Tag Archive for: nuclear policy

China’s secretive build-up presents Trump with a difficult nuclear challenge

After disappearing from debate over the last couple of decades, nuclear politics are set to return with a vengeance. China has begun an unexpected and secretive nuclear force buildup. This presents a major challenge for Donald Trump’s new administration, which will want to maintain US nuclear advantage over China.

China’s shifting nuclear posture, the secrecy surrounding it, and the low likelihood of Chinese cooperation on arms control threaten stability in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

We have heard little from China’s official sources about its plans for nuclear expansion. The likelihood is that China is seeking parity with the US, driven by political drive for status or possibly by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ego. If so, it would be just one of many instances of China pushing for parity in foreign and security policy. It may also be part of a general preparation for any future conflict, which should alarm not just Trump but also other leaders in the Indo-Pacific.

No other reasons make much sense. There is little deterrence logic to China’s nuclear expansion. While some scholars have suggested that China is responding to the US’s offensive and defensive capabilities, this is not particularly convincing, given that the US has not expanded its nuclear arsenal in decades. China’s expansion is more likely the result of China’s ambitions.

Other reasons for the expansion, such as empire-building pressure from within the military establishment, are also unconvincing. Strategic forces are under tight political control in China: decisions definitely flow from the top down. Anyway, such an explanation also fails to explain why a change is happening now. There is little indication that military is more influential (the evidence suggests the opposite) or that its views on nuclear force sizing have changed.

Whatever the reason, China’s nuclear expansion itself is considerable and its end state is unclear.

If this expansion is driven by the pursuit of parity, the Trump administration will face an uphill battle on nuclear arms control with China. Beijing has faced repeated calls for it to join nuclear arms control agreements, all of which it rejected on the basis that its nuclear forces are much more modest than those of other nuclear states. If China is pursuing parity, it is unlikely to be interested in nuclear arms control for a while.

Territorial tensions in the Indo-Pacific and the question of Taiwan are already raising temperatures. Adding nuclear competition to the mix only raises them further.

Until now, China’s no-first-use policy and the nuclear imbalance between the US and China have been some source of comfort. But there have been indications that China may adopt a launch-on-warning posture, meaning it might fire before suffering confirmed nuclear hits. This departure, combined with the pursuit of parity, will make crises much more dangerous.

China’s secrecy should be viewed as a threat to all nations. US-Russia nuclear arms control agreements have meant that the US could justifiably concentrate on the threat posed by Iranian and North Korean proliferation. Meanwhile, China—already the second biggest military in the world—has covertly gone down the path of nuclear proliferation.

While some refer to Trump’s powers of distraction, Beijing has become a master magician: it has sold a lie to the Indo-Pacific that Australia and its AUKUS partners are nuclear proliferators. As a result, Australia has had to defend nuclear propulsion while China rapidly and secretly expands its nuclear weaponry.

China claims to want only equality but is actually seeking superiority across the military and technology sectors, including in the nuclear sector. Reaching arms control is likely to be more difficult in the context of a dissatisfied and difficult-to-satisfy power.

Even if Beijing engages in arms control arrangements, its nuclear history should make us question its commitment. While the US and Russia cooperated on non-proliferation, China has supported nuclear proliferation in Pakistan, North Korea and possibly even Iran. This is at least partly responsible for the growing interest in nuclear weapons in South Korea and Japan.

Beijing’s wider strategic behaviour is also indirectly encouraging nuclear proliferation among its neighbours, by trying to expel the US from the region and raising their fears that they will be left alone in facing China. In those frightening circumstances, going nuclear may seem more desirable to them, if not urgently necessary.

The growing Chinese nuclear threat should be an important consideration for the Trump administration, as well as for Australia and the Indo-Pacific. Regional allies, such as Australia and Japan, should make China’s nuclear threat a key agenda item with the US, starting with the Quad meeting reportedly happening next week.

The US Nuclear Posture Review: all quiet on the eastern front

The Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) has received mixed reviews. Some see it as a dramatic move away from a long-term US policy of reducing the size and salience of its nuclear arsenal, and a commitment to a long-term nuclear competition—the German foreign minister calls it an ‘arms race’—with Russia and China. Others insist that the document represents a throwback to the days of the Cold War—and we can count the Chinese foreign ministry among the supporters of that line. The Washington Post’s editorial board decries Trump’s request for even more nuclear weapons as ‘flawed overkill’. And many argue that Trump is lowering the threshold for nuclear use, some claiming that new low-yield nuclear warheads constitute a ‘gateway drug for nuclear war’.

In contrast, administration officials, when launching the document, went out of their way to emphasise the elements of continuity between this NPR and its predecessors. The Obama administration’s negative security assurance—that the US won’t use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states that are in good standing with their NPT obligations—remains unchanged. The threshold for US nuclear use, similarly, remains unchanged. The bulk of the strategic modernisation program is the one sketched out in the final years of the Obama presidency. Even the aggregate size of the arsenal seems unlikely to grow much. The new low-yield warhead for the Trident D5 SLBM will simply entail modifying a small number of existing warheads. And, at this stage, the proposed new sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM) is no more than a gleam in the eye—it’s entirely possible that it’ll never be built.

But, from Australia’s point of view, it’s worth looking more closely at what, if anything, has actually changed in terms of ‘tailoring’ US assurances to its allies and partners in Asia. That means having a look at pages 36–37 of the NPR, in particular at the section called ‘Strengthening deterrence in Asia’.

To anyone reading that text, it’s apparent there’s less change in this NPR than some are suggesting. Much of the section is devoted to the several ways in which the Asian strategic environment is different from the European one, and therefore that the US nuclear posture in the two regions is also different. In Asia, there are no forward-deployed nuclear weapons, nor any dual-capable aircraft of the sort based in Europe under existing NATO arrangements. As the NPR states, ‘the United States currently relies almost exclusively on its strategic nuclear capabilities for nuclear deterrence and the assurance of allies in the region’.

The US commits itself to doing four things ‘to maintain credible extended deterrence and thus effective assurance in this complex environment’:

  • ‘Maintain integrated, flexible, and adaptable US nuclear and non-nuclear capabilities;
  • Continue to invest in missile defenses against North Korean missile threats;
  • Demonstrate with allies our joint commitment to deterrence through military exercises; and,
  • Work with our allies to improve our shared understanding of nuclear dangers and corresponding deterrence requirements through continued consultative dialogues.’

If we look closely at that list, there’s not a whole lot that’s new in terms of US extended nuclear deterrence and assurance in Asia. The frequency of words like ‘maintain’, ‘continue’ and ‘demonstrate’ underline that simple fact.

Ah, but what about the proposed SLCM, you might ask? Well, that’s a story in itself. Yes, the NPR accepts that the old Tomahawk nuclear-armed SLCMs contributed ‘for decades … to deterrence and the assurance of allies, particularly in Asia’. And it announces a decision ‘to immediately begin efforts to restore this capability by initiating a capability study leading to an Analysis of Alternatives for the rapid development of a modern SLCM’. The language is forbiddingly bureaucratic, true, but the reader is naturally inclined to see a returning SLCM capability as an enhancement of the US posture in Asia.

Later in the document—pages 54–55—the proposed new SLCM is depicted wearing three strategic hats: it’s needed to provide a ‘non-strategic regional presence’; it’s an ‘assured response capability’; and it’s an ‘I[ntermediate-range] N[uclear] F[orces]-Treaty compliant response to Russia’s continuing Treaty violation’. Subsequently, and unhelpfully, the NPR abruptly portrays the US ‘pursuit of a SLCM’ (emphasis added) as an arms-control bargaining chip, something that may spur Moscow into returning to compliance with its arms-control obligations. The text even draws a direct comparison between the proposed SLCM and the Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles that NATO built and deployed in the early 1980s, only to trade away in the INF Treaty.

For US allies in Asia, the proposed new SLCM seems unlikely to be the magic bullet that signals a re-energised US nuclear posture in Asia. Indeed, taking the NPR at face value, not much looks likely to change in terms of US extended deterrence and assurance in the region. Rather than going too far, the NPR may not go far enough to ease allied anxieties about the durability and credibility of the US nuclear umbrella. And that means, around the region, some will still press the case for indigenous nuclear arsenals.

The bomb for Australia? (Part 2)

As we consider whether Australia should obtain nuclear weapons, we need to ask who might subject us to nuclear blackmail. In the authoritative statement of China’s strategic vision in President Xi Jinping’s address to the 19th Communist Party Congress on 18 October last year, the three core elements of China’s vision of the new world order were parity in China–US relations; growing Chinese influence in writing the underlying rules and in designing and controlling the governance institutions of the global order; and more assertive Chinese diplomacy in that new international system.

The world therefore should prepare for a surge in Chinese international policy activism. It seems reasonable to conclude that—regardless of who may be at fault in initiating hostilities—the possibility of a future conflict with China can’t be ruled out. At the same time, Paul Dibb and Richard Brabin-Smith argue in their recent ASPI report, Australia’s management of strategic risk in the new era, that ‘it’s difficult to imagine any other major power … attacking Australia’. And there, for ASPI’s Andrew Davies, lies the rub, because ‘China is a nuclear power’.

But it does not follow that Australia must prepare for Chinese military or political use of nuclear weapons. For eight years or so, China has indulged in bellicose rhetoric and engaged in assertive behaviour against several neighbours, stoking their fears about its motives and intentions with growing capabilities. That said, of the nine leaders with fingers on the nuclear button, whose quality of nuclear decision-making is likely to be more responsible than Xi Jinping’s? Certainly not those who boast about the size of their button.

China’s nuclear stockpile is below 300, compared to nearly 7,000 warheads each for Russia and the US. Fan Jishe argues in an APLN policy brief that—notwithstanding its massively growing economy—China has consciously refrained from engaging in a sprint to nuclear parity with Russia and the US because its governing doctrine envisages only one role for nuclear weapons: to prevent nuclear blackmail.

Despite the total transformation in China’s economic fortunes since the 1960s, its nuclear doctrine, acquisitions program, and deployment and employment policies have remained essentially unchanged. It’s the only one of the nine possessor countries to be committed fully to an unequivocal no-first-use policy. Conversely, of the nuclear nine, only the US can be suspected of harbouring designs to shift from mutual vulnerability (the basis of deterrence) to nuclear primacy (which would enable use without fear of nuclear retaliation).

Of course, we can’t simply rely on the word of a potential adversary. But there are two further considerations. On the one hand, the international reputational cost to the next country to use nuclear weapons would be very high for breaking the global taboo. The cost would be even greater for a power that has a firm no-first-use policy. And the costs have been raised still higher by the new UN nuclear ban treaty. The treaty’s primary impact is intended to be normative, not operational, as I argue in the current issue of The Washington Quarterly, through moral stigmatisation and legal prohibition. It specifically prohibits the threat of use, along with banning any actual use of nuclear weapons. Instead of welcoming the treaty as a contribution to our national security, Australia has opposed and rejected it. On the other hand, an Australia reduced to a post-nuclear-attack atomic wasteland would be of no commercial, strategic or any other value to China, so the reputational cost would come with no compensating material or geopolitical gain.

According to a careful statistical analysis of 210 militarised ‘compellent threats’ from 1918 to 2001 by Todd Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann (Nuclear weapons and coercive diplomacy, 2017), nuclear powers succeeded in just 10 of them, and even then the presence of nuclear weapons may not have been the decisive factor. Non-nuclear states were more successful at coercion than nuclear-armed states (32% of cases versus 20%) and nuclear monopoly gave no more assurance of success. In a different dataset of 348 territorial disputes between 1919 and 1995, possessor and non-possessor states won territorial concessions at almost the same rate (35% and 36%, respectively).

Lacking compellent utility against non-nuclear adversaries, nuclear weapons can’t be used for defence against nuclear-armed rivals either. Their mutual vulnerability to second-strike retaliatory action is so robust for the foreseeable future that any escalation through the nuclear threshold really would amount to mutual national suicide.

The only purpose and role of nuclear weapons, therefore, is mutual deterrence. They are credited with having preserved the long peace among the major powers in the north Atlantic (the argument that holds NATO to have been the world’s most successful peace movement) and deterred attack by the conventionally superior Soviet forces throughout the Cold War. Yet that too is debatable. How do we assess the relative weight and potency of nuclear weapons, West European integration and West European democratisation as explanatory variables in that long peace? No evidence exists to show that either side had the intention to attack the other at any time during the Cold War but was deterred from doing so because of the other side’s nuclear weapons.

All is not lost in Australia’s fight against nuclear weapons

Nuclear non-proliferation can be assessed from several different perspectives that are characterised by polarising and even contradictory views. Very few topics divide international opinion as much as the future of nuclear non-proliferation. On the one hand, there’s general global consensus aimed at disarmament, governed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) since 1968. On the other hand, there are those who believe that nuclear deterrence provides the best form of defence. The recent draft UN treaty to ban all nuclear weapons brings the former one step closer, but it has also caused some controversy because of the absence of certain nations, including Australia.

The ANU’s Professor Ramesh Thakur, who also serves as the United Nations Association of Australia’s Goodwill Ambassador for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, argues that Australia should have at least made an appearance at the negotiating table. Even if, as he suggests, Australia is reluctant to be involved in gesture politics, it should have sent a delegation. That would have afforded the government an opportunity to listen to the current thinking and ideas coming from the 124 countries that were involved. Moreover, Australia would have been under no obligation to participate or vote on the treaty (as shown by Singapore, which abstained). Australia’s participation would have demonstrated the country’s commitment to its longstanding nuclear non-proliferation policy.

However, the fact that Australia didn’t participate in the negotiations in New York doesn’t imply that the government has abandoned its commitment to nuclear issues or, indeed, to nuclear non-proliferation. Australia’s absence from the negotiating table also isn’t an indication that it aims to supply uranium to anyone who wants it. Australia holds a strong position in the nuclear regime, which includes monitoring and regulating the military and civilian use of nuclear material. Australia’s past commitment to the nuclear non-proliferation regime, along with abundant uranium reserves and export potential, gives it leverage to influence the behaviour of other states. That should be held in high regard. In fact, Australia has long used its position in the nuclear regime to ensure that member states of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and signatories to the NPT adhere to strict nuclear safeguards and promote nuclear disarmament. But, for some, that isn’t enough.

Tim Wright, the director of ICAN Asia–Pacific argues that it’s ‘an incitement to proliferate’ if Australia condemns North Korea’s nuclear-weapon program while championing the US nuclear umbrella as essential for its national security. In addition, the Australian Greens Party argues that the export of uranium is strongly linked to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and calls for Australia to cease both uranium mining and export. So why, ask ICAN and the Greens among others, does Australia champion nuclear disarmament while at the same time supplying uranium to the international market? Australia’s longstanding nuclear policy explains why that’s the case. However, let’s unpack their concerns and evaluate whether Australia’s non-participation in the draft treaty and selling of uranium will see it on the wrong side of history.

Uranium is not used just for military purposes or towards the misery of humankind, as some would believe. Such alarmist assumptions breed misinformation about this resource, and its export, enrichment and final use. A quick glance at the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office’s website demonstrates that Australian uranium can only be exported for peaceful purposes (such as medicine and civil nuclear power) and is subject to some of the strictest bilateral agreements in the international nuclear regime.

The current Australian nuclear policy stems from the basic tenets of Malcolm Fraser’s nuclear export and non-proliferation policy of 1977. That legacy has allowed successive Australian governments to use uranium exports to influence the behaviour of other states. For example, Australia was an early signatory to the NPT and one of the founding members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which seeks to prevent nuclear proliferation by controlling exports of nuclear materials.

Not only does Australia require recipients of its uranium to be covered by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, but it has also implemented fall-back safeguards if the IAEA safeguards no longer apply. In addition, no third party can gain access to Australian uranium without Australia’s prior consent. All recipient countries must be parties to the NPT (although an exception has been granted to India), and nuclear-weapon states can’t use Australian obligated nuclear material (AONM) for anything other than peaceful purposes. And Australia has further tightened its export policy by implementing an additional protocol with the IAEA as a precondition for the supply of AONM to all states. Australia is highly regarded in the international nuclear regime for insisting on such strict safeguards, even though the country’s current uranium export volumes are well behind Kazakhstan’s and Canada’s.

All things considered, it could be that Australia was misguided in not making an appearance at the UN negotiations for the draft nuclear weapons ban treaty. However, to suggest that Australia is on the wrong side of history neglects, at the very least, the leading role it has played in nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament since 1945. Australia’s decision to stay away from the negotiating table was discussed at the highest echelons of government and the security community. The debate doesn’t need to be marred by overly alarmist statements or emotive language.

Australia and the enrichment option

Kakadu National Park uranium mining Controlled Area

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has recently shown a more open-minded approach to Australia’s nuclear future. In a radio interview in South Australia in late October he speculated on the possibility of a nuclear industry in Australia:

PRIME MINISTER: On nuclear power I commend Jay Weatherill for having the Royal Commission I think it’s good that he has done that.

QUESTION: I mean he’s probably going to say yes, go ahead and create some kind of nuclear industry. What would you say?

PRIME MINISTER: I was just talking about this with the cook in the café downstairs when I was having some coffee and breakfast with Steve Marshall. As Brett the chef was saying, his view, and I think a lot of South Australians feel like this, and it is a perfectly reasonable view, is we have got the uranium. We mine it. Why don’t we process it, turn it into the fuel rods, lease it to people overseas? When they are done we bring them back and we have got stable, very stable geology in remote locations and a stable political environment. That is a business that you could well imagine here. Would we ever have a nuclear power station in Australia or like the French do, dozens of nuclear power stations? I would be a bit sceptical about that ….But playing that part in the nuclear fuel cycle I think is something that is worth looking at closely.

This looks like a cautious testing of the waters by the prime minister. Brett the chef’s left carrying the weight of the proposal, with the prime minister saying only that it’s worth looking at closely. But if Australia’s going to be working across the full nuclear fuel cycle, from the mining and milling of uranium ore—which is what we do now—to nuclear fuel fabrication, fuel leasing and the storage of spent nuclear-fuel waste, the country’s going to have a nuclear industry and not just a mining operation. Such a capability would be both a commercial and a strategic asset. And it would mark a deep-level policy shift in Australia’s nuclear identity, which since the days of Bob Hawke has consciously shunned the possibility that we might possess sensitive nuclear technologies such as uranium enrichment.

It was the Hawke government, in the balmy anti-nuclear days of the early 1980s, which shut down Australia’s research and development program into centrifuge-based uranium enrichment. That program had begun in 1965, so by the mid-1980s we were throwing away twenty years’ worth of effort. (A small R and D program in laser enrichment was subsequently closed down in the early 1990s.) The program was a casualty of Labor’s interest in a stronger position on non-proliferation and disarmament, not a victim of underperformance. Indeed, the publicly-available information suggests Australian nuclear engineers had been successful in building an experimental cascade that delivered enrichment results comparable to those being achieved at the time by Urenco.

But enrichment, of course, doesn’t merely provide fuel for nuclear reactors; it’s a critical pathway to fissile materials for nuclear weapons. Enriching the percentage of the U235 isotope in a given quantity of uranium—it’s only 0.7% in natural uranium—is one means of building a nuclear bomb. That’s why it’s typically described as a ‘sensitive’ technology. Still, Australia has a strong case for an interest in uranium enrichment. We’re not Iran—we have the world’s largest uranium reserves, and a program to provide low-enriched nuclear fuel to others and to manage the resulting wastes would be a positive one for the international community.

If the new prime minister is serious about the possibility of building a cradle-to-grave nuclear industry in Australia (though without nuclear power stations), he should be interested in an early resuscitation of the enrichment research and development program at ANSTO. An enrichment R and D program doesn’t mean Australia intends to build nuclear weapons. In our case, even an industrial enrichment capability wouldn’t suggest that. A sound understanding of the enrichment process is important in its own right, not just for our own prospects but for understanding what other countries are doing in their nuclear programs.

True, an Australian enrichment capability would also be a strategic signal. It would constitute a hedge against any sharp deterioration in the regional security environment—a hedge similar to that enjoyed by a range of other countries around the world and in all likelihood one we’ll never need, because we’re already protected by US nuclear weapons under the ANZUS alliance. Still, the 21st century strategic order hasn’t yet unfolded in Asia. Keeping options open is no bad thing.

There have been other proposals over the years for Australia to think about the enrichment option (see here for example). Time to put the topic back on the agenda. As for Brett the chef, perhaps he should be applying for a job at Prime Minister and Cabinet under the new open admission rules.