“Just in Case”: Extended Nuclear Deterrence in the Defense of Australia
This paper examines the foundations and rationale for Australian reliance on US assurances of extended nuclear deterrence. The Australian model of extended nuclear deterrence is marked by its lack of public presence, a lack of certainty about its standing and character in US eyes, its lack of a direct nuclear threat, and its resurgence at a time when nuclear abolition possibilities are being embraced by the leader of the deterrence provider. Australian policy amounts to a claim that the nuclear guarantee is necessary “just in case”– though without any plausible specifics. The fundamental questions remain – for Australia as for other recipients of extended nuclear deterrence assurances – what threats, what probabilities, what alternatives?
The "Joint Facilities" revisited - Desmond Ball, democratic debate on security, and the human interest
Temper Democratic, Bias Human1Desmond Ball's labours through four decades to elucidate the character of US defence and intelligence facilities in Australia, to document the evidence, test the balance of benefits and dangers to both national security and human security, and then tell the story to his fellow Australians is unparalleled in Australian intellectual and political life. The dedication, often neglected, to the most famous and influential part of this work, A Suitable Piece of Real Estate: American Installations in Australia, was the call 'for a sovereign Australia'.2 We might best sum up the character of Ball's work of a lifetime - or more precisely, this one, brightly coloured, thread of a multi-stranded body of work - by recalling the enduring watchwords of an earlier Australian nationalist, Joseph Furphy: 'temper democratic, bias Australian'.3 Both elements are keys to understanding the animating force behind Ball's work on US installations in Australia4 - the concern for a fully and properly informed public as a prerequisite to democratic debate about the bases, and concern that Australians identify their country's specific interests in the bases, citing Malcolm Fraser 's prescient but often ignored 1976 warning that 'the interests of the United States and the interests of Australia are not necessarily identical'.5And yet, this is not enough, on either count. One might more properly say of Ball on the bases that the work is characterized by 'Temper offensively democratic, bias human'.6Among all the many US (and Australian) military installations past and present in Australia, Pine Gap occupies an iconic place in the Australian imaginary. Through Ball's work, magnified by the repressiveness of excessive and inept government secrecy, the base has acquired a sense of specialness - a place of difference, and a place of manifold potency, not least politically.7 In the minds of many Australians, US concern about a threat to the future of Pine Gap was enough to bring down the elected government in 1975. Its association with uncontrollable foreign powers, extraordinarily sophisticated technology, the exotic and necessarily fantasy-laden realm of space, and its associations with the use of nuclear weapons, as well being a target of them all, contributed to a mystique, which the only vaguely serious Australian government statement about its purpose prosaically described as 'unwarranted' - somewhat optimistically, since the statement had little effect on the Australian imagination. Physically located a short way from Alice Springs, a town that most Australians never visit, Pine Gap vies with Uluru for primacy as the symbolic centre of the country The physiognomy of the base, with its faceless white domes jumping out of the browns and greens of the McDonnell Ranges, quietly captured in an often reproduced still from Gill Serine's 1981 documentary Home On The Range, contributes much to this sense of mystery and potency, not to mention its ongoing capacity to act as a container of powerful projections of promise and threat.8For many Australians of a certain generation, A Suitable Piece of Real Estate: American Installations in Australia was profoundly shocking. Never before had any researcher provided a list of even half of the 'more than twenty' US military, intelligence, scientific and space facilities in Australia that Ball documented.9 Never before had the major bases been documented in such detail. Never before had the nature and activities at these facilities been documented primarily from mainstream US military, congressional, technical and corporate sources, leaving no doubt about the credibility of Ball's claims about their strategic implications. Never before had a writer so comprehensively, systematically and elegantly spelled out a framework for the assessment of the advantages and risks associated with each of these facilities within a framework that drew on strategic studies, defence policy and democratic understandings of the national interest. …
Stemming the Tide: Arms Control in the Johnson Years
The author, a Nobel laureate, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and for many years a key participant in the formulation of U.S. arms control policies, draws on his personal diaries to offer an insider's account of the efforts made during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson to bring nuclear arms under international control. Seaborg also outlines both national and international issues that should be resolved in order to reduce the risk of nuclear war.