Antinuclear

The reality of Australia’s sorry history on nuclear disarmament policy

AUSTRALIA’S NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT HYPOCRISY , Right Now, BY DAVID DONALDSON 4 July 13 “……..The Australian government’s submission also noted that extended deterrence has “removed the need for Australia to consider more significant and expensive defence options” – defence-speak for Australia developing its own nukes. Linking Australia’s decision not to develop nuclear weapons – a position to which it is bound by international law – to extended nuclear deterrence amounts to little more than an absurd threat to the Americans not to remove a guarantee that has never been publicly acknowledged.

Such statements demonstrate the lack of real commitment by the Federal Government to disarmament, and have no doubt made Obama’s stated desire to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world that little bit harder. Faced with an inevitably sceptical Pentagon and obstructive allies like Australia, the soaring anti-nuclear rhetoric of Obama’s 2009 Prague Speech has brought few results.

More recently, Australia refused to sign on to an 80-nation statement on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons at the 2013 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee. The statement sought to address the fact that, in spite of the widely acknowledged catastrophic effects of any use of nuclear weapons, such concerns have “not been at the core of nuclear disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation deliberations for many years.”

While more than 150 countries have expressed support for a treaty banning nuclear weapons under international law – based on similar conventions on landmines and cluster munitions – the Australian government is not among them.

Moreover, the Future Fund continues to invest in nuclear weapons companies, despite having agreed to divest from tobacco, cluster munitions and landmines companies…….  HTTP://RIGHTNOW.ORG.AU/WRITING-CAT/ARTICLE/AUSTRALIAS-NUCLEAR-DISARMAMENT-HYPOCRISY/

July 5, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, weapons and war