One of the brilliant pieces written by students from The Monthly Masterclass
The decision to sell Australian uranium to India has to rank among the more troubling Australian foreign policy developments in the last ten years. While Australia has stipulated that its uranium may only be used for civilian energy purposes, this moratorium will fail to prevent – and may well enable – a nuclear arms build-up in the sub-continent.
At the core of the problem is the fact that while Australian uranium itself will not be directly enriched for the weapons-making process, it will free up uranium derived from other, less scrupulous sources for military purposes by enlarging the net supply of nuclear material to a state which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Based on what we know about arms build-ups historically, from the pre-WWI British-Prussian naval build-up of 1870 to 1914, to the nuclear programs of Soviet Russia and the United States in the Cold War, the military expansion of one state rarely occurs without triggering a rival response from another. Given what we know historically about arms build-ups, the truly alarming prospect is not that India will have more thermonuclear weapons; it’s that it will trigger a corresponding nuclear build-up from Pakistan in response.
And therein lies the real danger: Pakistan’s government, military, and intelligence services cannot be relied upon to keep tabs on Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces. As Christopher Hitchens noted in the aftermath of Operation Geronimo, the assassination of Osama bin Laden forces two unnerving interpretations of events into the open. The world’s most infamous terrorist was discovered in a safehouse not one mile away from a Pakistani military base, in a posh resort town for the country’s military elite. Pakistan’s very own Sorrento or Noosa Heads, if you will. Now either the nation’s government, military, and intelligence service were all unaware of his presence, in which case, Al Qaeda and the Taliban have demonstrated they can effectively outmanoeuvre Pakistan’s government by hiding the world’s most wanted man right under their nose – at least until the United States discovered him. Or, far more disturbingly, the relevant authorities were aware of his presence, in which case, Taliban and Al Qaeda sympathisers would appear to have infiltrated elements of the Pakistani government, military, or intelligence service. And we want to supply the enabling factors for a nuclear arms race into this troubled region?
At the very best, the discovery of Bin Laden in Abbattobad demonstrated serious vulnerabilities in Islamabad’s security net, and in the administration of a burgeoning nuclear arsenal in the course of an arms build-up, the opportunities for one rogue weapon to slip through the net would seem to, in a word, proliferate.
Twitter: @lachlanmccall