From Ore to AUKUS, normalising the spread of militarised nuclear technologies
The AUKUS deal to acquire nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs) from the United Kingdom and the United States enjoys bipartisan support in Australia. Some may regard Labor as the anti-nuclear party, a posture most recently reinforced in opposition to Peter Dutton’s doomed nuclear energy plan. (ALP policies are examined in detail below.) Beneath this mirage, however, a history of progressive techno-optimism paired with a pragmatic approach to Australia’s uranium resources reveals a pro-nuclear proclivity within the Labor Party, harking back to the Whitlam government era. In the mid-1970s, under the influence of Minister Rex Connor, Labor envisioned an advanced domestic nuclear energy industry for Australia. This blueprint for energy sovereignty disregarded the eco-ethical anti-nuclear arguments espoused by a growing segment of Labor’s base. Nuclear technology has long been viewed by Labor’s policy-makers as a legitimate means of pursuing policy goals. AUKUS does not undermine Labor’s traditional nuclear posture; rather, it exposes it. Crucially, the nuclear-powered submarines will exploit nuclear energy for military purposes, subverting the division of peaceful and militarised nuclear technologies upon which global nuclear regulations rely. This willingness to disrupt international norms reveals how far Australia will go to remain relevant to the United States’ warmongering objectives in the Asia-Pacific.
Australia has been a major producer of uranium for more than seventy years. The continent holds the world’s greatest reserves of uranium ore, but production accounts for less than 10 per cent of global consumption. This discrepancy is a result of the history of public debate between pro- and anti-nuclear activists in Australia, both in civil society and political institutions. This debate situates Australian uranium mining within the global nuclear industry. It therefore associates uranium exports with the nuclear reactors and bombs produced following the sophisticated modification of raw uranium ore. Consequently, the ethical and political discourse around uranium mining from the 1970s through to the 1990s accounted for potential nuclear uses of Australian uranium overseas. Because of this, it has long been evident in Australia that uranium is nuclear. Yet internationally, uranium has regularly been stripped of its nuclear character. The nations that mine it—most former colonies, many underdeveloped—have been excluded from participating in global nuclear discourse. The advanced procedures involved in the nuclear fuel cycle, rather than the unrefined primary mineral, are what carry the technical and political gravitas of ‘nuclearity’ on the international stage.
As of September 2021, however, through the acquisition of the SSNs, Australia will receive the product of these advanced nuclearising processes. At a cost of $368 billion, AUKUS will link Australia to the global nuclear industry, a sphere from which uranium-mining nations have traditionally been excluded due to the absence of sophisticated uranium-processing facilities on domestic soil. Nuclear reactors embedded on military vessels epitomise the fraught, dual-use nature of nuclear technologies and reveal the flaws of an international nuclear order that has depended on a clean division between peaceful and weaponised applications of nuclear science. As a minor player in the global nuclear order, Australia’s acquisition of SSNs—the first non-nuclear weapons state to do so—has the potential to permanently disrupt nuclear norms, here and elsewhere. Efforts by Brazil and South Korea to acquire nuclear-powered submarines in the wake of AUKUS are an early indicator of this reality.
The Australian Labor Party is resolutely opposed to nuclear power for civil purposes in Australia. Australia remains a non-nuclear-weapon country under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Moreover, in 2018, and again in 2021 and 2023, Labor made public commitments to sign and ratify a new treaty, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) or ‘Ban Treaty’. Signed by more than ninety countries, the TPNW proposes a new nuclear order in which disarmament is obligatory and nuclear weapons are made globally illegal, without exception. Although the NPT has been remarkably successful in limiting nuclear proliferation, the five nuclear-weapon states enshrined in the NPT have made little meaningful progress on disarmament. The Ban Treaty offers an alternative multilateral framework to pursue a world without nuclear weapons. Yet this new treaty conflicts with key tenets of Australia’s security alliance with the United States, which is motivated at least in part by the United States’ status as a nuclear weapons country—a status whose validity is threatened by the TPNW.
When Labor gained power in May 2022, it could have nipped the nascent AUKUS deal in the bud. But the enthusiasm with which Defence Minister Richard Marles has pursued the AUKUS deal, including $1.6 billion in non-refundable gifts already paid to the sluggish US shipbuilding industry (Ben Doherty, ‘Australia pays US another $800m for AUKUS amid Trump administration review of security pact’, The Guardian, 23 July 2025), unlikely to deliver the necessary quota of submarines, has killed off any hope of a swift exit. Despite Labor’s professed hostility to domestic nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, the AUKUS program, which will unite nuclear energy with military objectives, is condoned and even championed. Moreover, the Albanese government has persistently acquiesced to the US policy of strategic ambiguity, whereby the presence of nuclear weapons aboard its ships and aircraft is neither confirmed nor denied. This raises the possibility that Australia could act as a launchpad for US nuclear operations either through B-52 bombers on rotation at RAAF Tindal in the Northern Territory or via allied submarines docked in Perth. And yet, the transit of nuclear weapons through Australia is incompatible with the TPNW that Labor enthusiastically and publicly supported. Australia’s AUKUS commitments contradict Albanese’s promise to sign and ratify the TPNW. This quiet abandonment, coupled with subdued compliance with US policy and resolute pursuit of AUKUS, makes for a contradictory posture, with Labor playing both sides of the nuclear debate.
This is not the first Labor government to project greater nuclearisation. As early as the late 1950s, ALP foreign policy urged domestic stockpiling of uranium ore ‘to ensure this country’s self-sufficiency in time of emergency or conflict’. The 1971 National Platform supported the construction of nuclear power plants in Australia. Labor’s pro-nuclear bent peaked during the Whitlam government under the influence of Minister for Minerals and Energy Rex Connor. At that time, an expanding global industry made nuclear power a seemingly obvious policy for achieving national energy sovereignty, given Australia’s ample natural resources. Once elected, however, Connor ceased uranium exports from Australia. Ending exports was a key anti-nuclear objective of the period as the movement gained support from union groups representing a significant Labor contingent (Tom O’Lincoln, ‘Leave it in the Ground: Union Bans and Uranium Exports in the 1970s’, The Commons). But Connor’s own emphasis was on an embargo that would help to grow Australia’s domestic nuclear energy industry, rather than simply disengage from the global nuclear economy. He envisioned a nationalised nuclear energy sector defined by technological independence, manufacturing power and resource exclusivity. The major elements of his blueprint were a strong uranium stockpile increasing in value as global interest in nuclear power expanded, a government-owned enrichment facility and uranium mill, and partially nationalised mining companies. Nuclear optimism here doubled as nuclear pragmatism, and this complemented the Whitlam government’s trend towards increased national independence, infamously including greater scrutiny of US military operations and activities in Australia.
Evidently, this vision never eventuated. Connor’s nuclear ambitions were embroiled in the 1974-75 ‘Loans Affair’ and relegated to a footnote in Australian Labor history by the subsequent ousting of the Whitlam government. Undoubtedly, much like any hint of pursuing sovereignty over, or the closure of, Pine Gap, Connor’s uranium embargo would have been very unpopular with US and UK allies, benefiting as they did from Australia’s mineral exports and military outposts. In Clinton Fernandes’ 2018 Island off the Coast of Asia, he argues that the bipartisan structure of Australia’s foreign policy seeks economic security for private enterprise, the basis of the nation’s wealth. Australia’s political and military support for the US war objectives in Malaysia, Korea and Vietnam (staving off the ‘red wave’ of communism) aimed to maintain a US-dominated economic order in which Australia would be rewarded as a raw materials exporter. Australia’s foreign policy relation to the United States is crucially both economic and military: economically, Australia is a loyal exporter of raw materials for industry; militarily, it provides political support and material resources for conflicts that maintain this economic structure. It is thanks to this relationship that Australia is an outlier in its position within the global nuclear order. Whereas many uranium-producing nations have been excluded from nuclear discourses, Australia has enjoyed a comparatively privileged political and technical position in international nuclear affairs. Notably, through the reception of a research reactor from the United Kingdom as early as 1956.
AUKUS should be understood within this broader economic and historical context of Australia’s relationship to its Western allies. Australia’s export of yellowcake, or uranium oxide concentrate, is a significant contribution to the global nuclear industry. This includes around a fifth of the uranium imported by the United States each year (US Nuclear Fuel Cycle, World Nuclear Association). Although the export of uranium is not an explicit element of the trilateral deal, it reflects Australia’s position within global economic structures as a raw materials exporter. AUKUS, then, represents the military facet of this relationship, not only an investment in submarines but, more substantially, an investment in the British–American alliance itself. Australia will pay billions for the product of the nuclear industrial processing machinery it does not possess, receiving fully operational, welded nuclear reactors (‘propulsion systems’) from the United Kingdom’s Rolls Royce Submarines (‘Albanese Government announces acquisition of long-lead items for AUKUS nuclear propulsion systems’, Australian Government Defence Minister, 24 February 2026). The AUKUS design avoids refuelling enriched uranium over the core’s thirty-year lifetime. Often referenced by proponents to allay concerns about nuclear waste and weapons proliferation, this technical fact also corroborates the limits of Australia’s sovereign influence over the advanced nuclear systems in this massive military investment. Connor’s vision from the 1970s is an alternative history in which nuclear technology presented a glowing path to national independence. From our contemporary vantage, this only underscores the paradoxical and confused objectives of Australia’s contemporary nuclear expansion, with Labor striving towards further subservience, or, as it is referred to in defence policy speak, ‘interoperability’.
A decade on from Connor’s aborted vision of nationalised nuclear energy, Labor established the three-mine policy. This limited uranium extraction to the Ranger, Nabarlek (later replaced by Beverly Uranium Mine) and Olympic Dam mines, and would define the structure of Australia’s uranium-mining industry from 1984 until 1996. Although the Howard government dropped the policy (and then, two years later, agreed to a national ban on nuclear energy in order to approve a new research reactor at Lucas Heights—see ‘Australia’s nuclear ban is an accident waiting to happen’, Parliament of Australia), the industry has since remained relatively stable at four or fewer operational uranium mines at any given time. Anti-nuclear activism in the 1970s through to the 1990s clearly linked Australian uranium mining to the global industry and the atomic clouds rising over the Pacific Ocean from French nuclear testing in Maō’hi Nui/French Polynesia. Still, the economic motive to industrialise a plentiful natural resource provided a strong incentive to maintain the industry, not only for export profits but also for possible future expansion into the nuclear supply chain or domestic use of yellowcake. The three-mine policy emerged as a compromise in this fraught contest, sustaining a pocket of industry that has gradually unfettered itself from Cold War-era nuclear stigma.
In the intervening decades, Australian uranium mining has drifted from public scrutiny as nuclear history has faded from the public conscience. Recent industry developments have been met largely with indifference. Uranium export profits dropped throughout the 2010s but have surged in recent years, promoting investment across the nation’s three operational mines and in exploratory projects (‘Australia’s Uranium’, World Nuclear Association). At least five mines across the Northern Territory and Western Australia are projected to commence extractive operations by 2030, significantly increasing the nation’s total uranium output (Kit Million Ross, ‘The future of uranium mining in Australia’, Mining Technology, 11 March 2024). While public attitudes in Australia are trending towards apathy, a counterexample is that of Kazakhstan, where nuclear optimism is on the rise. Like Australia, the former Soviet state has a torrid history of nuclear testing, with 456 detonations at the Semipalatinsk site over four decades (‘Semipalatinsk Test Site’, NTI). But where Australia ranks fourth in uranium production, Kazakhstan ranks first, producing more than a third of the world’s uranium, with national reserves accounting for only 14 per cent of global stocks—half of Australia’s natural reserves. The country expanded its nuclear fuel cycle engagement in 2021 by constructing a fuel fabrication plant, and plans for domestic nuclear power are underway. Where other comparable nations such as Kazakhstan have sought to grow their nuclear fuel cycle capabilities, Australia has not pursued domestic uranium-processing technologies or nuclear power, indicating ongoing concerns about nuclear technologies, whether ethical, economic or other, even if the uranium-mining industry appears to have unyoked itself from the scrutiny applied to ‘nuclear’ questions.
The resounding rejection of domestic nuclear energy and a Dutton government in 2025 suggests that nuclear issues remain highly contested in Australia. Bipartisan support for the AUKUS program, however, limits the terrain covered by the major parties in this debate as Labor avoids contradicting itself on nuclear safety. Albanese’s re-election campaign opposed the Coalition’s nuclear proposal on economic and logistical grounds. Of course, to oppose it on environmental or ethical grounds would have put into question all nuclear energy technologies, including nuclear-powered submarines. Labour, therefore, left the unions to do the legwork of discrediting the safety record of nuclear technology with their radioactive ‘Don’t Risk Dutton’ slogan. However, several memes featuring cartoon characters with radioactive mutations were posted to the Instagram accounts of Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen and Canberra MP Andrew Leigh. These triggered outrage from the Opposition, who predictably used the opportunity to undermine Labor’s commitment to AUKUS. Nonetheless, Labor was successful in both contesting the viability of civil nuclear power in Australia—whether with its own practical arguments or thanks to the nuclear risk campaign by its affiliates—and upholding its commitment to the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines through AUKUS.
An important point to be made is that risk in civil nuclear energy necessarily implies risk in the technology of AUKUS. The nuclear-powered submarine program sits at the unsound intersection of peaceful/weaponised, civil/military applications of nuclear science. International regulation of the nuclear industry relies on cleaving these categories from one another. Yet this is a slippery task at the technical level because the processes used to refine nuclear materials in the nuclear fuel cycle (conversion, enrichment) apply to both civil and military applications. US President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech gave political validity to the notion that peaceful and weaponised uses could be partitioned. The establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), with its dual mandate to promote and regulate civil nuclear technology, institutionalised the peaceful/weaponised division, with the former venerated as an effective right and the latter selectively legalised for an exclusive, nuclear-armed group. Australia, under the Menzies government, was among the first nations to sign the IAEA Statute in 1957, all while the United Kingdom was detonating nuclear bombs at Maralinga (‘Nuclear testing in Australia’, ICAN Australia).
The AUKUS pact poses a comprehensive challenge to the international norms governing nuclear technologies. Australia will be the first non-nuclear weapon state to obtain nuclear-powered submarines. As Tariq Rauf points out in his February 2026 policy brief for the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network, paragraph 14 of the IAEA Comprehensive Safeguards System stipulates the ‘non-application of safeguards to nuclear material to be used in non-peaceful activities’. This caveat precludes from IAEA regulations the radioactive material in nuclear-powered submarines, including in the AUKUS reactors. Up until now, this only applied to countries already armed with nuclear weapons (the five nuclear weapons states under the NPT, plus India), for whom the regulation of militarised nuclear technology is redundant. AUKUS thus demands new regulations for the technology Australia will receive from allies to ensure the non-weaponisation of these materials. In the wake of AUKUS, South Korea and Brazil have renewed efforts to acquire nuclear-powered submarines—South Korea from the United States and Brazil via a combined technology transfer from France and Germany. This copycat behaviour indicates that AUKUS may be paradigm-shifting, normalising the spread of militarised if not weaponised nuclear technologies towards the periphery of the global nuclear order. Yet the technology transfer entailed in AUKUS, from the nuclear-armed United States and United Kingdom to non-nuclear Australia, is in fact typical of the nuclear diffusion enacted by nuclear-weapon states to advance their own military objectives.
Although Australia’s acquisition of SSNs advances US objectives in the Asia-Pacific, the diffusion of such militarised nuclear power poses a challenge to the nuclear regulatory order that enshrines the United States and the United Kingdom as elite nuclear-armed states. Labor’s enthusiastic pursuit of the AUKUS agreement has seen it adopt a fraught posture that plays both sides of the nuclear debate. For Labor, nuclear technology has been a means to achieve policy goals since at least the Whitlam era. At that time, Rex Connor’s pro-nuclear stance saw nuclear technology as a means to promote independence and advance Australia’s technological standing and manufacturing power. This attitude overlooked the ethical, environmental and health risks associated with nuclear, appealing to a techno-optimism, whereby technology could be harnessed to achieve progressive social outcomes. AUKUS proponents revive this optimism to some extent by asserting that nuclear-powered submarines will ensure greater national security than any alternative. But this draws on the exceptionalism tied to both nuclear technology and the United States.
In stark contrast to the military and economic independence envisioned in the early 1970s, Labor’s massive investment in nuclear technology through AUKUS will see Australia tie itself closer to the United States and the United Kingdom while foregoing sovereign control over the technology itself. We may see then that despite the accolades for Labor’s anti-nuclear stance, renewed most recently in its public support for the TPNW and opposition to civil nuclear energy, greater nuclearisation has long been on the mind of Labor’s policy-makers. The current Labor government’s appeal to an anti-nuclear veneer is dangerous because it obscures the function that nuclear technology plays in the AUKUS pact. Not only will nuclear power propel the submarines, but it will entrench Australia’s subservient position within a belligerent alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom that threatens to push Australia closer to conflict.