Australia's Nuclear Policy

Reconciling Strategic, Economic and Normative Interests

Michael Clarke, Stephan Frühling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317177180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Australia's Nuclear Policy: Reconciling Strategic, Economic and Normative Interests critically re-evaluates Australia's engagement with nuclear weapons, nuclear power and the nuclear fuel cycle since the dawn of the nuclear age. The authors develop a holistic conception of 'nuclear policy' that extends across the three distinct but related spheres - strategic, economic and normative - that have arisen from the basic 'dual-use' dilemma of nuclear technology. Existing scholarship on Australia's nuclear policy has generally grappled with each of these spheres in isolation. In a fresh evaluation of the field, the authors investigate the broader aims of Australian nuclear policy and detail how successive Australian governments have engaged with nuclear issues since 1945. Through its holistic approach, the book demonstrates the logic of seemingly conflicting policy positions at the heart of Australian nuclear policy, including simultaneous reliance on US extended deterrence and the pursuit of nuclear disarmament. Such apparent contradictions highlight the complex relationships between different ends and means of nuclear policy. How successive Australian governments of different political shades have attempted to reconcile these in their nuclear policy over time is a central part of the history and future of Australia's engagement with the nuclear fuel cycle.

Chapter 1
Nuclear Policy: Managing the Dual-Use Challenge of Nuclear Fission

The term ‘nuclear policy’ is not as straightforward as it may appear. In public debate and government organization, it is immediately obvious what is meant by ‘health policy’, ‘education policy’ or ‘defence policy’. All of these terms are well established in popular and official use; in the Australian context all of them are aligned with government departments that exist to develop and implement them; and all of them are, grammatically, compound nouns. Not so ‘nuclear policy’. Its use is, as we shall see, inconsistent. It is rarely obvious which part of government is responsible for the development and implementation of nuclear policy as a whole; and as a term, it combines adjective and noun. ‘Nuclear policy’ shares the last of these traits with the more common term of ‘foreign policy’ – but whereas policy can be meaningfully said to be ‘foreign’ or ‘domestic’, it does not make much sense for it to be ‘nuclear’ itself. Nor does ‘nuclear policy’ refer to the nucleus of policy. ‘Nuclear policy’ is a term that is missing a noun.

What is ‘Nuclear Policy’?

What might this noun be? There are several possibilities. The US Department of Defense, for example, has a ‘Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy’, whose responsibilities include nuclear weapons and nuclear arms control. In the US defence context, ‘nuclear policy’ is thus generally used as shorthand for ‘nuclear weapons policy’. This is the case with the use of the term by the Department of State,¹ in the academic defence debate,² and in the programs of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major US think tank.³ Other US organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, Natural Resources Defense Council or Union of Concerned Scientists, use the longer ‘nuclear weapons policy’, or both.⁴

Reading ‘nuclear policy’ as ‘nuclear weapons policy’ or ‘nuclear non-proliferation policy’ would, however, confound those who consult the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Industry Association⁵ or the ‘World Nuclear News’.⁶ Both employ the term ‘nuclear policy’ as shorthand for ‘nuclear power policy’ or ‘nuclear energy policy’. Again, this is a use of the term ‘nuclear policy’ that also extends to the relevant academic literature.⁷

Then, finally, there are those cases where ‘nuclear policy’ is used to refer to all of the above: nuclear weapons, arms control, non-proliferation, energy, as well as – in more recent years – nuclear safety and security. ‘Nuclear policy’ programs of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Australia,⁸ and the US Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fall into this category.⁹ And this is also the conception that underpins this book. At first glance, this seems an unwieldy use of the term – depending on the particular issue involved, ‘nuclear policy’ could then be integral to broader defence, foreign, energy, industry, science, resources, mining and even health policy, with a commensurately broad range of governmental departments and agencies involved. Yet, our argument is that this breadth and the connection between different areas are real, and indeed that they are the main challenge for the development and implementation of nuclear policy in practice. Indeed, despite the stove-piped nature of government administration, Australian governments have in the past explicitly considered nuclear policy as an area that by its nature spans both many departments (e.g. when the Hawke Cabinet considered the scope for savings in administering ‘nuclear policy’),¹⁰ and constitutional powers (e.g. when the Fraser Cabinet considered the basis for a review of nuclear policy legislation).¹¹

What, then, is the missing noun in ‘nuclear policy’? In this expansive perspective, ‘nuclear fission policy’ may perhaps best capture the underlying theme. The common basis of nuclear weapons, arms control and non-proliferation, and of nuclear power production, safety and security is that they ultimately all relate to the use and control of the fission of atom cores of uranium-235 and plutonium-239.¹² In 1976, the then US President Gerald Ford began his ‘Statement on Nuclear Policy’ with a discussion of the imperative to reconcile the inherent promise and the inherent danger of nuclear fission, in a passage that is as valid today as it was then:

We have known since the age of nuclear energy began more than 30 years ago that this source of energy had the potential for tremendous benefits for mankind and the potential for unparalleled destruction. On the one hand, there is no doubt that nuclear energy represents one of the best hopes for satisfying the rising world demand for energy with minimum environmental impact and with the potential for reducing dependence on uncertain and diminishing world supplies of oil. On the other hand, nuclear fuel, as it produces power also produces plutonium, which can be chemically separated from the spent fuel. The plutonium can be recycled and used to generate additional nuclear power, thereby partially offsetting the need for additional energy resources. Unfortunately – and this is the root of the problem – the same plutonium produced in nuclear power plants can, when chemically separated, also be used to make nuclear explosives. The world community cannot afford to let potential nuclear weapons material or the technology to produce it proliferate uncontrolled over the globe. The world community must ensure that production and utilization of such material by any nation is carried out under the most stringent security conditions and arrangements. Developing the enormous benefits of nuclear energy while simultaneously developing the means to prevent proliferation is one of the major challenges facing all nations of the world today.¹³

In principle, the dual-use challenge of nuclear technology is not unusual. Almost any technology from knives or guns to chemical and biological agents can be used for military as well as civilian applications. But whereas nuclear policy has developed to deal with the dual-use dilemma of nuclear fission, there is no equivalent ‘oxidization policy’ that would do the same for conventional explosives. Nuclear policy is the only policy area that concerns humankind’s interaction with a physical or chemical phenomenon.

In this respect as well, nuclear policy is thus quite distinct from other areas of public policy. The importance of the state and government is far greater in the development and management of almost any application of nuclear fission than it is in other technologies, with the possible exception of spacefaring. This is not a mere consequence of the particular destructive power of nuclear weapons, which might have motivated governments to maintain close control of all matters nuclear. Rather, the use of nuclear fission – similar to early space technology – was and remains of a scale and difficulty that the active support of governments, in one form or another, remains a necessary condition. Because of the destructive power and the economic potential of nuclear fission, states have the motivation to make nuclear policy; because of the nature of the technology and its application, they have the opportunity to do so; but because of the wide range of considerations, objectives and actors involved – from defence to economic, science, health and diplomacy – the whole that is nuclear policy is also often overshadowed by its parts.

Overall, nuclear policy consists of three distinct domains: that of strategy; that of economics; and that of nuclear norms. All are inseparably linked by the inherent dual-use challenge of nuclear technology and fissile materials. This chapter will now introduce each domain separately, before demonstrating how the role of the state, its security and technological expertise are the common foundations of nuclear policy in all three of them.

The Strategic Domain of Nuclear Policy

It is to the military application of atomic energy that humankind owes its entry into the nuclear age. In early 1939, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch identified atomic fission in experimental results of Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. In August of the same year, Albert Einstein wrote his now-famous letter to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which he stated that ‘it is conceivable … that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed’.¹⁴ Throughout the Second World War, the United Kingdom and United States saw themselves in a race against Germany to harness the power of the atom. By May 1945, it was clear that the German effort had been far less advanced than feared,¹⁵ and the Manhattan project led to the first ever atomic explosion at Alamogordo on 16 July 1945.

The Second World War provided not only the motivation to create atomic bombs, but also the initial doctrinal and technical basis to make military use of their unprecedented power: strategic bombing by means of US long-range bombers. As such, the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 were different in kind, but not in their strategic logic, intent and scale from the conventional attacks on German and Japanese cities that had preceded them. And yet, they remain the only use of nuclear weapons in anger, and inseparably linked to the image of indiscriminate urban destruction. To make use of nuclear weapons, countries thus do not only have to overcome the technological hurdles of building them – a task that arguably has become easier as the level of general manufacturing technology has improved. They also need to find a credible strategy that can link the threat of large-scale nuclear destruction to the achievement of their national objectives. Although the former remains a significant task, the latter arguably proves just as, if not even more difficult.

Early imagination about the strategic effect of atomic bombs focused on the threat from nuclear aggression. Thankfully it is rare that leaders with genocidal intentions rise to command the full resources of a modern industrial country. But whereas most nuclear strategy in later decades focused on deterrence, it was the spectre of a ‘nuclear Pearl Harbour’ that preoccupied early thinking about the dangers of ‘the bomb’.¹⁶ But even if nuclear weapons are not used directly, the ability to deter large-scale retaliation means that dissatisfied powers armed with nuclear weapons can engage in more provocative behaviour than they otherwise would. What is often referred to as the ‘stability-instability paradox’ has been used to explain Pakistan’s initiation of the 1999 Kargil War, after it had demonstrated its nuclear capabilities in tests the previous year.¹⁷

Over the 30 years following the Second World War, the state of the art in the technology of nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, advanced in leaps and bounds. The development of miniaturized fission warheads in the early 1950s opened up a whole range of tactical applications. Thermonuclear warheads, which combine nuclear fission of plutonium or uranium with fusion of light atomic cores of deuterium and lithium in a staged warhead design, became available in the mid-1950s. They increased the yield of nuclear weapons from a few dozens of kilotons for fission warheads into the hundreds and thousands of kilotons (megatons), and were developed by the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China.

In the early years of the Cold War, nuclear war threatened destruction in Europe on a scale that would have surpassed that of the Second World War. The arrival of thermonuclear warheads, however, meant that the survival of civilization itself was now seen by many to be at stake. From the 1960s, nuclear-tipped Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM), stationed in silos or on submarines, eclipsed the strategic bomber as the main iconic image of nuclear deterrence. Staged, thermonuclear warheads also provided new possibilities to tailor weapons effects, leading to specialized designs, including the ‘neutron bomb’ which minimized thermal and blast effects in favour of greater initial radiation release.¹⁸

Since the United States had a significant quantitative and qualitative advantage in nuclear weapons over the Soviet Union during the 1950s, they were central to the strategy of ‘massive retaliation’. At that time, US policy saw nuclear munitions as a substitute for expensive conventional forces, and heavily relied on them to deter Communist attacks on its allies – both in Europe and in successive crises in East Asia. Once the Soviet Union achieved the ability to credibly threaten nuclear retaliation against the US homeland, however, reconciling the US pledge to use nuclear weapons in the defence of Europe with the logic of ‘mutual assured destruction’ became an enduring concern for Western allies.¹⁹ To solve this problem, t...