Australia’s technocratic drive to nuclear ignorance
The worshipped role of the expert has excised public debate from nuclear policy. The expert’s validation exonerates the government from the onus of explanation, excluding constituents from relevant information and thus precluding commentary. Nuclear science, a field shrouded in esotericism, marks the summit of techno-scientific rationality, in which utter destruction is intellectually atomised out of politics to the realm of the expert/executive.
ARENA, Sybilla George, 11 Dec 2024
Australia is ‘going nuclear’. The addition of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia’s defence arsenal through the $368 billion AUKUS deal passes a threshold of nuclear legitimisation that Oceania’s anti-nuclear activists have been battling for decades. Nuclearisation used to be an eco-ethical debate, as with the anti- vs pro-uranium mining battles since the 70s that have seen wins and losses on both sides. The rapid increase of Australia’s nuclear involvement, however, signals the reframing of national nuclear rhetoric as techno-scientific rationality that precludes dialogue and authorises executive ruling.
While the AUKUS deal plays out in the limelight, at RAAF Tindal in the Northern Territory the building of facilities to host six United States B-52H Stratofortress bombers on rotational deployment, alongside ‘up to 75’ US Armed Force permanent staff, is underway. The facility renovations are funded through the Force Postures Initiative, the most recent phase of the Force Postures Agreement which since 2014 has defined the United States’s military agenda in Australia, with the consent of successive Australian governments. The Enhanced Air Cooperation branch of the US Alliance was recently ratified when Australian Defence provided ‘air-to-air refuelling’ to B-2 Spirit bombers involved in the US’s October strike on Houthi targets in Yemen.
More than half of the United States’s stock of 76 active B-52 bombers is capable of carrying and deploying nuclear weapons; the remainder is conventionally armed. These jets have been flying over Australian airspace for half a century; however, stationing them at RAAF Tindal signals a significant escalation in nuclear involvement, as it will produce for the first time the conditions ‘to support potential nuclear combat missions from Australian soil’, according to a Nautilus Institute Special Report published in August.
This would be illegal under the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), an agreement on which Australia under Labor has abstained since 2022 when it rescinded the Coalition government’s ‘No’ vote. Signing and ratifying the treaty features as a goal in Labor’s 2023 National Platform. Yet progress seems unlikely, given Australia’s third abstention on the TPNW on 1 November 2024 and the persistent silence from the government on the United States’s policy to ‘neither confirm nor deny’ the presence of nuclear arms aboard aircraft or ships. Under this policy, Australia will not be informed whether B-52 bombers on deployment at RAAF Tindal are carrying nuclear weapons.
The public interest in the disclosure of the presence of nuclear weapons includes matters of security, ethics and democratic transparency. Of great concern is the Albanese government’s passive concession to a foreign state’s policy that conflicts with its own commitment to ‘full knowledge and concurrence’ of foreign activities conducted in Australia. Restricted speech has been increasingly utilised as a tactic to expedite pro-nuclear policy in the rush towards technological rationality.
Another example is Albanese’s Nuclear Power Safety Bill, which was rammed through the Senate without debate in October 2024. It stipulates two dumping ‘zones’ for highly irradiated ‘spent nuclear fuel’, to be located within dozens of kilometres of Perth and Adelaide—Western and South Australia being selected once again to play host to nuclear, as during the United Kingdom’s nuclear testing campaign. Indeed, Defence recently withdrew its environmental approval application for developments to prepare HMAS Stirling to host nuclear-powered submarines, and The Australian has reported that the government will resubmit the application with an additional request for the rights to store irradiated waste materials at the facility, which would thus be ‘subject to a single round of community feedback’.
Deferral to the United States’s ‘neither confirm nor deny’ nuclear weapons policy is an appeal to ignorance, and thus innocence, which in turn forecloses systems of accountability, since governments’ denial of information renders their constituents ignorant. The current government’s silence on the presence of nuclear weapons on US aircraft stationed at RAAF Tindal eerily resembles Robert Menzies’ ‘extreme’ commitment to the United Kingdom’s ‘need to know’ policy during the nuclear testing campaign from 1952 to 1963. As prime minister, Menzies exclusively assented without consulting Cabinet or scientific advisers to the use of the Montebello Islands as the site of Operation Hurricane, the nuclear bomb detonation that cemented the United Kingdom as the world’s third nuclear power. The program was not announced until 1952, prior to which Menzies deliberately misled the media about plans for nuclear testing on Australian soil, claiming he had ‘heard nothing’ about it.
The worshipped role of the expert has excised public debate from nuclear policy. The expert’s validation exonerates the government from the onus of explanation, excluding constituents from relevant information and thus precluding commentary. Nuclear science, a field shrouded in esotericism, marks the summit of techno-scientific rationality, in which utter destruction is intellectually atomised out of politics to the realm of the expert/executive.
. The UK nuclear testing campaign caused massive human and ecological suffering to Aboriginal communities in Western and South Australia. It was not until the publication of the 1985 Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia, more than two decades after the final tests, that the extent of Australian government collusion was revealed, typified by Menzies’ ‘complete’ acceptance that Australia be entirely excluded from technical information about the tests. This submission to an allied foreign state enacts the technocratic power of nuclear, which pitches influence disproportionally towards those with technical knowledge and renders those without it mute and nakedly vulnerable to, in the case of nuclear arms, annihilation………………………………
The Albanese government’s silence on the presence of nuclear weapons aboard B-52s at RAAF Tindal regurgitates the United States’s policy so as to allow it to skirt its democratic responsibility to inform the public of potential nuclear escalation. Extensive control of messaging and media across the decade-long nuclear testing campaign by Menzies on behalf of the United Kingdom, particularly regarding its true health risks, denied Australians the opportunity to establish informed opinions on the tests. The drive to ignorance common to both Menzies’s and Albanese’s nuclear policy strategies has been achieved via the interiorisation of allied foreign states’ intelligence protocols. This techno-scientific rationale dangerously licences executives to accelerate nuclear proliferation beyond the forum of public debate to which it belongs, and into reality. https://arena.org.au/australias-technocratic-drive-to-nuclear-ignorance/
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