Have yellowcake and eat it too

Third is the incipient breakdown of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Drafted by the United States in the 1960s, it came into force with strong international support in the 1970s.

Its central tenet, contained in Article VI, was a solemn mutual undertaking that the then-established nuclear weapons states would negotiate the reduction and eventual dismantling of their nuclear arsenals in exchange for a promise by the non-nuclear weapons states that they would neither make nor acquire nuclear weapons.

But none of the weapons states has honoured this undertaking. And several non-weapons states, tired of the hypocrisy of nuclear weapons states claiming they need nuclear weapons for their security while denying the same right to non-weapons states, continue to try to develop weapons of their own. Others, not signatories of the treaty, have gone further and built nuclear weapons and delivery systems, including India, Pakistan, Israel and, possibly, North Korea.

Fourth is the aggressive policy of President George W. Bush to expand US’ nuclear war-fighting doctrine to establish global military hegemony. His nuclear policy review of December 31, 2001 created a new land, sea and air-launched triad of offensive nuclear and conventional strike systems. This and his national security strategy of September 2002 reversed some time-honoured American nuclear principles that discouraged the use of nuclear weapons in war and proscribed their use against states not possessing them.

President Bush has now given himself moral permission, nay duty, to establish a new liberal democratic world order, and in doing so, to launch pre-emptive nuclear attacks against any country (or sub-national group) that his advisers recommend targeting.

Meanwhile, US scientists and nuclear engineers are researching and developing new generations of nuclear weapons, including “mini-nukes” and “bunker busters”. These activities, coupled with America’s determination to develop a missile defence system to protect the US and its allies from nuclear hard rain, has caused other countries to strengthen their own nuclear forces. In particular, Russia and China, determined not to allow the credibility of their own nuclear forces to be weakened, are quietly increasing and improving their own nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Threshold nuclear weapons states like Iran and North Korea are even more determined to take their own nuclear route.

President Bush’s recently announced Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which attempts to contain proliferation by restricting to “friendly countries” the capacity to enrich or reprocess uranium, is likely to fail. So will existing international arrangements to restrict trade in weapons and dual-use technology, such as the Wassenaar Arrangement, the Australia Group, the Missile Technology Exchange Regime and the Nuclear Suppliers' Group.

As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists observed in September/October 2005, A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani physicist who sold nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, may have performed a valuable service by vividly revealing just how ineffectual the multilateral non-proliferation export control system has become. Its sluggish and cumbersome machinery cannot keep pace with the nimble activities of proliferators and terrorists.

Against this background, let us return to Prime Minister Howard’s debate, and his push to increase the sale of Australia’s uranium.

At least twice in recent nuclear history, Australian governments have acted with clear-minded purpose to curb nuclear excess. One was in 1977, when the Fraser Government established strict bilateral conditions under which uranium could be exported. The other was in the early 1990s when Keating’s Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and a few of his senior diplomats effectively lobbied for ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and helped persuade the international community indefinitely to extend the NPT.

Their efforts culminated in the Canberra Commission, a bunch of international experts who met for the first time in the Australian capital in January 1996. The following August they handed down a blueprint that could have arrested the slide of mutual suspicion and double standards that was poisoning the NPT. They recommended a clear commitment by the nuclear weapon states to get rid of their nuclear weapons, take their nuclear forces off alert status, remove all warheads to separate storage, end all testing, initiate a third round of strategic arms limitation talks and conclude a no-first-use agreement.

Keating was voted out of office in March. He later claimed that if he had won the 1996 election, he would personally have taken the findings to the General Assembly and lobbied President Clinton and the leaders of other nuclear states to execute them. But John Howard and Alexander Downer, with their distaste for tying Australia to multilateral obligations, did nothing to endorse them widely, at the UN or elsewhere, and the report was quietly shelved.