Fact or Fission?: the truth about Australia’s nuclear ambitions

By Richard Broinowski and Mark Diesendorf

An updated and authoritative account of Australia’s involvement with nuclear power, including the AUKUS nuclear submarine pact.

Based on previously classified files and interviews with some of Australia’s prominent politicians and diplomats, the first edition of Fact or Fission? revealed that the nation’s nuclear policies had a chequered history. We sold, and continue to sell, uranium abroad, but rejected plans to build nuclear reactors in Australia. We switched from wanting our own nuclear weapons during the Cold War to giving strong support for a sane international non-proliferation regime.

But now the narrative needs updating. Since the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, an increasingly uncritical acceptance in Canberra of Washington’s war-fighting policies — nuclear and conventional — has encouraged the very things that Australia once so vigorously and moralistically opposed.

The latest step was taken at the end of 2021 with the announcement that the Navy will acquire nuclear-propelled submarines from either the UK or US. If the deal ever goes through, these submarines will likely be deployed as part of an American strategy to contain China. But if successive US administrations continue to vacillate in their policies towards their allies, or are unable or unwilling to defend us, Australian hawks may see arming the submarines with nuclear weapons as the only way Australia can defend itself against a resurgent China.

Richard Broinowski concludes that Australia’s foreign policy has become militarised, with key departments and militant think-tanks in Canberra calling the shots in pursuing an aggressive policy towards China. Such activities profoundly endanger Australia’s own security.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922586636

Richard Broinowski

Richard Broinowski is a former ambassador to Vietnam, Korea, Mexico, the Central American republics and Cuba. He also He is currently Adjunct Professor Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. He is the author of A WITNESS TO HISTORY and FACT OR FISSION: THE TRUTH ABOUT AUSTRALIA’S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS. He lives in Paddington, Sydney, with his wife, Alison, who is a former diplomat, academic and author. They have two children: documentary filmmaker Anna , and Adam, who works in avant-garde theatre. Richard’s sister is physician, author, activist and speaker Helen Caldicott.

Book preview

FACT OR FISSION?

Richard Broinowski was a senior Australian diplomat who served in Japan, Myanmar, Iran, and the Philippines before becoming ambassador to Vietnam, the Republic of Korea, and Mexico. He was general manager of Radio Australia in the early 1990s, and on his retirement in 1997 became an adjunct professor, first at the University of Canberra, and then at the University of Sydney. In 2006, he initiated a program to send many student journalists in Australia to work in the newsroom of English-language newspapers throughout Asia.

Since his retirement, Richard has published six books, two of which are on nuclear matters: two editions of Fact or Fission? (Scribe 2003 and 2022), and Fallout from Fukushima (Scribe 2012). He was president of the NSW chapter of the Australian Institute of International Affairs from 2015 to 2018.

Richard became an Officer in the Order of Australia in the June 2019 honours list. He lives with his wife, Dr Alison Broinowski AM, in Sydney.

Dr Mark Diesendorf is an honorary associate professor in environment and governance in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales, and senior editor for energy at the international journal Global Sustainability.

To Dr Anna Broinowski

and Dr Adam Broinowski

Scribe Publications

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409, USA

First published by Scribe 2003

This edition published by Scribe 2022

Copyright © Richard Broinowski 2003, 2022

Foreword © Mark Diesendorf 2022

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

Scribe acknowledges Australia’s First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this country. We recognise that sovereignty was never ceded, and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present.

978 1 922585 74 5 (Australian edition)

978 1 922586 63 6 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia.

scribepublications.com.au

scribepublications.co.uk

scribepublications.com

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Mark Diesendorf

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One: Beginnings

Chapter Two: The Cold War: the first decade

Chapter Three: An Australian Bomb?

Chapter Four: Selling Australian Uranium: the 1960s and early 1970s

Chapter Five: The Whitlam Years

Chapter Six: Malcolm Fraser and Uranium

Chapter Seven: Bob Hawke: my heart says no, my head says yes

Chapter Eight: Paul Keating’s Nuclear Concerns

Chapter Nine: Nuclear Diplomacy under the Howard Government

Chapter Ten: Mining and Exporting Australian Uranium: issues for the future

Chapter Eleven: Can Australian Uranium be Safeguarded?

Chapter Twelve: The AUKUS Deal

Chapter Thirteen: Some Conclusions

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

PRIMARY SOURCES FOR this book have been mainly Foreign Affairs officers and departmental files.

Former DFAT officers who have been particularly helpful include Rakesh Ahuja, Jeff Benson, Duncan Campbell, David Evans, Roy Fernandez, Allan Gyngell, Stuart Harris, Sandy Hollway, John Kelso, Alf Parsons, Bill Pritchett, David Reese, David Sadleir, and Michael Wilson. Several other officers, still serving, have also been helpful, but I will not embarrass them by naming them.

Files of the Department of External Affairs, later Foreign Affairs, and then Foreign Affairs and Trade, have also been a rich source of information. This material, along with personal recollections of colleagues, give this study special point. DFAT has been remarkably generous in giving me such access. I thank Roger Holdich and Elizabeth Nathan for their guidance and assistance, and archivists in the National Archives in Canberra. Librarians in the Petherick Room at the National Library have, as always, been most helpful.

I thank Andy Buttfield for his perspective on nuclear engineering; Amy Land at the University of Canberra, who helped me with some early research and ideas when the book was only an idea in my head; Ian Hancock, who provided some useful suggestions on historical research; Gavin Mudd, an environmental engineer who shared some of his findings on mine waste hydrology with me and took time to proofread the manuscript; Arvi Parbo for the generous time he gave me to discuss uranium mining from his own perspective as a geologist and mining engineer; Hugh Saddler for some valuable statistics; and Gough Whitlam who gave me his unique perspective on nuclear politics in Australia.

As with my first book on my grandfather, Alison Broinowski has been an unfailing source of ideas, enthusiasm, hot coffee, and good grammar. Finally, thanks to my daughter Anna, who came up with the title for this book. For this updated edition, I’d like to thank Geoff Miller and Mark Diesendorf for their thoughtful observations and suggestions, and to Mark for suggesting the need for updating this book in the first place.

Foreword

by Mark Diesendorf

THE FIRST EDITION of Fact or Fission? is the classic insider’s history, up to 2001, of Australia’s role in nuclear proliferation. The author, Richard Broinowski, was formerly a distinguished diplomat who served as Australian ambassador to Vietnam, the Republic of Korea, and Mexico. Drawing upon internal memos of the then Department of External Affairs, published documents and interviews, Richard described how Australia developed an international reputation for principled opposition to the testing and proliferation of nuclear weapons, while covertly attempting to develop its own nuclear weapons in the 1960s and also compromising safeguards controlling the export of its uranium. This second edition addresses a similar, contemporary situation in Australia, which opens up new proliferation hazards.

In September 2021, the United States president, the United Kingdom prime minister, and the Australian prime minister launched a new strategic partnership between the three governments with the stated aim of ‘ensuring peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific over the long term’. A key part of this partnership, named AUKUS, was to cancel Australia’s contract to buy 12 diesel-powered submarines from France and replace them with nuclear-powered submarines purchased from the USA or the UK. The abrupt decision reversed previous US policy to ban the transfer of naval nuclear reactor technology to any other country apart from the UK. Other countries could ask: if this technology is transferred to Australia, why not to us? Clearly, the decision increases the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.

US and UK naval reactors are fuelled by highly enriched uranium (HEU), which is ideal for nuclear weapons. Because Australia has a large uranium resource, there will be pressure from the uranium industry and the nuclear power lobby to build a uranium-enrichment plant in Australia. If this eventuates, it would create the perception among our neighbours that Australia could once more attempt to covertly develop nuclear weapons. A regional nuclear arms race is not out of the question.

The shift from diesel-powered submarines, which are suitable for patrolling the Australian coastline, to nuclear-powered submarines with HEU, which are much more suitable for remote operations, demonstrates the further integration of Australia into the powerful US war-fighting machine. If the scheme is ever implemented, it could make the proposed home port, Adelaide, and possibly all the other Australian ports where the submarines could be birthed, targets for attack by nuclear missiles.

The AUKUS decision was made without prior discussion by the US Congress or the parliaments of the UK and Australia. It takes place in a context where the USA and China are confronting each other over the rights of ship passage in the South China Sea, with the underlying concern that mainland China may be preparing to invade Taiwan. Although Australia does not have nuclear weapons or nuclear power stations, its government is still refusing to sign and ratify the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, an initiative of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which was itself an initiative of Australians. The gap between the Australian government’s non-proliferation rhetoric and actual government policies has opened further.

Fact or Fission? has been out of print for several years, and my academic colleagues, representatives of the peace and environmental movements, and I raised with Richard and the publisher, Scribe, the need for an update that takes account of recent developments. Both responded positively to our call, and Richard has prepared this updated edition with two new chapters — one on the AUKUS pact, and one on conclusions to be drawn from recent developments. Like the first edition, this edition is very well researched, and is even more relevant today than in its original year of publication, 2003. It will be a valuable resource for public debate and public resistance to proposals for Australia to purchase nuclear-powered submarines and become involved in other stages of the nuclear fuel cycle.

Preface

THE FIRST EDITION of this book described the history of Australia’s nuclear policies to that time. The tale is intricate and convoluted, but its details need remembering, so that current suggestions that the country should be both nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed can be put in proper historical context.

And what needs remembering, in particular, is that Australia had two nuclear agendas. One was to remain a major player in supporting the international nuclear non-proliferation regime. The other, driven by influential commercial interests, was to export Australia’s uranium. To justify such exports, the uranium had to be wrapped in such strict safeguards that it could never be diverted to nuclear weapons programs. Customer countries not only had to be signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, but negotiate separate bilateral safeguards agreements with Australia.

Over the last couple of decades, however, Australia’s non-proliferation credentials have been degraded. We have allowed commercial considerations to intervene, permitting contracts for Australian uranium to be negotiated with customer countries before concluding bilateral government-to-government safeguards agreements. We have permitted the export of uranium to India, which is not a signatory to the NPT.

Australia has also refused to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons promulgated in New York in 2017, which entered into force on January 2021. That is because successive Australian governments cling to the unrealistic view that the ANZUS agreement of 1951 shelters Australia under the United States' nuclear umbrella from attack or invasion by another country. If we signed the Prohibition Treaty, we would forfeit this protection. The same logic applies to our refusal to honour our obligation under Article VI of the NPT to pursue negotiations in good faith for general and complete nuclear weapons disarmament.

That is why Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal-National Party government, including his then foreign minister Julie Bishop, refused to congratulate ICAN, the Victorian-origin International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, on winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. For to have done so would have irritated Washington, our hoped-for nuclear protector.

As of today, because of global warming and the so-called China threat, Australia’s anti-nuclear credentials have taken another hit with the announcement that, under a trilateral agreement with Britain and the United States, called the AUKUS agreement, Australia will acquire nuclear-powered submarines either from Britain or the United States. The full ramifications of this decision are discussed in Chapter Twelve.

Meanwhile, Australians’ nuclear allergy continues to prevent any Australian politician with healthy survival instincts from advocating the construction of nuclear power reactors in their electorates. But publicly expressed indignation towards all things nuclear seems to have disappeared. Gone are the vehement anti-nuclear rallies of the 1970s and 1980s, and those that greeted French nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 1990s. Instead, encouraged by the Murdoch press, we hear advocates spruiking nuclear power reactors around the Australian coast, and apparently sober analysts suggesting that Australia should be nuclear-armed.

If we don’t remember past constraints against such ambitions, we are less inclined to maintain them. My hope is that, in a small way, this updated edition of Fact or Fission? may help revive the sensible anti-nuclear policies of the past, and help combat such irresponsible views as those of defence minister Peter Dutton that if America went to war with China over Taiwan, it would be inconceivable that Australia would not join in.

Introduction

EVER SINCE AN atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, nuclear issues have driven international relations. Nuclear weapons, nuclear power, nuclear materials and their possession have determined the way nations deal with each other. This has been as true for Australia as for other countries. In Australia’s case, the nuclear policies of the United States have also profoundly influenced the formulation and conduct of many aspects of Australian diplomacy. The more I have examined the files of the old Department of External Affairs and its successor departments, the more I am convinced this is true. Yet most accounts of Australian foreign policy, including Rawdon Dalrymple’s Continental Drift (2002) and Richard Woolcott’s The Hot Seat (2003), barely mention nuclear matters. An analysis of Australia’s nuclear diplomacy is clearly overdue.

‘Diplomacy’ is an often misunderstood term applied to a complex business. In Australia it is usually practised by professionals in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade with their counterparts in the foreign and trade ministries of other countries. This practice has its own protocols and conventions that give predictability to discourse and aid understanding. But public servants from other commonwealth departments and specialised agencies increasingly try their hand at it too. So do prime ministers and their cabinet colleagues, either through the press or on overseas trips, sometimes with counterproductive results.

Apart from bilateral diplomacy between governments, there is multilateral diplomacy conducted within international organisations, in development and technical assistance programs, and in the international activities of many private institutions. Multinational corporations also practice their own brand of business diplomacy.

The diplomacy I analyse in this book is mainly of the conventional sort: government-to-government negotiations conducted between diplomats in the field. But it also strays into the international activities of specialised agencies such as the defunct Australian Atomic Energy Commission (AAEC) and its successor, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Agency (ANSTO), and the business diplomacy of uranium mining companies.

The book traces the erratic path followed by successive Australian governments in pursuit of what they conceived to be the nuclear holy grail. The object of their desire was sometimes manifested as a bomb, sometimes as a reactor to generate electricity, sometimes a plough, sometimes a radio pharmaceutical or a food preservative, often all these things. The book begins with pre- and immediate post-World-War-II engagement in nuclear research, and documents the efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to acquire nuclear weapons technology. It describes the radical change that took place in the early 1970s when plans to acquire nuclear weapons and nuclear power stations were abandoned, and Australian diplomats strove to reach the high moral ground of nuclear non-proliferation. This aspiration drove Australian diplomacy in the 1980s and early 1990s selectively to discourage nuclear weapon acquisitions in the international arena.

On the face of it, current Australian nuclear diplomacy reflects the policies of the international organisation established to monitor and regulate nuclear industry and technology throughout the world: the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and international statute law, particularly the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Like the IAEA, Australian policy encompasses the light and dark sides, the binary nature, of nuclear technology. ‘Peaceful’ nuclear technology is to be made available to those nations that obey Australian and international non-proliferation rules, together with the fissile materials and hardware required to harness it. But nuclear technology directed towards the manufacture of weapons and their means of delivery is to be prevented, and sanctions applied where it occurs.

To these apparently straightforward ground rules Australia has added some self-imposed restrictions. One is that censure of the pursuit of the nuclear weapons option does not extend to the activities of Australia’s friends, the United States and the United Kingdom, and only occasionally to those of the other ‘recognised’ nuclear powers: Russia, France and China. Australian diplomacy has been and remains confined in a way that is seldom articulated and even sometimes denied. It opposes the horizontal rather than the vertical spread of nuclear weapons. Thus when states such as India or Pakistan change the nuclear status quo and demonstrate their acquisition of nuclear weapons, Australia is heavily censorious. And when North Korea, or Iraq or Iran, move towards developing their nuclear weapons, Australia is among the first to condemn them.

When however the internationally recognised Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) increase or refine their own nuclear arsenals, Australian policy has in the main been silent, except when public anger triggered some fiery attacks against the French. Even with France however, Australian diplomacy has been directed at only one aspect of weapons development: testing above ground (or more accurately above water) in the Pacific in the 1960s and 1970s, and the continuation of such testing underground, also in the Pacific, up until 1995. There was a flare-up in Australian public indignation over France’s criminal destruction of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985, and over France’s final series of tests in 1995. When these tests concluded, so did Australian official and public indignation.

More significant NWS proliferation activities such as Chinese ballistic missile testing and exporting, the launch of a fourth British Trident submarine, and massive research and development of new kinds of nuclear weapons in the United States, have been met with indifference and unconcern both by Australian governments and opposition parties alike. In particular, despite frequent claims that Australia is a leader in the international nuclear non-proliferation movement, Australian governments express little concern that such activities contravene the spirit and intention of Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that they could undermine the undertaking of non-nuclear-weapons states not to acquire nuclear weapons of their own.

I am particularly concerned about how the Australian foreign service has contributed towards this lack of concern, and appears not to have advised ministers of the need to take a stand against it. It is true that the politicisation of diplomats and other commonwealth public servants began in the 1980s under the Hawke government, and continued under Keating. But my experience is that particularly since John Howard became Prime Minister in 1996, Australian diplomats have been cowed into suspending their critical faculties about this and many other crucial strategic issues.

I recall in October 2002 calling on one of the most senior officers in DFAT responsible for nuclear and disarmament matters. I wanted to find out what Australia’s responses had been to a series of policy decisions by President George W. Bush that had the effect of degrading the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The atmosphere was strained. The officer was defensive and less than frank in his responses to my questions, even though I had provided him with a written list in advance. He did not want to be named or quoted. A junior officer sat throughout the meeting furiously taking notes on all that we said. My interlocutor dismissed my concerns that the Bush Administration might be walking away from American commitment to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty as ‘whacky’. I left the meeting without a clear picture of government policy on any of the issues I had raised.

Australia tends to oppose what its nuclear diplomatic establishment regards as ‘extreme’, ‘naive’, or ‘impractical’ disarmament positions. These have included invitations from small and middle powers to the established Nuclear Weapons States to abolish their nuclear arsenals, or attempts to seek through international courts the outlawing of all nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.

This book examines four realities underlying these Australian positions. One has been an abundance of uranium deposits, and the commercial pressure from the Australian mining industry to turn it into a substantial export earner. Related to this, successive Australian governments, driven by a concerned electorate, have moved to make such exports ‘responsible’, by surrounding them with comprehensive bilateral and international safeguards so that Australia is not, and cannot be seen to be, a potential contributor to nuclear weapons proliferation.

A second reality, persistent throughout Australian history, has been the reliance on great and powerful friends for defence. Although national self-confidence has grown, with official claims that Australia can look after itself against most regional threats, psychological and latterly political dependence on the alliance with the United States remains strong. Many Australians take comfort from the status of the United States as the world’s remaining superpower. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of Australia’s disarmament ambassadors about the desirability of nuclear disarmament, they and their departmental directors in Canberra have been careful to stay within the parameters of the alliance. Nor were the Keating or Howard governments, advised by their Defence and DFAT officials, swayed by international condemnation of United States plans to develop national and regional missile defence shields. Such plans are seen as ‘justifiable’, and as consistent with ‘the national interest’, rather than as incentives for destabilising regional proliferation. Whether a future Labor Government will have a different policy is far from certain.

A third reality has been the influence of nuclear scientists on Australian nuclear policy. Encouraged by the early nuclear knights, Sir Mark Oliphant, Sir Philip Baxter and Sir Ernest Titterton, the AAEC had plans in the 1950s and 1960s for the acquisition of atomic bombs and the means of delivering them. As chairman of the AAEC, Baxter was assisted in developing these plans by an almost wilful ignorance on the part of Australian politicians and ministers about what he was doing. ANSTO, the AAEC’s successor, claims that its nuclear research is focused entirely on peaceful applications. But the habit of autocracy and secrecy dies hard. There is a lack of transparency about the possible applications of the new research reactor being constructed at ANSTO’s research complex at Lucas Heights in New South Wales. ANSTO is also less than candid about what will happen to irradiated fuel rods from the reactor, and the long-lived radio-toxic wastes that will occur if they are reprocessed.

Brian Martin’s observations about the dependence of government on scientific experts are particularly relevant.

Governments choose and justify policies of technical change by reference to expert technical opinion expressed by their scientific advisers and supporters. [This] provides governments with a conclusive answer, namely that experts have insisted that a technical initiative is necessary, economically sound, and safe. The answer fits well with the self-esteem of scientists – that experts can be trusted, since theirs is a precise and self-contained discipline. Both groups share the supplementary advantage that direct consideration of moral or social assessments is evaded – a process that could be damaging to one and threatening to the other. ¹

A fourth reality is the attitude of the Australian people towards nuclear issues. They are as divided and changeable about them as the people of any other educated and articulate democracy. Thus, support in Australia in the early 1960s for the acquisition of a nuclear deterrent changed to general abhorrence of most aspects of nuclear technology a decade later. General opposition to the export of uranium in the early 1980s changed to acceptance of exports, with safeguards, a few years later. Tolerance of British nuclear weapons testing on Australian soil in the 1950s and 1960s gave way, belatedly, to strong opposition against any nuclear activity likely to pollute the environment, including plans for a repository for the permanent disposal of high-level international nuclear waste. Such consensual changes will continue to occur, although it is unlikely that they will alter the syndrome of psychological dependence on the United States that afflicts Australian politicians and the public servants who advise them.

When he came to office in 2001, President George W. Bush radically changed American nuclear doctrine. He abrogated the 1972 ABM treaty with Russia and resurrected and expanded former President Reagan’s strategic defence initiative to include national and theatre missile defence systems. He ordered United States military forces to target for possible nuclear attack several countries untargeted before, five of which are non-nuclear-weapons states (NNWS). His military planners actively and publicly canvassed the use of a new generation of ‘small’ nuclear weapons, notably against Iraq. He goaded North Korea into a policy of nuclear brinksmanship by calculated inaction on the 1994 Framework Arrangements to provide it with nuclear power, labelling it a member of the Axis of Evil, and by refusing to talk directly to its leadership.

All of these developments degraded the nuclear non-proliferation regime and the credibility of the NPT. They also cut across Australian regional defence interests by raising fears of an accelerated nuclear weapons acquisition program by China, and/or the acquisition of nuclear weapons by North Korea, South Korea and Japan. Yet neither Howard nor his Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, nor any other member of Howard’s cabinet expressed the slightest concern. This goes beyond a simple continuation of Australian support for the United States. I doubt that any of his predecessors would have shown such insouciance. His pretensions to be America’s deputy sheriff in the region were insensitive enough. His assertion that Australia would initiate military action on the soil of its neighbours to prevent terrorists from landing in Australia was worse. Equally appalling has been Howard’s willingness to allow Australia’s earlier nuclear non-proliferation credentials to be undermined. He has supported most of Bush’s nuclear initiatives, despite the likelihood that these will eventually degrade international support for the NPT. He has shown neither concern nor understanding of the proliferation dangers that will accompany installation of theatre missile defence systems in North-East and South-East Asia. As a result, Australia no longer has a credible voice on disarmament or non-proliferation issues at the United Nations or in its agencies.

This is unfortunate because the world needs reliable international safeguards against the development and use of nuclear weapons more than ever. Since the horrific events in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, the United States, and increasingly its allies, have been haunted by several grim possibilities. Al Qaeda may have acquired fissionable material and may be making, or may already have made, one or several nuclear devices. Indications from documents captured in Afghanistan in 2002 show that the organisation has both the knowledge to do this, and the fierce determination to use such weapons in their operations. Alternatively, Al Qaeda, or one of its associate organisations like the South-East Asian regional Islamic fundamentalist group Jema’a Islamiya, may be planning to irradiate infidel countries with ‘dirty’ bombs: conventional bombs encased in radioactive materials. They may be planning to attack nuclear power stations with conventional or nuclear explosives. Howard’s decision to join the United States in the unlawful invasion of Iraq in March 2003 certainly raised Australia’s profile as a target for such terrorist attacks.

* * *

I begin the book with an examination of two Australians who shaped early nuclear policies in this country: the physicist Mark Oliphant and the Labor Foreign Minister H. V. Evatt. I trace the emergence of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of External Affairs as key players in shaping Australia’s nuclear activities during the first and second decades of the Cold War. There were tensions between them, and fierce debate about whether Australia could or should acquire its own nuclear weapons. I then examine the growing official realisation that Australia has enormous reserves of uranium in its mineral inventory, and how this awareness influenced nuclear policies during the 1960s and 1970s.

I consider the policies of Australia’s two major political parties towards aspects of nuclear technology — few though their differences are — and their respective contributions towards the development of an Australian safeguards system. I endeavour to show how successive governments have sought, through safeguards, to reassure a nervous electorate that exported Australian uranium cannot be used to make nuclear weapons.

The scope of the study runs from the domestic and foreign nuclear policies of Australian governments from Curtin and Chifley through to Howard, that is, from 1940 to 2002. Much excellent scholarly material is available on many aspects of the subject, and I have gratefully and without reservation drawn upon it. I mention in particular the comparatively recent works of Alice Cawte, Roger Cross, Clarence Hardy, Jacques Hyams, Gavin Mudd, Wayne Reynolds and Jim Walsh, as well as earlier studies by Des Ball, Stewart Cockburn, David Ellyard, Tony Gray, Margaret Gowing, John Newhouse, Alan Renouf, Anthony Sampson and Jim Spigelman. Most of these are confined to particular and very diverse aspects of the nuclear story. For example, Cross covers the problem of radioactive fallout from British nuclear tests in Australia, and Mudd the appalling safety record of uranium mining in Australia. Grey describes the bureaucratic opposition he faced in trying to launch his Pancontinental mining operations in the Northern Territory. Hardy’s work is a history of the AAEC, and Hyams and Reynolds each wrote accounts of Australia’s attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. (Reynolds’s account is particularly comprehensive.) Cockburn and Ellyard wrote a diverting biography of the Australian nuclear physicist, Mark Oliphant. Gowing provided a study of Britain’s post-war struggle to develop nuclear energy and weapons despite American obstructions — a useful benchmark to measure what Australia went through. Pringle and Spigelman’s The Nuclear Barons covers broader ground, tracing the evolution of nuclear technology in all the major nuclear countries of the world.

If my book has a parallel, it is with Alice Cawte’s Atomic Australia. She describes how nuclear technology, proceeding hand in hand with uranium mining, developed in Australia from 1944 to 1990. I differ from her in three important respects. First, my book examines the Australian story from the perspective of the commonwealth public servants who helped develop nuclear policies and negotiated their realisation with other countries. It provides an insider’s point of view. Second, it takes the story beyond the conclusion of Cawte’s account at the beginning of the 1990s through another decade, through the election of the Howard Government, and on to the present day, perilous and uncertain as that is. Third, it shows how Australian politicians and nuclear diplomats have throughout the process allowed themselves to be almost completely circumscribed by United States policies and pressures, both real and imaginary.

I have sought to analyse and present all this material accurately, and in a way that does justice to the officials who debated and formulated it. Some of them will not agree with my line of argument or my conclusions. But that is my call, and I take full responsibility for it.

I should also declare my position on the nuclear industry and Australia’s part in it. During my time as an Australian diplomat, and when I began researching this book, I held a fairly optimistic view about the role Australia could play. I felt that in the history of its international trade, Australia has usually taken the easy way of exporting unprocessed or semi-processed minerals and agricultural products. It did the same with uranium, being content to refine uranium ore to uranium oxide, commonly known as yellowcake, but neither to convert or enrich it. Wouldn’t it have been imaginative and responsible, I thought, if we could develop the whole nuclear fuel cycle in Australia, enrich our uranium, fabricate it into fuel rods for power reactors, lease these to power companies in other countries, take them back as spent rods, reprocess them and safely dispose of the radioactive wastes in Australia? By doing so, we would on the one hand have created an enormously valuable industry, and on the other, a responsible and foolproof way of preventing the diversion of Australian uranium into nuclear weapons. A few Australian politicians, scientists and public servants have had the same idea, notably Whitlam’s Minister for Minerals and Energy, R. F. X. Connor, in 1973–5.

After years of consideration, I have abandoned such views. Given the sensitivity of the Australian electorate towards the environment and its suspicion of nuclear matters, especially the disposal of radioactive wastes, no political party could persuade their constituents to support enrichment or reprocessing plants. And given what I fear will become a growing propensity by countries to walk away from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and develop nuclear weapons of their own, leasing fuel rods will no longer guarantee their immunity from diversion. Meanwhile, two immutable facts remain. So-called peaceful nuclear technology can all too easily be converted into making nuclear weapons. And despite claims by the nuclear industry to the contrary, there is as yet no proven method to isolate nuclear wastes from the biosphere for the time required for them to decay to safe radioactive levels. The ecological effects of storing large quantities of radioactive waste in Australia could be disastrous.

It follows that I do not support the continuation of the uranium mining industry in Australia. I believe there is every likelihood that at least a small fraction of some of the thousands of tonnes of Australian uranium already exported has found its way into nuclear weapons programs. (It only takes a fraction.) And despite some improvements to the IAEA inspection process, international and Australian safeguards remain too weak to prevent further diversions to weapons programs. The safest course would be to leave Australian uranium in the ground where it can do no harm.

Meanwhile, since 11 September 2001, the world has become a more unpredictable and dangerous place. An increasing number of nations and sub-national groups are likely to want to acquire nuclear weapons. My hope is that the book will throw new light on the nuclear industry, and the role or roles that Australia has played in its development. The more we know, the more we will be able to pressure our politicians to take responsible positions, and the better we will be able to shape our country as a responsible international citizen. They do not take responsible positions by uncritically following and supporting the nuclear weapons research and war-fighting policies of President George W. Bush.

chapter one

Beginnings

THE WORLD CHANGED with the successful detonation of a plutonium bomb on top of a 30-metre metal tower at the Alamogordo bombing range in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. The nuclear age had begun.

When the