The Extended Nuclear Deterrence Myth

Australia has long contributed to global arms control and non-proliferation efforts, yet its reliance on the US nuclear umbrella reflects a conflicting stance on nuclear disarmament. This dependence not only undermines Australia’s historical commitment to nuclear disarmament but also risks drawing the nation into potential nuclear conflict without assured protection.
Australia has made important contributions to the negotiation and consolidation of multilateral nuclear (and conventional) arms control and non-proliferation measures—in relation, for example but by no means only, to the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1995 and to the adoption of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996. But it sees the world, strategically, through the eyes of a nuclear weapon state (NWS) and thus takes an essentially NWS view of the future which pays, ever more obviously now, lip-service to nuclear disarmament as, at best, a distant ideal.
Australian defence strategists would have us believe that, for as long as nuclear weapons exist, Australia must (and presumably can) rely on US nuclear weapons for its security. The United States has been largely silent on this claim while continuing broadly to assure “Allies and partners,” in the language of its most recent Nuclear Posture Review (2022), that they can be confident of US readiness “to deter the range of strategic threats they face whether in crisis or conflict.”
This language raises questions that are much too little asked. Nuclear war poses an existential threat most obviously to the nuclear weapons possessors themselves. So does Australia really believe the United States would choose to expose itself to the risk of nuclear attack by threatening to use its nuclear weapons for any purpose that did not serve its own strategic interests exclusively? Of course it doesn’t.
Does the United States in any case have the means to defend Australia against strategic nuclear weapons? No. As impressive as they sometimes are, none of the air defence systems now deployed in Israel and Ukraine are capable of intercepting intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and no such system is reliably available even to the United States itself.
What grounds do we have for fearing that Australia could become a nuclear target independently of its alliance relationships? Surely the answer to this question is “none.” Nuclear weapons are not needed to exploit Australia’s strategic vulnerabilities—its massive import dependency, and long sea lines of supply and communication—and can do nothing to alleviate them. The only credible occasion for deploying nuclear weapons against us would be a nuclear war in which the United States was already engaged.
The situation might then be summarised as follows: the concept of extended nuclear deterrence allows us to claim the benefit of association with another state’s nuclear weapons. But when deterrence fails, we will very quickly discover that there is no “nuclear umbrella.” The United States has no capacity to defend us against the strategic nuclear missiles that may be deployed against us precisely because we have claimed the false protection of its nuclear arsenal. Australia’s mistaken reliance on nuclear weapons as a last line of defence thus makes us more, rather than less, likely to experience their impact.
In 2016, Australia voted against a UN General Assembly resolution clearing the way for the negotiation of a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons and refused to participate in the negotiations that led to the adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in New York the following year. Australia is now one of the few countries in its own region not to have signed the treaty. The Australian Labor Party adopted a resolution in 2018 committing a future Labor government to do so but has not followed through in the face of unwavering US hostility to the Treaty, and for fear of being wedged by a parliamentary Opposition whose principal contribution to the national life is incessantly to sound the national security alarm.
Parties to the TPNW are prohibited from providing any support to another state’s nuclear weapons program. In Australia’s case, this would mean (at a minimum) giving up its nuclear umbrella and terminating all nuclear-weapons-related activities at the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap. Australia/US relations would be faced with a challenging reset, not least because the Americans have come to assume a largely unquestioning Australian like-mindedness on strategic issues. We are though, I think, much too inclined to overlook the fact that Australia’s national character and international credibility in the nuclear era have been shaped, to a genuinely important degree, by an enduring commitment to nuclear disarmament. We owe it to ourselves not to diminish this (to some modest degree bipartisan) legacy. And we do certainly diminish it by opening ourselves to the prospect of becoming an expendable bit-player in someone else’s nuclear war. Australia has taken practical steps, in close consultation with the United States, to carefully dissociate itself from other weapons—anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions—that it, unlike the United States, has formally renounced. It could do the same with nuclear weapons.
Australia can dissociate itself from nuclear weapons without turning its back on the alliance. But this will only get harder as the focus shifts from deterrence to undermining confidence in the survivability of strategic nuclear weapons platforms, and Australia finds itself increasingly caught up in US strategic non-nuclear weapons programs. We might perhaps begin by placing more emphasis publicly on an important US motivation for extending the nuclear deterrence concept to allies, which is to reduce the incentive for them to acquire nuclear weapons of their own. As a party to the TPNW, Australia would be demonstrating its determination never to acquire these weapons, and the United States would no longer have to pretend that it is holding a nuclear umbrella over our heads.
It really makes no difference, for the purposes of this argument, who sits in the Oval Office, but the fact that Americans have chosen, for the second time in eight years, to hand over the nuclear launch codes to Donald Trump obviously does nothing to diminish its force. Australia is always more at ease in the world, and more helpful, when it makes a real effort to see the world for itself—as it has done from time to time over the past eighty years. Our relationship with the United States is claustrophobic and the situation is getting worse. We must find some clear air soon if we are to avoid suffocation. This will require genuinely independent thinking and the courage of our traditionally multilateralist and humanitarian convictions. A second Trump administration gives us a chance to see whether we still have these qualities.
A somewhat fuller, and more contextual, treatment of these issues, including their alliance implications, is given in “Australia’s bipolar approach to nuclear disarmament.”
Peter Hooton is a former diplomat whose postings included appointments as High Commissioner to Samoa (2001–03) and Solomon Islands (2007–09). Prior to leaving the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 2012, he was Assistant Secretary for Arms Control and Counter-Proliferation.
This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.