The Lowy Institute's dangerous nuclear propaganda

In early December, Medcalf was the Australian Co-Chair of the 2012 Australia-India Roundtable, a meeting of more than 50 parliamentarians, diplomats, government officials, academics, business figures and journalists from both countries. The Roundtable was supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Indian Ministry of External Affairs.

The Roundtable ought to have put some positive proposals on the table. India should have been encouraged to stop attacking and murdering citizens involved in peaceful and creative protests against nuclear power plants, to take concrete steps towards nuclear weapons disarmament, to seriously address ineffective and negligent nuclear regulation, and to address inadequate nuclear security and entrenched corruption. Medcalf could have used the occasion to champion his long-lost idea of an "invitation to India to work with Australia on arms control". The Roundtable could have called into question the scale of military spending in India (A$49 billion in 2011) and its recently-acquired status as the world's largest weapons purchaser.

But there was none of that at the Roundtable. On the contrary, one of the main proposals was to expand military links. All the better for the Indian state to attack and murder citizens opposing the nuclear power plants that may be fuelled by Australian uranium.

Medcalf uses straw-man arguments. He writes: "Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Israel have long pursued nuclear weapons regardless of how the world treated India. It is absurd to suggest that their leaders are on the verge of nuclear disarmament if only Australia would steer clear of India's nuclear energy program."

No-one has ever made that absurd suggestion − Medcalf is simply making stuff up. The flip-side of his disingenuous, straw-man argument about disarmament is a disingenuous, straw-man argument about proliferation. He writes: "But the most mistaken claim is that Prime Minister Julia Gillard's proposal to end the blanket ban on civilian uranium exports to India will somehow lead to the catastrophic spread of nuclear weapons ..."

Yet nuclear trade with India clearly does encourage proliferation. If Japan or South Korea pulled out of the NPT and built nuclear weapons prior to the 2008 US-India nuclear trade agreement, they would have been excluded from international nuclear trade and that would have killed their domestic nuclear power industries and their nuclear export industries. Now, the equation is fundamentally altered − based on the Indian precedent, both countries could realistically expect to be able to build weapons with minimal impact (or manageable impact) on their nuclear power programs and their nuclear export industries.

The undermining of the nuclear non-proliferation regime coincides with a range of other worrying developments in north-east Asia. South Korea has a long history of secret nuclear weapons research. Now, Seoul wants to develop uranium enrichment technology in violation of its commitments under the 1992 Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and despite the fact that it has no legitimate need for enrichment technology. Regional tensions are worsened by North Korea's development of nuclear weapons (using plutonium from an 'experimental power reactor') and its recent rocket test.

Japan and China are engaged in territorial disputes. Japan's nuclear weapons hawks have become more vocal recently and they're not shy about pointing to Japan's nuclear power program as a source of materials and expertise for a weapons program. Japan is pressing ahead with its reprocessing program despite already having a huge stockpile of plutonium and no legitimate need for any more.

WMD proliferation in south Asia and north-east Asia may turn out to be the defining events of this Asian century. Yet Australia turned a blind eye to secret nuclear weapons research in South Korea, one of our uranium customer countries. Australia gives Japan open-ended permission to separate and stockpile plutonium produced from Australian uranium. And there is bipartisan policy to undermine the non-proliferation regime by selling uranium to India with no disarmament concessions.

Despite its claim to champion "open debate" and to "encourage the widest range of opinions", the Lowy Institute refused to publish a critique of Medcalf's propaganda. Friends of the Earth will soon be writing to the Institute's sponsors suggesting they redirect funding to organisations upholding reasonable intellectual standards and promoting peace instead of militarism and WMD proliferation. We don't expect a positive response from at least two of those sponsors − uranium miners BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto.