Antinuclear

Australian news, and some related international items

Location for nuclear subs base ‘close to a decade’ away as selection process rebooted

ABC Illawarra / By Tim Fernandez 3 May 23

The federal government has revealed it will spend almost a decade choosing a location for an east coast submarine base.

Key points:

  • Matt Thistlethwaite says all options are on the table regarding the selection of an east coast submarine base
  • The process of selecting a location for a base is expected to be almost a decade
  • Unions claim the lengthy selection period will hurt business interests in Port Kembla

Scott Morrison identified Brisbane, Newcastle and Port Kembla last year as the three options for the home of an Australian nuclear submarine fleet as part of the AUKUS agreement.

The ABC understands Illawarra harbour was strongly favoured by the Department of Defence and industry figures.

In a recent briefing with Illawarra industry, community and business leaders, Assistant Defence Minister Matt Thistlethwaite said other locations would be considered.

“Everything is on the table,” he said.

“There are a number of factors — deepwater ports are essential, ensuring that there is a domestic industry base that can service a base like that, ensuring there is a skilled work force.

…………………….. “We are looking at close to a decade before that decision is made.”

Other locations ‘hot potatoes’

The announcement opens the door for defence to reconsider the Garden Island naval base in Sydney and Jervis Bay on the NSW south coast.

The sites were among the top locations identified by Defence in a 2011 report obtained by former South Australian Senator and submariner Rex Patrick under freedom of information laws.

“I think the other sites are political hot potatoes and the government is seeking to diffuse those aspects of this particular AUKUS program,” Mr Patrick said.

“Garden Island in Sydney is a significant population site surrounded by the residents of Sydney who simply will be uncomfortable with the stationing of a nuclear submarine in the harbour.

He said winning community support for a base in Jervis Bay would also be a difficult proposition due to the environmental sensitivity of the site.

“There have been many campaigns over the years to stop the navy conducting activities in Jervis Bay, even though it is a pretty good environmental tenant,” he said.

“I can see huge problems with government trying to impose a nuclear base in that pristine environment.”

‘The air has to be cleared’

The government is also facing a challenge at Port Kembla, where the Illawarra community also has a long history of opposing nuclear projects and has already begun rallying opposition to a base.

NSW Ports, which operates the harbour, has released plans for an off-shore wind turbine assembly facility at Outer Harbour, a site which is already being scouted by Defence.  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-03/nuclear-submarine-base-decision-delayed/102293870

May 5, 2023 Posted by | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, weapons and war | Leave a comment

‘National Defence’ takes Australia closer to war with China

Australian missile defence system concept, 3D rendering

Pearls and Irritations By Dr Vince Scappatura, May 2, 2023

The 2023 Defence Strategic Review has recommended Australia adopt a new strategic conceptual framework dubbed ‘National Defence’ that incorporates a ‘strategy of denial’. This approach is tied to a broader concept of ‘collective security’ in the Indo-Pacific and is aligned with America’s framework for ‘integrated deterrence’ of China. ‘National Defence’ is consistent with American force structure designs to develop the northern Australian expanse as an increasingly important base of operations for force-projection.

From ‘Defence of Australia’ to ‘National Defence’

The recommendation by the 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR) to abandon the long-standing strategic doctrine known as ‘defence of Australia’ (DoA) has been met with approval by the Albanese government, even as the doctrine had been previously eviscerated to conform with the requirements of the US alliance.

DoA reached its zenith with the release of the 1986 ‘Dibb Review’ that recommended a shift in Australia’s defence strategy from dependent expeditionary combat to ‘self-reliant’ protection of the continent and the air and maritime approaches to Australia. This was to be achieved by adopting ‘an essentially defensive posture in our region’ and employing a ‘strategy of denial’ with strike capabilities strictly limited in range to accomplish that objective………………………………….

However ………… long-standing aspirations for Australia to be an influential ‘middle power’ in international affairs, or more accurately, a ‘sub-imperial power’, which required undertaking regional ‘burden sharing’ responsibilities to preserve ‘stability’ on behalf of the US-led global order.

………………. A major turning point came in late 2001 when the Howard government committed Australia to America’s ‘global war on terror’. ……………….

…….  While DoA and ‘self-reliance’ remained official strategic guidance, operationally the Australian Defence Force (ADF) largely came to serve as an adjunct to the US military.

DoA has now been jettisoned entirely by the DSR in favour of ‘National Defence’, a new strategic conceptual framework based on the prospect of higher-level direct threats to Australia’s ‘national interests’ arising from US-China competition………….. This entails abandoning a ‘balanced’ force in favour of a force structure that is ‘focussed’ on preparing for major war – with China.

…………………….. Today, it is the supposed threat to the ‘rules-based order’ that functions as the new ‘domino theory’, where legitimate concerns about Chinese assertiveness in long-standing territorial disputes in the South China Sea is imagined as a direct military threat to Australia and our ‘national interests’.

………… maintaining a ‘balance of power’ has long been a euphemism in Australian political discourse for sustaining American military dominance or ‘primacy’…………..

……………….. achieving ‘balance’ translates into an agenda for Australia to work even more closely with the United States, and key American security partners like Japan, to further encircle China militarily.

…………………………………..Unlike the strategic approach articulated in the 1986 Dibb Review, the ‘strategy of denial’ adopted by the DSR is tied to a broader concept of ‘collective security’ in the Indo-Pacific and is aligned with America’s framework for ‘integrated deterrence’ of China. It is consistent with American force structure designs to develop the northern Australian expanse as an increasingly important base of operations for force-projection

………..The biggest change foreshadowed by the DSR is to the Army, which will have its infantry fighting force dramatically scaled back and be optimised for littoral operations and enhanced long-range fire. 

……………………………… This is the great strategic folly of AUKUS. It will equip the ADF with a potent capability to strike the Chinese mainland and, in coalition with the United States, play a frontline role in hunting China’s nuclear-armed submarine force and its critical second-strike nuclear deterrent capability.

While AUKUS risks contributing to an existential nuclear threat to China, the DSR reassures Australians that we remain safe from nuclear annihilation under the protection of America’s ‘extended nuclear deterrence’, for which there are no credible assurances, and in efforts to pursue ‘new avenues of arms control’, of which there are none, except that which the Albanese government has yet to join – the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – despite assurances by the Labor Party to the contrary

Finally, climate change is belatedly recognised as a significant national security issue in the DSR, but largely as a distraction that risks detracting from Defence’s primary objective of defending Australia against China…………………..

The DSR overstates the threat China poses to Australia, appears wilfully blind to the risks of nuclear escalation inherent in the defence strategy it recommends, and understates the existential threat of climate change which it fails to confront. What’s more, ‘National Defence’ dictates an acute focus on preparing Australia’s armed forces to integrate in a substantial way with American force structure plans to carry out what should be utterly unthinkable: a high-end war with a nuclear-armed China that risks wreaking a global catastrophe.  https://johnmenadue.com/labors-serial-betrayal-of-australia/

May 5, 2023 Posted by | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, politics international | Leave a comment

The rise of fascism, Ukraine, America at war with the world – journalists must speak up.

JOHN PILGER: Danger of war exists if we don’t speak up now

Independent Australia, By John Pilger | 2 May 2023

“………………………………………………………………………………… The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or “neo-Nazism” or “extreme nationalism”, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s “Jewish policy” which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.

Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow fascists have been paid for by the EU and the U.S., replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.

In 2014, neo-Nazis played a key role in an American-bankrolled coup against the elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being “pro-Moscow”. The coup regime included prominent “extreme nationalists” — Nazis in all but name.

At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the “White supremacist militias” active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real’. The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.

Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the “Wolfsangel”, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations, 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.

This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a “Putin apologist”, regardless of whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a NATO-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.

Journalists who travelled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.

In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.

Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s “assets” in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.

The university hired a leading KC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found ‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech’. Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished………………………………………

When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new “threats” on “America’s frontier” (as the Project for the New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

In the years since, America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s “war on terror” was at least 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

This figure does not include the dead of U.S.-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, ‘could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision-makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOs.’

At least one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five per cent of the population.

The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the Western consciousness. No one knows how many is the media refrain. Blair and George W Bush – and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al – were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a “media personality”.

……………………………………Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited; and Islamic State might not have existed.

Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its “allies” and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?

Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945:

‘Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system…it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.’

…………………………………………………………. On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the NATO attack on Libya which it described as an ‘array of lies’ — including the Benghazi massacre story:

‘The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.’

……………………………….Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th Century, the U.S. African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds U.S. officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

……………………… In the year NATO invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the “pivot to Asia”. Almost two-thirds of U.S. naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront the threat from China,” in the words of his Defence Secretary.

There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a “noose”.

At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any U.S. administration since the Cold War — having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to help “rid the world of nuclear weapons”.

Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.

…………………………………………………….. Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid — three million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.

If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.  https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/john-pilger-danger-of-war-exists-if-we-dont-speak-up-now,17470—

May 5, 2023 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment