Preparations are already underway at the United Nations for the 2026 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which was originally signed in 1968. Many expect a contentious event. Some countries are having second thoughts about the principle of non-proliferation because they wonder if Russia would have invaded Ukraine in 2022 if the latter had kept the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. Such counterfactuals, in turn, have renewed others’ fears of nuclear proliferation.

These concerns are not new, of course. In my memoir, A Life in the American Century, I revisit an equally contentious period in the 1970s, when I was in charge of US President Jimmy Carter’s non-proliferation policy. Following the 1973 oil crisis, the conventional wisdom was that the world was running out of oil and needed to turn to nuclear energy. However, it was also widely—and wrongly—believed that the world was running out of uranium and therefore would have to rely instead on reprocessed plutonium (a byproduct of the uranium used in nuclear reactors).

According to some forecasts at the time, as many as 46 countries would be reprocessing plutonium by 1990. The problem, of course, was that plutonium is a weapons-usable material. A world awash in the trade of plutonium would be at much greater risk of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism.

In 1974, India became the first country beyond the five listed in the NPT (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the US) to launch what it euphemistically called a ’peaceful nuclear explosion’. It used plutonium reprocessed from American and Canadian uranium, which had been provided on the condition that it would be used for peaceful purposes only. France then agreed to sell a plutonium-reprocessing plant to Pakistan, whose prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had said the country would eat grass before letting India develop a nuclear monopoly in South Asia. Meanwhile, in Latin America, Germany was selling a uranium-enrichment plant to Brazil, and Argentina was exploring its options for using plutonium. With other countries quietly doing the same, an incipient nuclear arms race was developing.

A decade earlier, US President John F. Kennedy had warned that the world would have 25 nuclear powers by the 1970s. Though the NPT was supposed to avert that scenario, it was beginning to look like his prognosis might come true. But Carter (who had experience as a nuclear engineer in the Navy) was determined to prevent this when he arrived in the White House.

For my part, I had recently served on a Ford Foundation and Mitre Corporation commission on nuclear energy and non-proliferation—which included multiple eventual members of the Carter administration. While many feared that the world was headed for a plutonium economy and the spread of nuclear weapons, the Ford-Mitre Report called this conventional wisdom into question and argued that the safest way to use nuclear energy was with an internationally safeguarded ‘once through’ fuel cycle that would leave the plutonium locked up in the stored spent fuel.

Carter accepted our report when we met with him in the White House. But our recommendation was wildly unpopular with the American nuclear industry and with senators from western and southern states whose facilities would be closed. It was also anathema to allies such as France, Germany, and Japan, whose energy strategies (and exports) would be undercut.

My job, when I entered the administration, was to implement Carter’s policy, which resulted in heavy criticism from all the groups mentioned above. As an academic, it was a new experience to see my name in critical editorials and headlines, or to be hauled before a Senate committee for a hostile grilling. When you are constantly being told you’re wrong, it is sometimes hard to remember that you might be right!

The question was how to break through the conventional wisdom that was driving the world toward a plutonium economy. We invited other countries to join an international nuclear fuel cycle evaluation (INFCE) so that we could examine subjects such as the availability of uranium supplies and the ability to safeguard plutonium. The INFCE was launched at a large conference in Washington DC, in 1977, and its committees and working groups then met for the next two years. It thus played a central role in Carter’s strategy to buy time, to slow things down, and to develop transnational webs of knowledge about the true costs and alternatives to what the nuclear industry regarded as the immutable nature of the nuclear-fuel cycle.

Over those two years, the INFCE did much to advance these objectives. The major nuclear-supplier countries met in London in 1977, and agreed on guidelines to ’exercise restraint’ in the export of sensitive nuclear facilities. Soon thereafter, France and Germany suspended their exports of controversial facilities.

Where does nuclear non-proliferation stand today? The good news is that there are only nine countries with nuclear weapons, compared to the two dozen that Kennedy predicted by the 1970s. Moreover, the NPT has 189 parties and is one of the few arms-control agreements that the major powers still observe. The Nuclear Suppliers Group guidelines still hold, and while a few countries engage in reprocessing, the world is not hurtling toward a fragile plutonium economy.

The bad news is that North Korea has abandoned its commitments under the NPT. It has achieved six nuclear explosions since 2006, and Kim Jong-un frequently rattles his nuclear saber in a destabilising manner. In the Middle East, Iran has developed facilities for enriching weapons-grade uranium, and it is fast approaching the threshold of becoming the 10th nuclear-weapons state. Many observers fear that if it does so, it may precipitate a proliferation cascade across the region, with Saudi Arabia quickly following suit.

These are worrying developments. As my experience in the 1970s shows, it is when conditions seem especially dire that efforts to slow the spread of nuclear weapons must be maintained. Otherwise, the world will become a far more dangerous place.

The Labor party avoided an open stoush over nuclear weapons at last week’s national conference. But it would be wrong to imagine the issue’s gone away. Nuclear weapons are becoming more prominent in a more contested world. Australians, like others, are naturally apprehensive about the future. The government must become more articulate in helping Australians to understand a more complex nuclear order, in explaining why US extended nuclear deterrence still matters, and in defending the particular contributions that Australia makes to global and regional security as well as its own. At a time when US allies are being asked to carry more strategic weight, we should probably expect our alliance burdens to increase, including in relation to nuclear deterrence.

Geraldine Doogue’s astute interview with Melissa Parke, the new executive director of ICAN (the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) on Radio National’s Saturday Extra program last week, gives a sense of the key issues in play. Many of those issues crystallise around the question of whether Australia should sign and ratify the Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Doogue’s best question was almost her last: what would joining the TPNW mean for Australia? Parke went out of her way to minimise the consequences. It would mean that we would cease to claim protection under the US nuclear umbrella. And it would mean ensuring that the joint defence facilities didn’t have a nuclear role and that the B-52s rotating through Tindal were not nuclear capable. Parke said she didn’t see any ‘impediments’ to such actions.

Let’s start with our rejection of extended nuclear deterrence. Badmouthing a doctrine central to the defence policies of dozens of countries worldwide would not be a good look—not least because many of those countries are close strategic partners, such as Japan, South Korea, and the European members of NATO. ICAN is fond of labelling the non-nuclear states which benefit from extended nuclear deterrence as ‘weasel states’, claiming they want both to flaunt their anti-nuclear credentials and to huddle under the US nuclear umbrella during crises. But ICAN should be careful what it wishes for. A collapse of current extended deterrence arrangements would probably spur a wave of nuclear proliferation unseen since the early days of the Cold War.

Similarly, and as I’ve argued before, countries don’t usually get to choose which parts of an ally’s arsenal they are willing to see deployed in their defence. New Zealand tried to play that game, specifically requesting a port visit by an Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate. Washington wasn’t willing to play ball. Sure, that was 1985. But go and read Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review: nuclear deterrence is inseparable even from conventional deployments.

Let’s look at the joint facilities, plus the Australian-run Harold Holt Naval Communications Station (still informally known as North West Cape). There is now a distinct set of parliamentary statements which should form the starting point for anyone interested in what the joint facilities do (see here and here). But one point usually underdone in the official record is the list of beneficiaries—that is, for whom do the joint facilities facilitate? Most Australians probably think of them in relation to the ANZUS treaty, and therefore see their role as primarily one affecting ourselves plus American capabilities in our near region. That’s wrong.

The joint facilities are part of the command and control of US forces worldwide. Limitations on their role have global consequences and not merely local ones. To deny them a nuclear role in ANZUS is also to deny them a nuclear role in US defence strategy and every other US alliance. Does anyone seriously imagine that ballistic missile launch detection, for example, is of interest to Washington only when ANZUS parties are involved?

The North West Cape facility provides another example. The facility houses a very low frequency (VLF) transmitter, capable of transmitting messages to submarines without requiring them to deploy an antenna on the surface. It is one part of a global communication system. Readers would be forgiven for thinking that transfer of the facility to Australian ownership back in the 1990s implies that we are now its main users. We aren’t. The station provides four communication channels. Three of those are for American use, one for Australian. Under the user-pays principle, Washington picks up 75% of the running costs of the station. And the US currently uses the facility under a 25-year lease, which expires in 2033.

Now, how are we going to ensure that the station doesn’t support US ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) operating within its transmission footprint? The footprint is large: although actual signal range varies in accordance with atmospheric and sea conditions, the transmitter is credited with a nominal range of 5,000 kms. And we know that US SSBNs do, on occasion, move through the Indian Ocean—the USS West Virginia made a port call at Diego Garcia last October. But the idea itself is preposterous. Secure second-strike capabilities are a critical element in deterrence stability. Why would we want to disrupt reliable communications to our ally’s submarines?

So, where does that leave us? At the moment the Labor government is pretending that the TPNW merits Australia’s support and that the main issue in question is one of timing. More strategically-minded individuals acknowledge that the treaty in its current form probably won’t ever get up: the verification provisions are too weak, the treaty has no support from any nuclear-armed state, and Australia’s alliance commitments get in the way of signature and ratification.

But the principal hurdle to our joining the TPNW is that the treaty sees nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence as the key strategic problem rather than the relationships between states. For decades, Australian governments of both political persuasions have supported the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. True, some individuals within those governments have argued that deterrence is a mere way station on the road to nuclear disarmament, but that’s essentially been an argument over the definition of ‘mere’.

The government’s reluctance to join the TPNW does not mean it is opposed to nuclear disarmament. It’s just that real nuclear disarmament is going to be hard. The G7 summit in Hiroshima earlier this year gave a good indication of just how hard: the leaders at the summit reaffirmed their commitment ‘to the ultimate goal of a world without nuclear weapons with undiminished security for all, achieved through a realistic, pragmatic and responsible approach’. Five adjectives there, all doing some heavy lifting.

Nuclear disarmament is not close. Indeed, we’re headed in the opposite direction—towards a more complex and competitive world where nuclear weapons play larger roles than they have in the past. The government needs to acknowledge that changing nuclear reality, and to explain to Australians that while our goals—principally the building of a stable nuclear order which minimises the prospects of actual use—have not changed, we’ll probably need to pursue those goals in a more turbulent world. Still, even in that world of heightened risk, US extended nuclear deterrence has a critical role to play; and it will pay us to work with our ally, not against it.