MELBOURNE - Before making any firm decisions toward acquiring nuclear-powered attack submarines, the Japanese government and people should consider carefully the lessons of Australia becoming the first state without nuclear weapons to embark on this fraught path.
Former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating has called the estimated AU$368 billion nuclear submarine plan with the so-called AUKUS alliance with Britain and the United States for a total of eight submarines the "worst deal in all history" and "the worst international decision" by a Labor government since Prime Minister Billy Hughes twice tried to introduce conscription during World War I.
Earlier this year, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said, "It's a submarine deal with no submarines...a terribly bad deal, a really stupid deal" and a "huge wealth transfer from the Australian government to the U.S. and the U.K."
Their views have been echoed by former political and military leaders, including former foreign ministers Bob Carr and Gareth Evans.
What has motivated such unprecedented deep concern across Australia's political spectrum?
The submarines are not designed to defend Australia and are unsuitable for Australia's shallow northern coastal waters. Rather, they would operate against China's nuclear-armed submarines and control maritime chokepoints as part of the U.S. arsenal in a war with China. Pacific and Southeast Asian leaders have expressed concern that AUKUS submarines will increase regional tensions and the risks of major power conflict, including nuclear war. They will make Australia more deeply complicit in such conflict, and add submarine bases to other U.S. military bases in Australia as high priority targets for conventional and particularly nuclear attack by U.S. adversaries.
There is in fact no evidence that China, Australia's largest trading partner, poses a military threat to Australia other than because of the U.S. military bases it hosts.
Australia's sovereignty and independence is severely eroded, as the technology and operation of nuclear-powered submarines will be entirely dependent on the United States, an increasingly erratic ally repeatedly violating international law. Kurt Campbell, while he was Indo-Pacific coordinator at the U.S. National Security Council and deputy assistant to President Joe Biden, told European Union officials in 2022 that AUKUS was about "getting Australia off the fence -- we have them locked in now for the next 40 years."
Despite making donations totaling AU$10 billion to U.S. and British submarine building as part of its largest-ever sovereign wealth transfer, Australia will have no recourse if, as the relevant agreements entitle them to do, the United States and Britain decide they are unable or unwilling to provide the planned submarines.
Like current U.S. and British submarines, Australia's planned submarines will operate on weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium fuel. This trashes decades of international efforts, to which Australia has contributed, to minimize use of proliferation-prone HEU reactor fuel. French and Chinese naval reactors run on low enriched uranium fuel, which cannot be used for nuclear weapons. It also erodes nuclear nonproliferation -- each of the secondhand U.S. Virginia-class Australia will initially buy contains enough HEU for 24 nuclear weapons. At the end of service 30 years later the spent fuel will still be HEU sufficient for 15 nuclear weapons. The planned future yet-to-be-designed AUKUS submarines will likely contain even more HEU.
Spent naval nuclear fuel waste in the United States still contains 83 percent uranium-235, more than the 80 percent level of the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima. At every stage from construction to waste storage for millions of years, this weapons-usable fuel will require not only strict isolation from humans and the environment for safety, but also to be guarded at the highest level of military security, a cost excluded from the already eye-watering projected cost.
Australia will become the first state to open a previously dormant loophole in International Atomic Energy Agency's comprehensive safeguards agreements, which allows nuclear material to be removed from safeguards while being used for non-explosive military purposes. Effective safeguards can, in any case, not be applied to a mobile, hidden platform like a submarine.
The negative precedent being set by Australia is already being followed by others. In addition to Brazil's long-standing program using low enriched uranium, South Korea, which uses LEU, and Turkey are pursuing nuclear submarines, and Iran has claimed to also have such plans.
Given rapid developments in undersea detection and submersible drone technology, it is quite possible that by or during the time any Australian nuclear submarines enter service, any military advantage will be gone. The security and radioactive accident risks, however, will remain.
As the first country to be bombed by nuclear weapons in war, Japan has a particular ethical and political responsibility to be a leader for nuclear disarmament. Japan should not embark on the costly and risky path of nuclear submarines, enlarging holes in nuclear nonproliferation only to increase regional tensions and the risks of a war with catastrophic outcome.
(Tilman Ruff, born in 1955 in Australia, is a doctor and a founding chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, established in Australia and now based in Geneva, that was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.)
