Australia and 'Stable Nuclear Deterrence' – Catching Up With a Changed World

Heralds of a new nuclear age are everywhere. Commentators point to the decline of relationships among the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council—the exclusive great-power club which previously constituted the main ballast of the nuclear world—and the destabilising consequences of a tripolar, potentially multipolar, nuclear order. Both within the P5¹ and beyond it, the number of nuclear weapons is increasing.

US allies everywhere confront a bevy of new problems—and those in the Indo-Pacific in particular sense a greater need for enhanced linkages to US nuclear capabilities. Some of those pressures are felt even in Australia, and new patterns of cooperation are starting to unfold. But the Australian public wouldn’t know it. Our government remains almost mute, reluctant to lead a public discussion about a new role for Australia in the new nuclear age².

Nuclear deterrence will endure, not least because the main alternatives—large-scale conventional rearmament or global disarmament—look unappealing, unachievable, or both. And that will require a new generation of Australian leaders to determine just where nuclear weapons fit in our broader strategic policy. In short, what does Australia want nuclear deterrence to prevent? I think there is a spectrum of possible answers here, ranging from deterring armed attack upon the Australian homeland, to slowing and reversing the erosion of our Defence of Australia doctrine, to helping refurbish the ordering imperative implied in making a greater contribution to Fairhall’s defence of the free world.

But history sounds a cautionary note. During the 1980s—the last decade of the Cold War—Australia’s thinking about nuclear weapons was heavily skewed by a strong preference within the Labor party for a particular kind of deterrence—namely, the narrow, supposedly stable, mutual-assured-destruction form of nuclear deterrence that excludes the idea of limited nuclear war. Moreover, the current government’s unwillingness to open up a public debate about the current and future shape of extended deterrence suggests strongly that the party hasn’t yet been able and/or willing to build a wider understanding of the subject.

Nowadays we have to dig deep to get even a clue about the main themes of the government’s thinking. Those themes were laid out before the ALP came to power in 1983. They were, for example, argued vigorously by Bill Hayden in his address to the trade union seminar on disarmament, held at the Graphic Arts Club in Sydney in June 1982.

Nuclear weapons, said Hayden, posed a great danger to the world. Nuclear disarmament would be the best solution, but disarmament wasn’t close. In the meantime, deterrence was the principal restraint on nuclear use. But deterrence was under challenge: from technological change and employment doctrines that put increasing weight on actual nuclear use. If nuclear weapons were meant solely to deter, said Hayden, ‘Weapons such as cruise missiles, maneuverable re-entry vehicles, missiles with hard-target capability such as the SS-18, MX and Trident II, would be unnecessary. The development of space-age anti-missile capabilities such as charged particle beams and lasers could be dis-continued, as could ABM systems. Killer satellites would be unnecessary.’⁵

Readers can see in that list harbingers of some difficult moments to come in the alliance relationship: the tensions that surrounded the proposed MX-missile testing, for example, and the opposition to Reagan’s SDI proposal (now resurrected by President Trump). In his Evatt memorial lecture in July 1983, Hayden—now foreign minister—repeated Labor’s commitment to a stable nuclear future: ‘We want to see the leadership of the two super powers regain control of technology rather than allow it to be the driving force towards a nuclear disaster.’⁶ A tall order. Nor did Labor’s ambitions stop there: ‘We want to see the abandonment of doctrines which encourage the belief that there can be a winner in nuclear war…The super powers have moved a long way from the doctrine of “assured destruction”…’

In January 1984, in an address entitled ‘War is Peace’, Hayden repeated his argument:

‘until better systems of restraint are in place aimed at leading to nuclear arms control and disarmament I accept that the principle of deterrence is the only practical option available to avoid serious international nuclear instability and overt nuclear conflict…I believe it would be immoral for Australia not to contribute what she properly can in support of arms verification, arms control and deterrence as concrete inputs into a very imperfect but the only available system of nuclear restraint.’⁷

This definition of stable deterrence would not support doctrines advocating nuclear warfighting—even though by the 1980s they were already a hallmark of nuclear planning in NATO. In Hayden’s argument, stable deterrence was founded upon the belief that nuclear war could not be limited: that any crossing of the nuclear threshold would inevitably result in automatic escalation into a larger, more destructive global conflict.

As Hayden put it in his 1984 speech, ‘The Government rejects any concept of controlled, limited or winnable nuclear war and urges the abandonment of such concepts.’⁸

That belief is too categorical. The likely reality is that nuclear war would sometimes be limited and other times not. To set the argument in a broader context, readers might wish to contrast Hayden’s position with that of Michael Quinlan, the British civil servant responsible for much of British and European thinking about nuclear deterrence. Quinlan fundamentally believed in ‘the non-automaticity of escalation (which he described as not a “set of mindless spasms but a sequence of human choices which are not predetermined)”.’⁹

Still, credit where it’s due. The idea of such ‘good’ deterrence gave the ALP a platform which allowed the party to support the joint facilities. Their roles—including contributing to a resilient communications network in support of US ballistic-missile-carrying submarines, early warning of ballistic-missile launch, and verification of arms control—fitted well under the ‘stable’ deterrence model. But as Hayden told the trade union seminar, ‘we are prepared to accept these facilities only insofar as they are genuinely part of a stable system of nuclear deterrence; we will have no part of any specious doctrines of limited nuclear war’. Still, the reality was then, and is now, that Australia does have a part in such doctrines, and that part is growing as the strategic complexion of the Indo-Pacific changes.

Moreover, the concept of stable deterrence allowed the ALP to offer guarded support for the doctrine of nuclear deterrence itself. As Hayden said, deterrence was the only restraint that worked in preventing the use of nuclear weapons, and the ALP was not so foolish as to walk away from that. But neither did that stop the party wishing for a particular form of deterrence. To put it in Bob Hawke’s words, ‘Deterrence can be pursued through any means of convincing a potential aggressor that he would face unacceptable costs, but stability requires discrimination and restraint.’¹⁰ In short, Australia, living in a region of the world characterised by Western conventional superiority, enjoyed the luxury of choosing how it wanted deterrence to be portrayed.

In 1989, Gareth Evans spoke to the National Press Club on the style of Australian foreign policy, identifying the joint facilities as a critical contribution to the maintenance of global security: ‘they expose us to risk, as we have acknowledged, but these facilities, with their early warning and verification capacity, are crucially important in both maintaining a system of stable nuclear deterrence and in creating the preconditions for disarmament and arms control agreements.’¹¹

It would be wrong for readers to imagine that this view of deterrence ended with the end of the Cold War. See Gareth Evans’ answer to a question without notice from Dee Margetts in 1994: ‘In order to manage the possession but non-use of these weapons until such disarmament is achieved, the Australian Government, along with most others around the world, has supported the principle of stable deterrence—that is, a deterrence based on the perception that any first use of nuclear weapons would be met with a sufficiently large retaliation as to render unattractive such a first strike.

Obviously support for that principle is premised upon acquiescence to possession and the threat of use of nuclear weapons, provided that such possession and threat of use is directed to the purpose of deterrence of the use of nuclear weapons by someone else. I do stress that the Government, while supporting stable deterrence, does so only as an interim measure until nuclear disarmament is achieved.’¹²

Paul Keating’s speech to the House of Representatives in 1995 advocating a world without nuclear weapons rehearsed the same point: ‘We acknowledge the need, as we always have, for a system of stable deterrence to be maintained while the reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons is being achieved.’¹³ True, the report of the Canberra Commission was considerably less generous in its coverage of deterrence, but the commission was merely a collection of individuals, not the ALP.

So, what’s the point of exploring this 40-year-old, historical path? The objective is to better illuminate the current dilemma confronting the Labor government in relation to nuclear issues. The Cold War came to an end with the Labor party in government in Australia, and thinking about nuclear deterrence largely stalled at that time. Australian policy efforts turned to arms control and disarmament.

Still, the foundations of the stable nuclear deterrence model endured. The core of that thinking can still be seen in the Rudd government’s Defence White Paper of 2009. In paragraph 4.59, for example, the white paper states, ‘It is the Government’s judgement that stable nuclear deterrence will continue to be a feature of the international system for the foreseeable future, and in this context extended deterrence will continue to be viable.’ Some readers might think that the simple use of the adjective ‘stable’ is an insufficient basis upon which to claim a link back to Hayden’s speech to the Graphic Arts Club in 1982. I would invite those readers to turn to paragraph 9.103 of the same white paper:

‘The Government is opposed to the development of a unilateral national missile defence system by any nation because such a system would be at odds with the maintenance of global nuclear deterrence. We would be especially concerned at developments that might undercut the deterrent value of the strategic nuclear forces of the major nuclear powers, and especially the viability of their second strike capabilities.’

That White Paper was published 26 years after President Reagan had proposed his Strategic Defense Initiative, and 7 years after President Bush had quit the ABM treaty.

In May 2011, Gareth Evans delivered remarks to the European Leadership Network, under the heading ‘Towards Safer and More Stable Nuclear Deterrence’, Evans pushed for movement in three key areas: de-alerting of nuclear forces, doctrinal changes to include no-first-use and sole-purpose pledges, and down-sizing of nuclear arsenals.’¹⁴ All three proposals fit neatly under the stable deterrence model that Hayden unpacked almost thirty years before.

But the stable deterrence doctrine does not fit with Western strategic practice. It never did. And it has proven an increasingly impractical, unrealistic policy guide since the 1980s. As missile technology, especially accuracy, has advanced, and the key features of a new Asian strategic order have become more prominent—especially the growth of China’s conventional capabilities—so too have issues related to a joint allied understanding of potential nuclear thresholds across the theatre. With extended deterrence now being leveraged in different ways, Australian policymakers should feel increasingly obliged to confront questions that the stable deterrence model was never designed to answer. The issues of evolving weaponry—would a theatre-range, low-yield, nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile (a SLCM) help or hurt regional deterrence?—sit alongside increasing discussion of what Hayden termed ‘the specious doctrines of limited nuclear war’.

To address those issues, Australia needs to put its own conceptual house in order. It can do so by focusing upon two principal issues—namely, those logical weaknesses and unrealities which lay at the heart of stable deterrence, swirling in particular around theatre-range nuclear systems and the doctrinal changes necessary to give them leverage.

Readers with some familiarity with the field of nuclear deterrence might reasonably see the stable deterrence model as one variant of minimum deterrence. Minimum deterrence advocates come in a variety of hues, but they are characterised by an all-or-nothing approach to nuclear use, with relatively small numbers of weapons trained upon counter-value targets, such as large cities. Minimum deterrence doctrines aim to prevent any crossing of the nuclear threshold by holding as hostage the civilian populations of both sides, deliberately ensuring a brutal choice for any future decision-maker between peace and Armageddon—echoing Hayden’s 1982 observation that ‘nuclear war is the immersion of mankind and civilisation in a vast torrent of death’.¹⁵

But the real problem with the concept of stable nuclear deterrence is that it is so out of touch with the strategic environment of the past few decades, and with today’s.

Increasingly, Australia finds itself staring down the barrel of an adverse conventional force balance. Moreover, China’s building a nuclear arsenal designed for the possibility of limited nuclear war¹⁶.Increasingly too, Australia finds itself confronting autocratic powers determined to exercise nuclear threats, and possibly use, for coercive advantage. Nowadays, government ministers don’t talk much about mutual assured destruction, but nor do they acknowledge changed times. After Labor’s triumph at the recent general election, it will confront increasing pressure to think anew about nuclear issues.

Dr. Rod Lyon is one of Australia’s foremost and respected strategists, who focuses on global security, nuclear strategy and Australia.  This article, originally published in GeoMasters, is republished with the permission of its author.

Endnotes:

1 United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia (as a successor to the USSR), and the People’s Republic of China.

2 As in nuclear weapons strategy, as opposed to the civilian nuclear energy use, which has dominated recent public debate in Australia.

3 Allen Fairhall, Official Hansard, House of Representatives, 29 April 1969, p.1416.

4 For readers of Geomastery Missives, recall some of our missives; China, China, China, India and Pakistan, and Subsea Cables.

5 Bill Hayden, Opening Address to Trade Union Seminar on Disarmament at the Graphic Arts Club, Sydney, 28 June 1982, p.5. For those readers interested in the broader views of nuclear weapons in the Australian environment, see Leah, C., & Lyon, R. (2010). Three visions of the bomb: Australian thinking about nuclear weapons and strategy. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 64(4), 449–477.

6 Bill Hayden, The Evatt Memorial Address, 9 July 1983 (check). p.4.

7 Bill Hayden, ‘War is peace’, Address at the University of Western Australia’s 56^th Summer School, 18 January 1984, p.10

8 Bill Hayden, ‘War is peace’, p.14.

9 Tanya Ogilvie-White, On nuclear deterrence: the correspondence of Sir Michael Quinlan, IISS, London, 2011, p.105

10 Robert Hawke, Ministerial Statement on Arms Control and Disarmament, House of Representatives, Official Hansard, 6 June 1984, pp.2982-2989, at p.2988.

11 Gareth Evans, ‘The style of foreign policy’, Address to the National Press Club, 29 September 1989, p.10

12 Gareth Evans, House of Representatives, Official Hansard, 2 June 1994, p.1206

13 Paul Keating, Ministerial Statement on Australia and a World without Nuclear Weapons, House of Representatives, Official Hansard, 26 October 1995, pp.3059-3064, at p.3062.

14 Gareth Evans, ‘Towards Safer and More Stable Nuclear Deterrence’, Remarks to the European Leadership Network/Nuclear Threat Initiative/Hoover Institution Conference on Deterrence, London, 21 May 2011.

15 Hayden, Graphic Arts Club speech, p.2.

16 Andrew Erickson, ‘What the Pentagon’s new report on Chinese military power reveals about capabilities, context, and consequences’, War on the Rocks, 19 December 2024