain, France and China – have little to show in terms of actual disarmament, and nothing much has been done to bring Israel, India and Pakistan into a multilateral disarmament process.


    In spite of the support declared by some nuclear-armed states for “a world free of nuclear weapons”, all are investing heavily in the modernisation of their nuclear forces – which is incompatible with the requirements of international law.


    In 2011 they will spend an estimated $100 billion between them bolstering their nuclear arsenals. This sum is equal to the UN regular budget for 50 years. According to the World Bank, an annual investment of just half that amount – between $40 and $60 billion – would be enough to meet the Millennium Development Goals to end extreme poverty worldwide.


    The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons revealed this May through FOI laws that the Future Fund – which invests Australian taxpayers’ money – has holdings worth $135 million in 15 companies that manufacture nuclear weapons for the US, Britain, France and India.


    These investments hamper disarmament efforts and go against the Future Fund’s own stated policy not to invest in companies involved in economic activities that are illegal in Australia or contravene conventions to which we are a party. The Fund should divest from these companies, just as it has, commendably, divested from companies that produce land mines and cluster munitions.


    So long as Australia continues to claim the protection of US nuclear weapons, its credibility as a disarmament advocate will be greatly diminished. With a US president sympathetic to the cause of disarmament, the time is ideal for Australia to adopt a nuclear-weapon-free defence posture and begin contributing meaningfully towards nuclear abolition.

  • Imagine There’s No Bomb

    There has never been a better time to achieve total nuclear disarmament; this is necessary, urgent and feasible. We are at the crossroads of a nuclear crisis. On the one hand, we are at an alarming tipping point on proliferation of nuclear weapons, with a growing risk of nuclear terrorism and use of still massively bloated arsenals of the worst weapons of terror. On the other, we have perhaps the best opportunity to abolish nuclear weapons.

    For the first time, a US president has been elected with a commitment to nuclear weapons abolition, and President Barack Obama has outlined a substantive program to deliver on this, and shown early evidence that he is serious. He needs all the support and encouragement in the world. We do not know how long this opportunity will last. Unlike the last one, at the end of the Cold War, it must not be squandered. An increasingly resource- and climate-stressed world is an ever more dangerous place for nuclear weapons. We must not fail.

    Like preventing rampant climate change, abolishing nuclear weapons is a paramount challenge for people and leaders the world over – a pre-condition for survival, sustainability and health for our planet and future generations. Both in the scale of the indiscriminate devastation they cause, and in their uniquely persistent, spreading, genetically damaging radioactive fallout, nuclear weapons are unlike any other weapons. They cannot be used for any legitimate military purpose. Any use, or threat of use, violates international humanitarian law. The notion that nuclear weapons can ensure anyone’s security is fundamentally flawed. Nuclear weapons most threaten those nations that possess them, or like Australia, those that claim protection from them, because they become the preferred targets for others’ nuclear weapons. Accepting that nuclear weapons can have a legitimate place, even if solely for “deterrence”, means being willing to accept the incineration of tens of millions of fellow humans and radioactive devastation of large areas, and is basically immoral.

    As noted by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission headed by Dr Hans Blix: “So long as any state has nuclear weapons, others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain, there is a risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. And any such use would be catastrophic.” The only sustainable approach is one standard – zero nuclear weapons – for all.

    Recent scientific evidence from state-of-the-art climate models puts the case for urgent nuclear weapons abolition beyond dispute. Even a limited regional nuclear war involving 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs – just 0.03 per cent of the explosive power of the world’s current nuclear arsenal – would not only kill tens of millions from blast, fires and radiation, but would cause severe climatic consequences persisting for a decade or more. Cooling and darkening, with killing frosts and shortened growing seasons, rainfall decline, monsoon failure, and substantial increases in ultraviolet radiation, would combine to slash global food production. Globally, 1 billion people could starve. More would succumb from the disease epidemics and social and economic mayhem that would inevitably follow. Such a war could occur with the arsenals of India and Pakistan, or Israel. Preventing any use of nuclear weapons and urgently getting to zero are imperative for the security of every inhabitant of our planet.

    The most effective, expeditious and practical way to achieve and sustain the abolition of nuclear weapons is to negotiate a comprehensive, irreversible, binding, verifiable treaty – a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC) – bringing together all the necessary aspects of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. Such a treaty approach has been the basis for all successes to date in eliminating whole classes of weapons, from dum-dum bullets to chemical and biological weapons, landmines and, most recently, cluster munitions.

    Negotiations should begin without delay, and progress in good faith and without interruption until a successful conclusion is reached. It will be a long and complex process, and the sooner it can begin the better. We agree with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that the model NWC developed by an international collaboration of lawyers, physicians and scientists is “a good point of departure” for achieving total nuclear disarmament.

    Incremental steps can support a comprehensive treaty approach. They can achieve important ends, demonstrate good faith and generate political momentum. Important disarmament next steps have been repeatedly identified and are widely agreed. They remain valid but unfulfilled over the many years that disarmament has been stalled. The 13 practical steps agreed at the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review conference in 2000 should be upheld and implemented. They include all nuclear weapons states committing to the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals; entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; negotiations on a treaty to end production of fissile material; taking weapons off extremely hazardous high alert “launch on warning” status; and negotiating deep weapons reductions. But at the same time a comprehensive road map is needed – a vision of what the final jigsaw puzzle looks like, and a path to get there. Not only to fit the pieces together and fill the gaps, but to make unequivocal that abolition is the goal. Without the intellectual, moral and political weight of abolition as the credible and clear goal of the nuclear weapon states, and real movement on disarmament, the NPT is at risk of unravelling after next year’s five-yearly review conference of the treaty, and a cascade of actual and incipient nuclear weapons proliferation can be expected to follow.

    Achieving a world free of nuclear weapons will require not only existing arsenals to be progressively taken off alert, dismantled and destroyed, but will require production of the fissile materials from which nuclear weapons can be built – separated plutonium and highly enriched uranium – to cease, and existing stocks to be eliminated or placed under secure international control.

    The International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament announced by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Kyoto last June and led with Japan is a welcome initiative with real potential. It could most usefully direct its efforts to building political momentum and coalitions to get disarmament moving, and promote a comprehensive framework for nuclear weapons abolition.

    Australia should prepare for a world free of nuclear weapons by “walking the talk”. We should reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our own security policies, as we call on nuclear weapon states to do. To ensure that we are part of the solution and not the problem also means that the international safeguards on which we depend to ensure that our uranium does not now or in the future contribute to proliferation, need substantial strengthening and universal application. Our reliance on the “extended nuclear deterrence” provided by the US should be reviewed so that Australian facilities and personnel could not contribute to possible use of nuclear weapons, and we anticipate and promote by our actions a world freed from nuclear weapons. Canada championed the treaty banning landmines, or Ottawa Treaty; Norway led the way on the cluster munitions with the Oslo Convention. Why should the Nuclear Weapons Convention the world needs and deserves not be championed and led by Australia and become known as the Canberra (or Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane) Convention?

    This article was originally published in The Age

    Malcolm Fraser is the former prime minister of Australia. Sir Gustav Nossal is a research scientist. Dr Barry Jones is a former Australian Labor government minister. General Peter Gration is a former Australian Defence Force chief. Lieutenant-General John Sanderson is former chief of the army and former governor of Western Australia. Associate Professor Tilman Ruff is national president of the Medical Association for Prevention of War Australia.

  • US Threatens Australia and Aotearoa: “Increase Military Ties Or Else…”

    Women for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific
    International Peace Bureau, Oceania Representative

    United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Defence Secretary William Cohen recently visited Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand to do some very heavy threatening about military alliances. They made it clear that Aotearoa would not be allowed to rejoin the ANZUS (Aust/NZ/US) Alliance unless it rejects its nuclear free legislation. In Australia they made it clear what that alliance actually means.

    Meeting with Australia’s Defence Minister Ian McLachlan and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, they threatened that if Australia doesn’t substantially upgrade its military hardware. Unless Australia engages in the same technology, doctrines and training opportunities it will not be able to keep up with US developments, undermining its ability to participate in joint operations. This would result in Australia losing its status as a “valuable” US ally and be unable to participate in wars, training, etc., with the US.

    They insisted that Australia increase its military budget accordingly, and establish a “joint defence acquisition committee” with the US. This committee would enable US and Australian experts to consult, cooperate and collaborate so that technology and information gaps are eliminated and Australia had the ability to function under a US controlled alliance.

    The US is developing a combination of satellite and laser technology that goes far beyond that witnessed during the Operation Desert Storm attack on Iraq in 1991. Their plans to militarise and control space, outlined in a document called “Vision for 2020”, require the development of ground-based anti-satellite weapons (ASATs), space-based ASATs and space-based earth strike weapons. This systems, as with all weapons systems, are controlled and coordinated by ground bases such as those in Australia, Ka Pae’aina, Marshall Islands and other nations. This is requires an incredible military budget which is greater than the economy of all South-East Asia countries combined.

    In exchange Australia will be allowed to upgrade its involvement in the US new space-based missile early-warning and monitoring system. This includes stationing Australian defence personnel at Colorado Springs, HQ of the US early-warning system.

    Increased weaponry and other facilities would strengthen Australia’s readiness for future cooperation in the Middle East, specifically against Iraq. It would also enhance Australia’s ties with the Central and Atlantic commands, and therefore with the US army command, and increase its involvement with the US Pacific Command, based in Ka Pae’aina/Hawai’i, which provides training with naval and air components. Part of the package is that the USAF facility at Nurrungar in South Australia will close after 30 years, but that it will be replaced by two new antennas to be built at Pine Gap, the CIA intelligence stations near Alice Springs. The antenna will link into the new geostationary satellites targeted to pick up on tactical and intermediate range missiles (like those of Iraq, India and Pakistan), as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles. The data collected by these antenna will be sent directly to Colorado, rather than to Nurrungar as before.

    Sources:
    “US warns of defence risk”, The Australian, Greg Sheridan, 31 July 1998.

    “Star Wars Returns to Dominate Space”, Bombs Away. Newsletter of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, Vol 12, No 1, Spring 1998. p3.