Australia's Nuclear Horizon: Moving Beyond the Drumbeat of Risk Inflation
The 2006 Switkowski review report commissioned by the Howard government highlighted some of the economic and foreign policy benefits that could flow from a major expansion of Australia's uranium export program. It also identified the long-term advantages for Australia's energy security flowing from the development of a national nuclear industry. The report has been condemned by anti-nuclear groups, who argue that proposals for Australia's continuing and, possibly, deeper involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle are unacceptable. The primary risk identified is that Australian uranium exports will contribute to global nuclear proliferation pressures, but claims concerning nuclear-related terrorism are also an increasingly common theme in anti-nuclear commentary. These arguments, in turn, are framed within a broader set of assumptions about the ‘immoral’ nature of any engagement in the nuclear fuel cycle. This article examines the most prominent claims put forward by anti-nuclear proponents and argues that many of them are based on an unnecessary inflation of risk.
Australian Uranium Exports: Nuclear Issues and the Policy Process
Over the past decade the controversy which has surrounded nuclear power and technology since the end of the second world war has increased in intensity. The changing tempo of the international debate over the issue has been most noticeable in the nuclear consuming countries of western Europe, North America and in Japan where the expansion of commercial nuclear facilities to meet the rising demand has attracted considerable domestic opposition. However, the debate over nuclear power has not just been confined to these countries. It is perhaps one further indication of the growing interdependence of states in the international system that during the 1970s a debate over the safety and utility of nuclear power developed in Australia which was equal in intensity to any of those taking place around the world. Yet in contrast to those other debates Australia’s did not emerge from the process of formulating national defence or energy policies; rather it arose in conjunction with policy decisions regarding resource development and more particularly the exploitation of Australia’s uranium reserves. Put another way, Australia approached the dilemmas posed by the use of nuclear power from the standpoint of being a supplier of nuclear material rather than as a consumer of nuclear energy.
Blasts from the Past: Proliferation Lessons from the 1960s
Strategy document issued by the George W. Bush administration in 2002 portrays a world far different from that of the past. The Cold War was dangerous, but according to this document, its lessons are largely irrelevant to the making of contemporary U.S. strategy. After the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the United States faced a “status quo, risk-adverse” adversary—the Soviet Union—that believed that weapons of mass destruction should be used only as a last resort. In contrast, the United States is currently confronted by “rogue states” that “brutalize their own people,” “threaten their neighbors,” “sponsor terrorism,” and “hate the United States and everything for which it stands.” Most important, rogue states “are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction” to “achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes.” In so doing, they have created a world that is far “more complex and dangerous” than the international system of the 1960s. As a result, Cold War concepts such as deterrence are ineffective in a “security environment that has undergone profound transformation.”1 U.S. policymakers responsible for assessing international politics following the testing of an atomic device by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 16, 1964, would have been puzzled by the Bush administration’s characterization of their world. Four decades ago, the threat posed by a