Abstract
An unwitting pawn?
Australia's ambitions to become a nuclear weapon state have been shrouded in mystery—the quest was confusingly entwined with larger issues of defense and economic development, and the government and public debates were dominated by both deliberate and unintended ambiguity. Australia's Bid for the Atomic Bomb by Wayne Reynolds does an exceptional job of lifting the shroud on these ambitions, demonstrating that from the 1940s to the 1960s several key Australian leaders worked to acquire nuclear weapons. Based on a large and disparate body of evidence culled from declassified and open sources, Reynolds reveals that the Australian government hoped to develop its own nuclear weapons capability or obtain weapons from Britain in return for cooperating with Britain's nuclear program.
Reynolds, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Newcastle, makes a strong case for revisiting the conventional wisdom regarding Australia's broader security policies. Most historians have viewed the fall of Singapore and Australia's subsequent shift of loyalties from Britain to the United States as the pivotal catalyst in determining the country's defense policies after World War II. But according to Reynolds, instead of turning away from its mother country, Australia became entwined in British pretensions about creating a “Fourth Empire.” Australia also figured high in Britain's attempts to establish “strategic depth” by having key defense assets throughout the so-called “white dominions” (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa).
The book provides a compelling account of Britain's schizophrenic attitude concerning nuclear cooperation with Australia and the other white dominions. On the one hand, Britain needed their cooperation to acquire uranium, scientific expertise, nuclear test sites, and plutonium production sources.
But Britain's desire to retain the scientific and technical advantages of close cooperation with the United States prevented it from pursuing nuclear deals with these other countries. The United States jealously guarded its nuclear monopoly, despite having drawn extensively on British and Commonwealth expertise during the Manhattan Project. Washington was also paranoid about communist infiltration of “Western nuclear establishments.
“When two British diplomats—Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean—were revealed as spies, Australia was regarded by the United States as guilty because of its close association with Britain. In return for its access to U.S. nuclear secrets after the 1957 Anglo-American Bermuda summit, Britain agreed to cut the dominions out of the nuclear loop altogether.
Despite its merits, the book has its flaws. For example, despite the author's meticulous archival research, his implied argument that there was an Australian Manhattan Project does not stack up. The available documentation (many secret government documents have not yet been released) shows that the country's nuclear ambitions did not receive the political, scientific, or financial support necessary to acquire nuclear weapons. There were attempts to obtain some of the prerequisites, such as uranium supplies (which Australia had in abundance), a critical mass of nuclear expertise in government and academia, and an experimental nuclear reactor. But there is no evidence of a determined plan to build on these foundations and actually undertake a bomb program. Nor is there any evidence of a political or bureaucratic effort to devise a coherent rationale for acquiring the bomb. And perhaps most tellingly, there is no indication that anyone understood the enormous national effort that would have been required by a country with a population and national budget as meager as Australia's to produce an effective, deliverable, and indigenously produced nuclear arsenal.
Australia, like many other countries at the time, was simply keeping its nuclear options—both civil and military—open. Lured by the prospect of cheap power from nuclear power plants, eager to take advantage of scientific and technological developments in all fields, caught up in a wave of post-war national economic development, and conscious of its strategic vulnerability as a Western outpost, Australia did not wish to foreclose any security options.
Part of the problem with Rey-nolds's narrative is that it fails to put what often amounted to loose talk about acquiring the bomb into proper context. For instance, the main rationale for the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme (allegedly Australia's version of the Tennessee Valley Authority) was not to provide power and water for plutonium-producing reactors. Rather, the scheme was an attempt to realize the great dream of turning back the mighty rivers that emptied uselessly into the Pacific Ocean. Reynolds neglects to mention this. Similarly, the acquisition of F-lll aircraft was not primarily to give Canberra a nuclear delivery capability. Australia, a country with a relatively small defense budget, simply wanted a highly versatile, multi-purpose aircraft, which incidentally could be used to deliver nuclear weapons if necessary.
The book makes too many leaps of faith in an attempt to give coherence to what in reality was an incoherent Australian “bid” for the bomb. The author assumes, for instance, that Prime Minister Robert Menzies was talking about nuclear power when, in 1950, he told the British that Australia's potential role in a global war was linked to its long-term economic development program, which would provide “great increases of power.” Menzies was most likely only talking about electricity. The author also assumes that when Australia pressed for involvement in allied strategic planning and decided to establish an air base at Butterworth in Malaya, it was to enable the country to use tactical nuclear weapons. But these moves were motivated by other factors—including Australia's commitment of troops to Asian wars in Korea, Malaya, and Vietnam; a desire to ensure that a future war was fought as far from its shores as possible; and its attempt to ensure that its allies would come to its defense if Australia was attacked.
The book's treatment of arms control issues is also scanty and inaccurate. It was not an Irish proposal during the 1958 test ban talks to link a test ban to nuclear proliferation that scuppered Australia's quest for access to U.S. nuclear weapons information. Instead, the main culprit was the dawning realization that a world with large numbers of nuclear weapon states would be even more dangerous than one with a handful.
Although Reynolds undertook admirably painstaking research to uncover the most minute evidence of Australian nuclear yearnings, his case is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. Australia's nuclear aspirations were more a case of wishful thinking—of a na'ive opportunism based on the perceived advantages of remoteness, wide open spaces, nuclear-age minerals in the ground, and (withering) colonial connections— than a serious nuclear enterprise on par with that of South Africa. Despite its extensive early nuclear cooperation, Britain dumped Australia as a partner as soon as the nuclear gateway to the United States opened. In fact, a case could be made that Australia was an unwitting pawn in a larger British-American nuclear game.