Pacific Apprehension Toward AUKUS

The big ticket item of the new AUKUS defense pact between Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom is the provision of eight new nuclear-powered submarines to the Australian defense force. Australia had previously negotiated a deal for conventionally powered submarines with France, but Canberra assessed that those diesel-electric submarines would be insufficient for Australia’s needs. This upgrading of Australia’s capabilities has clearly been devised with China in mind, but will also be watched closely by other countries in the Indo-Pacific, in particular Australia’s Pacific Island neighbors.

Given the region’s history of being used as a testing ground for nuclear weapons by both the United States and French governments, Pacific Island countries have an ingrained suspicion of all nuclear technology. Many of the atolls used for these tests are still suffering the ongoing effects of their toxic remains. In 1985, most of the region’s countries signed the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty – commonly known as the Treaty of Rarotonga – that banned the use, testing, and possession of nuclear weapons within the region.

Nuclear-powered submarines are obviously different from nuclear weapons, requiring far less enrichment of uranium and utilized in an entirely different manner. Yet there are potential knock-on effects from the acquisition that trouble Pacific Island countries.

In order to facilitate this deal Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom are utilizing a loophole in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The loophole provides an exemption from regular nuclear safeguards for naval reactors. There is a belief among those who are staunch in their opposition to nuclear proliferation that this omission undermines one of the central aims of the treaty to limit the use of any enriched uranium – weapons-grade or otherwise – because the process enables the creation of nuclear weapons.

Alongside this, given that Australia has the largest known uranium deposits in the world there remains the temptation that Canberra will seek to take advantage of this resource for its own local nuclear manufacturing capabilities. The acquisition of nuclear-power submarines heightens this temptation.

For Pacific Island states, which are already concerned about Australia’s reluctance to phase out its coal industry, the potential for the rise of a new industry that they also consider a serious threat in Australia compounds their disappointment in Canberra’s current trajectory.

Despite the fanfare around Australia’s “Pacific Step-Up” – its foreign policy reengagement with Pacific Island countries – Canberra still fails to give enough respect to the region’s guiding collective conceptual framework, the Blue Pacific. This is the attempt of Pacific Island countries to reframe themselves as “large ocean states,” rather than “small island states.” It places the health of the Pacific Ocean as its primary objective.

The defining outline of the Blue Pacific concept was a speech delivered by then-Samoan Prime Minister Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi at the United Nations Oceans Conference in New York in June 2017, titled “Our Values and Identity as Stewards of the World’s Largest Oceanic Continent.” In the speech, Tuila’epa outlined how the vast Pacific Ocean is central to the region’s way of life and how it has shaped the cultural and historical identity of island nations. Tuila’epa stated that this creates an “inseparable link between our ocean, seas, and Pacific Island peoples: their values, traditional practices and spiritual connections.”

It is this guardianship that Pacific Island nations feel toward the Pacific Ocean that has driven their opposition to nuclear technology. The general consensus is that nuclear technology in any form has the potential to lead toward the development of nuclear weapons. Pacific Island states would no doubt be highly aware that there is an ongoing debate in Australia’s foreign policy and defense communities about whether Australia should acquire nuclear weapons itself. In these debates, the more independent foreign policy it would buy Canberra is weighted against the cascading nuclear arms race it may create in the Asian region.

The fact that these issues are frequently discussed in Australia is enough to make the Pacific nervous. The AUKUS pact may arouse suspicions that this trajectory is starting to unfold.

Canberra continually stresses that it is sympathetic to the Pacific’s concerns, but its inclination to inject itself into strategic competition between the larger and more powerful states means that its actions often contradict its rhetoric. The AUKUS pact has already trampled on the feet of a major strategic partner in France. Canberra should have known that it would create serious waves within its Pacific family as well.