When I was in Washington recently, I had a very funny conversation with Matthew Harries over dinner. It seems there is a proposal for Australia to seek nuclear-weapons state status under the NPT on rather weak claim that the UK had conducted nuclear tests down under in the 1950s.
I was delighted when Matt and Hassan Elbahtimy offered to write up a fine riposte to this strange idea. Also, I left you a little easter egg at the bottom.
Australia, the undercover nuclear-weapon state? Nice try.
Hassan Elbahtimy and Matthew Harries
Australia, like many other countries during and after the Cold War, considered developing nuclear weapons but never fully pursued its own programme. It did, however, host a number of British nuclear-weapons tests on its own soil. Should Australia therefore be thought of as a nuclear-weapon state under the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)?
Two Australian scholars think so. In a co-authored blog post, Christine Leah and Crispin Rovere call on Australia to revisit its nuclear options, arguing that it should not be held back by membership of the NPT. They claim that Australia has a ‘very unique legal status with regard to nuclear weapons’, thanks to its involvement in British nuclear testing.
The NPT defines a nuclear-weapon state as one which ‘manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to 1 January 1967’ (Article IX, paragraph 3). Leah and Rovere argue that if Australia wanted to develop nuclear weapons, its historical involvement in British testing would give it the right to do so, a right which they believe the United States should publicly recognise.
To put it politely, this is a stretch. Australia’s contributions to the British nuclear programme did not amount to common ownership; what’s more, hosting another country’s nuclear tests was hardly unique to Australia. And even if Leah and Rovere’s historical argument held water, an attempt today to fit Australia into the NPT as a nuclear-weapons state would be laughed out of the room by the treaty’s members – just as it would have been during the negotiations.
I
Whose bomb?
The United Kingdom conducted 12 atmospheric nuclear tests in Australia between 1952 and 1957. Testing in small, crowded Britain was not an attractive proposition; in addition to Australia, officials had also considered testing in Nevada and Canada, before passing on technical and political grounds. The tests took place on Australian soil, and Australians provided significant support. But the devices tested were developed, owned and controlled by the UK. The device used for the first UK test, for example, as British historian Richard Moore recounts, had to make the long journey from the UK to the Australian island of Trimouille via Gibraltar, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Mauritius on the Royal Navy frigate HMS Plym, while the fissile material followed a separate route by air.
Though Australians took auxiliary security, safety and sometimes sampling roles, the testing process itself was planned and executed by UK personnel. For the first test, in fact, the UK was initially reluctant to have any Australian scientific representation at all, though it eventually agreed to the presence of a small number of observers. By way of context, as Lorna Arnold and Mark Smith note with surprise in their exhaustive historical account, it had been agreed well beforehand that Canadian scientists would be there; the parties only got around to discussing Australian participation some months later (p. 26). In the early tests, as the 1985 McClelland Commission recorded, the Australian contribution did not extend to any area requiring ‘knowledge of weapon design or function’ (pp. 105, 139). More information was shared in the tests that followed – driven by pressure to allow Australia to make adequate safety assessments – but the same principle of controlled participation applied. In adopting this restrictive approach, the UK was guided by the January 1948 UK–US–Canada modus vivendi on nuclear cooperation, which had an annex specifying a limited range of information the UK could supply to Commonwealth countries such as Australia (see appendix F).
To put it simply, here’s how Howard Beale, the Australian minister whose department had responsibility for the tests, described the relationship in 1955, on the eve of the preparation of the Maralinga test site (quoted in Arnold and Smith, p. 100):
England has the bomb and the know-how; we have the open spaces, much technical skill, and a great willingness to help the Motherland.
So Australia played a significant role in the birth of the British bomb. But a midwife does not get to take home the baby. A reminder of that NPT phrasing: ‘manufactured and exploded a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device prior to 1 January 1967’.
And it is worth remembering that Australia was not alone in playing host to others’ tests. In some cases this meant testing on overseas territories. The Sahara desert in Algeria was used for nuclear testing by France from 1960–66. The Marshall Islands were the site of extensive testing by the US from 1946–58. At the time, these territories were controlled by the testing nation; they are now separate entities. France continued to test in Algeria, by mutual agreement, after the former colony became independent in 1962. The Australian case might be different in detail and degree, but it is not different in kind.
II
Dodgy dossier
One of the most interesting parts of archival research is discovering roads not taken. Civil servants’ briefing notes often include lists of options which, for various reasons, never saw the light of day. Leah and Rovere make the following claim:
As Australia’s Dr Rod Lyon sharply has observed from recently declassified documents, Australian negotiators were very much cognizant of this legal basis prior to Australia joining the Treaty. In sum, if Australia determined it was a national security imperative to develop an independent nuclear deterrent, it would be legally entitled to do so.
The authors don’t provide a link, but they appear to be referring to Rod Lyon’s commentary on the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s release of documents on the NPT.
Looking at the memorandum Lyon refers to – which notes Australia’s hosting of British tests and its dabbling in nuclear-weapons-related activities – it becomes quickly apparent that this was not seen as a winning argument. The case that Australia should sign the NPT as a nuclear-weapon state could just about be made, but it would be stretching the treaty’s text to breaking point. Or, to put it another way, here is what Lyon actually wrote:
We learn [from the memo] that some officials were giving consideration to Australia’s seeking recognition as a nuclear weapon state (NWS) under the NPT … [T]he bare bones of an argument existed that [Australia] had a case to be treated as a NWS.
Unless Leah and Rovere have further evidence, Lyon’s is the only fair characterisation. The bare bones of the argument were there, but not the meat; this was one option being considered, not a ‘legal basis’ of nuclear-weapon-state status of which officials were ‘very much cognizant’, and which entitled Australia to the legitimate pursuit of nuclear weapons in the future. The nuclear-weapons state idea made it onto a list of options. In the absence of any other documentation, that doesn’t prove much.
III
No going back
In any case the point is moot, because we know the path that actually was taken. Australia, albeit not without some reluctance, signed and ratified the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state. And as Australian officials likely knew at the time, had Australia tried to claim it was a nuclear-weapon state, it would have been met – at best – with raised eyebrows, and a chorus of ‘Nice try’.
The NPT’s drafters had no doubt that the treaty’s definition of a nuclear-weapon state exclusively meant the US, UK, China, France and the Soviet Union, the states acknowledged to have manufactured and detonated a nuclear device by the time the talks got serious. Article IX was drafted so as to allow no wiggle room; for chapter and verse, see Mohamed Shaker’s definitive study of the NPT negotiations (and specifically volume 1, pp. 194–200). Earlier drafts of the treaty had linked nuclear-weapon status to ‘possessing’ nuclear weapons, or simply referred to ‘nuclear’ and ‘non-nuclear’ states. Both approaches were problematic: ‘nuclear’ was vague, and status gained through possession, as British diplomats pointed out, would allow a non-nuclear-weapon state – Australia, say – to claim nuclear-weapon status merely through temporary custody of atomic weapons.
When the article was redrafted to read as it does today, the clarity it brought was welcomed by a number of negotiating parties, including the as-yet-non-nuclear India. Egypt, concerned that a state might secretly manufacture and test a nuclear weapon during the negotiating window so as to keep covert nuclear-weapon status up its sleeve, even went so far as to make explicit – twice, without challenge – its understanding that the nuclear club had a membership of five. In the words of Morton Halperin, who was a National Security Council staffer at the time of the talks: ‘We were absolutely certain that this is just a cute way of naming the five countries and politically more viable. Nobody had the slightest doubt that we knew which the five countries that tested were. We did not worry because we thought it was very clear.’ States parties to the treaty also agreed in 2000 to limit the possibility of any further expansion of the nuclear weapon status by stating that new parties ‘may accede to the Treaty only as non-nuclear-weapon States’ (p.19).
If Australia were ever to decide to go down the nuclear-weapons route, there would be only one way it could legally reconcile its status with the NPT. It would have to withdraw from the treaty in accordance with the procedures in Article X, before breaking its non-proliferation obligations.
This brings us, finally, to what seems to be Leah and Rovere’s ultimate goal: to tout the ‘strategic advantages’ of a nuclear-armed Australia, and to rip up the bargain at the heart of the NPT. ‘The most effective means for Australia to insulate itself from long-range nuclear attack’, they write, referring to the threat posed by China, ‘is to develop or acquire its own reliable long-range nuclear deterrent.’ They don’t propose the immediate development of Australian nuclear weapons, but the recognition of NPT nuclear-weapon-state status would presumably be a first enabling step along that road.
Perhaps this is an idea which deserves serious consideration. We disagree – strongly! – but that’s an argument for another day, and, ultimately, a question for Australians themselves. Regardless, the case for Australian nuclear weapons should not be allowed to stand on faulty historical revisionism. Australia is, and always was, a non-nuclear-weapons state.
Hassan Elbahtimy (@Elbahtimy_H) and is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
Matthew Harries (@harries_matthew) is Managing Editor of Survival, and a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
