Three months before Bob Hawke joined with Pacific leaders in the Cook Islands to sign a landmark new anti-nuclear treaty, the local newspaper carried an arresting headline.
“PACIFIC – A REGION OF ‘PEACE’ – AND BOMBS FOR FRANCE,” thundered the Cook Islands News on Saturday 11 May 1985.
The French defence minister had turned up in Noumea to declare the country had no enemies in the Pacific – but the platitudes were greeted with scepticism because just hours earlier France had carried out its 69th nuclear test in French Polynesia.
These heightened concerns permeated the region in the months leading up to the crucial meeting in the Cook Islands in August 1985 where leaders endorsed a nuclear-free zone.
Hawke, the Australian prime minister at the time, hailed the negotiations as a “dramatic success” that would send “a clear and unequivocal message to the world”, with the treaty leaving major powers in no doubt about the region’s desire to preserve “the South Pacific as the peaceful region which its name implies”.
But nearly 40 years after the Treaty of Rarotonga came into force, the region is on edge about another rise in geopolitical tensions – and critics say gaps in the treaty’s coverage are now being exploited.
“The treaty was really important to a lot of people, especially for grassroots activists,” says Talei Mangioni, a Fijian-Australian board member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Australia.
“But it was quite watered down. And so even though we celebrate it today, what activists were saying in the 1980s and what progressive states like Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu were saying was that it wasn’t comprehensive enough.”
Mangioni, who researches the legacy of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement, adds: “That’s what’s left us now with things like Aukus exploiting certain loopholes that have remained in the treaty.”
A hotbed of great-power competition?
When leaders met last week in the Cook Islands for the annual meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum (Pif), the Treaty of Rarotonga was once again on everyone’s lips.
The host of the summit, prime minister Mark Brown of the Cook Islands, argued the region “should rediscover and revisit our Rarotonga treaty to ensure that it reflects the concerns of Pacific countries today, and not just what occurred back in 1985”.
The treaty – signed on the 40th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima – reflected “the deep concern of all forum members at the continuing nuclear arms race and the risk of nuclear war”.
Also known as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, it designated a vast area from the west coast of Australia to Latin America where its parties must prevent the “stationing” (critics say this was always a deliberately ambiguous word) of nuclear weapons.
“The treaty prohibits the use, testing or stationing of nuclear explosive devices in the South Pacific,” the Cook Islands News explained on 7 August 1985.
“It does not prohibit countries from transporting nuclear devices through the zone nor does it prohibit nuclear-powered or equipped ships from calling in ports within the area.”
Today the parties to this treaty are Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
Once again, many of these nations are worried about the Pacific becoming a hotbed of great-power competition and the risk of that spiralling into conflict. Aukus feeds into some of those fears.
“We regret that the Aukus agreement … is escalating geopolitical tensions in our region and undermining Pacific-led nuclear-free regionalism,” says the Pacific Elders’ Voice, a group of former leaders whose members include Anote Tong, the ex-president of Kiribati.
The legality of a treaty – and the spirit of it
Under the Aukus plan, Australia will buy at least three Virginia class nuclear-powered submarines from the US in the 2030s, before Australian-built boats enter into service from the 2040s.
In the meantime, the US and the UK will increase rotations of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, all aimed at deterring China from unilateral action against Taiwan or destabilising activities in the increasingly contested South China Sea.
One point of sensitivity is that it will be the first time a provision of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime has been used to transfer naval nuclear propulsion technology from a nuclear weapons state to a non-weapons state.
The Australian government has worked assiduously behind the scenes to reassure Pacific leaders on a key point about Aukus.
“Certainly when I was talking to people about it I would explain how it was consistent with the Treaty of Rarotonga,” says the Australian minister for the Pacific, Pat Conroy.
Donald Rothwell, a professor of international law at the Australian National University, concurs. The treaty, he notes, does not deal with nuclear-propelled submarines.
“My view is that Aukus is consistent with Australia’s Treaty of Rarotonga obligations,” Rothwell says.
“Pacific states may have concerns about the potential stationing of US and UK nuclear-armed warships in Australian ports under Aukus. The stationing of such vessels, as opposed to port visits, would be contrary to the treaty.”
The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, sought to allay any Aukus-related concerns when he briefed Pacific leaders during the Pif meetings last week and appears to have held off any open rebellion.
Albanese insists the treaty remains “a good document” and “all of the arrangements that we’ve put in place have been consistent with that”.
But anti-nuclear campaigners point to the planned new aircraft parking apron at the Tindal base in the Northern Territory that will be able to accommodate up to six US B-52 bombers.
The US refuses to confirm or deny whether the aircraft on rotation would be nuclear-armed, in line with longstanding policy.
“We should delineate between a legalistic interpretation of the Treaty of Rarotonga and the spirit of it,” says Marco de Jong, a Pacific historian based in Aotearoa New Zealand.
“Pacific nations are growing increasingly frustrated at Australia’s reliance on loopholes and technicalities.”
Australia: the regional outlier
The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons says a good way for Australia to reassure the region about its long-term intentions would be to sign the newer Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
This is an idea Albanese previously supported enthusiastically but which appears stalled.
One potential problem is that the US has warned that the TPNW – which includes a blanket ban on helping others to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons – wouldn’t allow for close allies like Australia to enjoy the protection of the American “nuclear umbrella”.
Documents obtained by the Guardian under freedom of information laws show the Australian defence department has warned the Labor government that the TPNW is “internationally divisive” because the nuclear weapons states “are all opposed”.
But Mangioni, a member of the Youngsolwara Pacific movement of activists, counters that Pacific countries rushed to join the TPNW six years ago, reflecting their longstanding concerns about nuclear testing legacies. It’s the same regional sentiment that spurred the earlier Treaty of Rarotonga.
“I would say that Australia is indeed the outlier compared to the rest of the Pacific states,” Mangioni says.
“Australia depends on nuclear deterrence as its policy but the rest of the Pacific states are nuclear abolitionists.”
