The Aukus submarine agreement turbocharges an existing trend: the chances of Australian involvement in a direct military confrontation with China
Analysis: Chris Hipkins was bound to say it. Australia’s nuclear-powered submarines wouldn’t be welcome visitors on this side of the Tasman, and Aukus would not change New Zealand’s long-held nuclear-free policy. But he was addressing a non-existent problem.
On the one hand, it’s difficult to envisage a peacetime scenario in which Canberra would want to send one of those multi-billion dollar subsurface vessels, suited for missions well into East Asian waters, to a New Zealand port. And on the other hand, we have plenty of time to ponder the hypothetical chances of that request coming from Canberra.
Assuming no big delays (a dangerous thing to do), Australia will be waiting about a decade for the delivery of its first Virginia class submarines from the US (and then another decade before Australia builds any of the new generation submarines, the Aukus SSNs, which will also be procured by the Royal Navy).
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But that complex and expensive multi-stage deal brings a different nuclear-related challenge that touches on New Zealand’s pro-disarmament view of the world. The reactors in the Virginia class (as in some other US vessels) rely on weapons-grade highly enriched uranium.
Selling vessels with this propulsion system may not be a technical violation of the respective safeguards agreements that nuclear weapon possessing America and its non-nuclear armed ally Australia have with the International Atomic Energy Agency. But it is definitely a blow for the spirit of the nuclear non-proliferation regime which New Zealand strongly supports, and will leave the IAEA with an extra verification challenge it scarcely needs.
That’s not the only arms control issue. America’s Virginia Class vessels are festooned with highly capable Tomahawk cruise missiles which have a range of over 1000km. (And if Australia gets any of the next versions of the Virginias, there will be even more spaces available for extra Tomahawks.)
Making these missile systems available to Australia (for submarine use and also for the Hobart Class destroyers) puts the US beyond the maximum 300km range limit for missile transfers maintained by the Missile Technology Control Regime. At the 2019 plenary meeting of this sometimes overlooked and not very membered-up grouping which New Zealand hosted in Auckland, the then Justice Minister Andrew Little noted “the destabilising impact missiles and missile technology can have on regional as well as global security”.
The most likely place for an Australia-China violent confrontation is maritime East Asia. And while New Zealand’s formal and informal obligations to Australia in that more remote zone may not seem as obvious, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that they are non-existent
That’s two strikes against the arms control part of the rules-based order which we could be forgiven for assuming is central to Wellington’s view of how the world should behave. How much noise New Zealand is willing to make about these problems remains to be seen. The slow drip of old-style nuclear arms control isn’t as sexy as the campaign to ban “killer robots” or as morally charged as the quest to outlaw nuclear weapons on humanitarian grounds. And Australia is, after all, our closest and most important partner. But New Zealand’s big headache with the submarine deal is off in another direction. The Virginia Class vessels and the missiles they carry would put Australia towards the front of US war plans should armed conflict erupt with China somewhere in the East China Sea-Taiwan Strait-South China Sea area.
In such an event, parts of Australia’s Southeast Asian neighbourhood are close to the firing line whether those neighbours like it or not. In the meantime, the deeper integration of American force elements in Australia (along with the rotational Royal Navy presence) increases the importance of Down Under targets for China’s own military planners. The Aukus submarine agreement turbocharges an existing trend: the chances of Australian involvement in a direct military confrontation with China. That trend is not just a product of the choices that Canberra is making, and the intensification of the Australia-US relationship as both prepare for potential crises and war with the People’s Republic. It is also a result of China’s geopolitical intentions and the intensifying military actions that are going with them. As Australia gets ready to sends its submariners and engineers to train up with their American and British counterparts (an early part of the Aukus submarine cooperation), New Zealand has some properly big strategic thinking to do. As I have argued recently in a long article, and in a short synopsis, in the event that Australian forces end up fighting in a war with China, trans-Tasman alliance obligations might spring into action for New Zealand. On paper those obligations are strongest should Australia come under direct attack, a scenario planners in Canberra are now taking more seriously. In practice, the New Zealand-Australia alliance has been most active in the South Pacific, where Wellington and Canberra are concerned about China’s ambitions.
But the most likely place for an Australia-China violent confrontation is maritime East Asia. And while New Zealand’s formal and informal obligations to Australia in that more remote zone may not seem as obvious, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that they are non-existent. Anzus, which New Zealand has stopped talking about even though it has a trans-Tasman leg, is part of that picture. That picture may see Australia at war with China in an even deeper way thanks to the submarine plans released at San Diego. And it might also have New Zealand somewhere inside the frame.
This is an edited version of a piece that first appeared at Incline
