Jack Waterford | We don't need nuclear subs or a war with China

It's one with the sickening performance of Anthony Albanese with the Indian prime minister this week. There may be merit in having better relations - even a loose alliance - with India. It's a country with which we share much history and tradition. But its prime minister, Narendra Modi runs a government every bit as authoritarian as China. We deserve more from our prime minister than participation in a Modi election rally disguised as cricket. It was as unworthy of an Australian leader as Scott Morrison's love-in with a campaigning Donald Trump.

Expect more self-abasement in San Diego as Albanese outlines details of the subs deal. It's being sold as bipartisan, although Morrison did not consult Labor while he negotiated AUKUS in 2021. Labor has done nothing to naturalise it, or to make it better for Australian interests.

Down the track it will bankrupt us. This is not because Australia cannot afford a mere $200 billion or more - and the deal will cost us all of that. It's because our nation won't be able to sustain the nuclear industry and workforce that having the submarines will require. Attempting to do so will seriously distort and deform the Australian workforce, education system and armed forces, and massively reduce the nation's economically competitive position. That may not trouble our AUKUS allies, who may even benefit economically by contracting to us the expertise and the capacity, though, alas, at the cost to Australia of the sovereignty and control that the Prime Minister and Defence Minister, both dills in the national security arena, insist will be enhanced.

It's a complete dud from a strategic point of view, neither enhancing our defensive or offensive potential in any actual war, nor our clout while at peace. It makes us more, not less, vulnerable in a large-scale confrontation with China, or any other major potential future enemy, such as, say, India or Japan. With or without the US as a potential ally in case of attack, our risk of being separated from the herd and attacked alone is almost as great as of Australia being the major casualty in an outright confrontation with a nuclear-armed power. It could be over Taiwan, some push by China into the Pacific, or Japan-style into a Greater South China Sea Co-Prosperity Sphere.

They increase the risk of a conflict going nuclear - in which case everyone loses. But even in conventional war, China retains great advantages of mass, shortness of communications, supplies, armed forces, and we now know, ammunition and munitions. Duels with particular missile types, breeds of aircraft or secret super-weapons may determine some local outcomes, but victory most often goes to the strongest with the greatest reserves of power. With or without our allies, we are outgunned.

Having Britain in the mix, either through AUKUS, NATO or the western alliance, is unlikely to make a difference. For them it's on the other side of the world, and for the first time in more than 70 years, against a power militarily and economically (and socially) stronger than it. A "war" would probably be over before British might arrived on the scene.

As we have seen again in the past week, any number of Australian commentators and advisers are awfully keen to promote a confrontation with China. That's why the Australian government seems so keen to conclude the AUKUS subs' deal, which provides the illusion that there will be, at least some years away, a greater amount of Australian defensive - maybe offensive - power to throw into a brawl.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are promoting the idea that war is inevitable, possibly desirable. It might happen in the next three years, in which case, they say, we are woefully unprepared. Journalist Peter Hartcher gathered the usual suspects, mostly from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, to agree with him that the outlook was grim. China was becoming more and more aggressive, assertive and angry at us and the US. Australia would be greatly damaged if it got to blows now, so we must re-arm at an even more frantic pace, search desperately and with fewer and fewer inhibitions for allies, and, in particular, bind ourselves even more uncritically to the US.

The major irritant for much of the verbal hostility manifested by China has been relentless abuse and provocations from Australian statesmen, journalists and two-bit bureaucrats. Sometimes even from Albanese to prove he's no patsy. The noise from Australia has been encouraged by the US, which is engaged in a trade war (one it seems to be losing) with China. Australian subservience to American defence interests is such that we are always pathetically grateful at being assigned the role of pig in the minefield, seemingly unaware that this is so that the return fire mostly comes in our direction. We know our staunchest friend will help us if China does us wrong. They will too. When we annoyed China to the point where it cancelled its barley imports from Australia, our loyal ally stepped up and sold its barley to China instead.

Some Australians think that the deal, even before a single sub has been delivered, puts us in the big league - one of only six nations with nuclear subs. But it reduces rather than enlarges us, even if one could imagine as true, as Albanese asserts, the Albanese illusion that Australia would have absolute sovereign power over our subs we get. Their value, as against China could come only from a common organised deployment, probably close to China's shores. The more that is so, the less they are a casual deterrent to anyone else. The enormous cost diminishes our capacity for a more balanced defence. And one day, which may be sooner rather than later, the stealth capacity of submarines will disappear in the face of modern detection technology.

The defence debate is dominated by a military-intelligence-industrial complex steeped in the common beliefs of players in the western alliance. Spiritually, intellectually, and sometimes morally, these call Washington home. You must be an indoctrinated believer to play. Our players see most issues from the perspectives and feelings of its guardians. It is not that they have rejected their own nation. But they see Australia's interests and fortunes as so intrinsically bound up with the interests and fortunes of the US that it is unthinkable that we should do anything against them. Indeed they worry that the US might be a fair-weather friend only unless we indulge it. It might abandon and betray us in a tough spot, as John F. Kennedy did over Indonesia and Irian Jaya in 1963.

Our preferred role, thus, is to always seem more tough and resolute on western alliance issues than almost anyone else. The first to volunteer to put troops alongside Americans, whatever the strength of their cause and however little it affects our own interests. It is better to be seen as America's poodle than to be naked and alone. We had no quarrel with Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria worth going to war over in our own right. We went to war only to please America.

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High priests of western alliance theology dominate our intelligence establishment. Indeed the ones currently advising Albanese are precisely the same ones, then regarded as partisans with strong right-wing views advising Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton. They are not apolitical. The overall head of the intelligence system, Andrew Shearer, is an ideological warrior from all the right think tanks, and Labor folk said as much when they were in opposition. He, and a good many from ASPI have views closely aligned with the Americans they have worked alongside all of their professional lives. They instinctively see, and usually promote, the American point of view. A small number are rather more eccentric, but whatever their chumminess with current Labor ministers, their views are usually right wing, formed from a lifetime of western alliance considerations, and dismissive of local considerations, particularly about human rights. It really is time that Labor got itself some new advisers. Even ones from the middle of the road would be a vast improvement.

But aggravating everything - perhaps our greatest national security scandal - is a political rather than a strategic problem. It is the moral cowardice of the Labor Party and its leaders going back to Kim Beazley in 2001. Labor fears accusations from the Liberal Party that it is "soft", "weak" or "unsound" on national security matters, in part because it lacks the ticker to make "hard decisions." It's macho stuff. The pussies in Labor are thus reluctant to differ by a millimetre from the Coalition on defence, foreign affairs and national security lest they be accused of treason. They duck every debate on national security. They are scared of having views of their own. Australian views. Even more scared of debating them in the open. The most reactionary and closed-minded advisers, demagogues and commentators, and, in most media, journalists well briefed by insiders are dominating the debate. No one from Labor ever contradicts them.

By about 2033 Australia will need a small nuclear industry to build and maintain the new nuclear subs coming online. No doubt the Brits and the Americans will lend us some specialists, but we must be starting now creating an elite workforce of about 50,000 engineers and scientists within 10 years. All trained and educated to PhD standards. And at least another 50,000 highly skilled and university trained technicians to work alongside them, sometimes at sea.

This is not a workforce that can be cobbled together from closing down a car industry. If the mining industry is to be regarded as a likely source of initial recruits, at least someone must be thinking how that increasingly specialised and highly trained workforce is to be replaced. That's assuming that a blissfully ignorant China still wants to import our minerals so as to provide us with the wherewithal to pay for our great nuclear project.

At the moment our navy cannot manage to recruit enough highly skilled sailors to staff more than two much smaller and less technically demanding submarines at any one time. Luckily, the current navy is scarcely able to keep more than two subs afloat, as it were, simultaneously. It will need to have six times as many, and from a cohort of young Australians that will probably be smaller 10 years hence.

Those planning this workforce should factor in a high attrition rate. Probably of about 80 per cent before they are of any use. Some won't be up to the intellectual requirements, or will lack the perseverance at their studies, or later, the discipline required for working in a national security job. Others may well find themselves lured to other areas of industry or research, after the expensive education lavished on them. Many may find that their new skills give them social and economic opportunities that neither the navy, defence industry, and defence contractors, can match. Some will be lured away to work in the mature American, British, French and German nuclear industries, including in nuclear power generation.

The academic and vocational institutions required to provide the training will, of course, have to be built largely from scratch, as will the teaching expertise. The cost of training and staffing the new submarines, or the academic factories necessary to process them, has not been factored into the cost equations.

A target of producing perhaps 15,000 extra engineers and scientists, focused on matters nuclear, may not seem an impossible ask. But they have to come from somewhere, and at the expense of other industries who want such people of ability. The supply of matriculants is steadying. So too teachers and facilities. The ask would not be as great if we could manage absurd rates of attrition, suggesting either that we are training the wrong people or failing to provide them with the jobs, conditions, lifestyles, support and work satisfactions they want.

Some will immediately guess that Australia could have itself a decent nuclear power industry if we had a critical mass of nuclear scientists. We have ample uranium. Perhaps we could even be developing nuclear bombs, with the result, assuming that the Americans and the Brits were not horrified, that our submarines were even more integrated with the same "deterrent" and thus get economies of scale. We might have to ignore non-proliferation treaties.

That's what comes from a domestic nuclear industry capable of producing nuclear submarines, and of maintaining the power plant needed to put them to sea for extended periods. Plus, of providing a base for allied submarines fleets, with repair facilities. We might have to sacrifice action on climate change, if only to subsidise operations by coal sales to India.

It could, some might think fundamentally change the game, and Australian manufacturing potential. Well it could, perhaps, assuming that the marginal cost of nuclear power was less than the marginal cost of solar, or wind, or even gas or coal power. And that after somehow forgetting the capital cost of such a power plant, or the still unresolved problem of how to dispose of used nuclear fuel. It's the opportunity cost - the things one could be doing instead without spending the money - that we should be focused on.