Antinuclear

The hypersonic hypocrisy of Pacific nuclear politics

Jeremy Rose.https://pearlsandirritations.com/post/2026/07/the-hypersonic-hypocrisy-of-pacific-nuclear-politics/?utm_source=pi_news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-2026-07-08

Australia and New Zealand rightly criticise China’s nuclear-capable missile tests in the Pacific. Their silence on repeated US tests exposes a glaring double standard.

In March, the US launched a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Travelling at speeds of more than 24,000 kilometres an hour, it landed near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands 6,700 kilometres away 24 minutes later.

Minuteman III missiles can deliver up to three separate nuclear warheads, each more than 20 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

On 3 March, 2025, the Marshall Islands formally announced its intention to join the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone by signing the Treaty of Rarotonga.

Searches of the NZ Herald and Stuff websites for stories about the missile test, and the signing of the treaty come up empty.

And yet, on Tuesday, both the NZ Herald and The Post led with news that China had test-fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in the Pacific. Neither report made any mention of the 15 ballistic missile tests fired into the Pacific by the USA since 2021.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters and his Australian counterpart, Penny Wong, were both quoted as saying the Chinese missile test went against the intent of the Treaty of Rarotonga.

“The Pacific Islands Forum leaders have made clear that they want the Pacific to be an ocean of peace. We believe this test is inconsistent with that objective,” Wong said.

Wong isn’t wrong.

In 2024, Kiribati publicly criticised an earlier test of a Minuteman III missile that also landed in the Ronald Reagan Space and Missile Test Range located near the Kwajalein Atoll. As the name suggests, the tests are a regular occurrence.

A statement from the President’s office, reported by RNZ, said Kiribati objected equally to China and the US using the South Pacific for test-firing nuclear-capable missiles.

“Kiribati continues to advocate for the cessation of weapons testing in the Pacific Ocean and urges global cooperation to ensure the peace, security, and stability of our shared environment. We remain committed to protecting the peaceful future of the Pacific and safeguarding the well-being of future generations.”

It’s a thought – almost – echoed by Winston Peters in his response to the Chinese test: “This missile was fired into the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone established by the Treaty of Rarotonga. China’s action goes against the object and intent of that Treaty.”

You’ll search long and hard to find any similar criticism of the US missile tests by Ministers Peters and Wong. That’s despite the people of the Marshall Islands themselves and the leaders of neighbouring countries making it clear any testing of ballistic missiles in the Pacific goes against the spirit of the Treaty of Rarotonga.

The Chinese missile test is widely being reported as a response to Australia and Fiji’s signing of the Ocean of Peace Alliance the previous day.

Without confirmation from China, it’s impossible to know for certain, but it seems likely that the alliance – which New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has expressed interest in signing up to – is seen as a ratcheting up of military tensions in the South Pacific.

When it comes to the “object and intent” of the Treaty of Rarotonga, mentioned by Peters, few if any of the signatories would have countenanced one of their members purchasing nuclear-powered submarines.

But in 2023, Australia announced it was doing just that with the planned purchase of three nuclear submarines at an estimated cost of more than A$300 billion (about 15 times the combined GDP of the Forum countries excluding New Zealand and Australia).

Shortly after the announcement, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Damukana Sogavare told the UN General Assembly that his nation “would like to keep our region nuclear-free and put the region’s nuclear legacy behind us… We do not support any form of militarisation in our region that could threaten regional and international peace and stability.”

The legacy Sogavare mentions is nowhere felt more keenly than the Marshall Islands, where the US carried out 67 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1946 and 1956, resulting in sky-high rates of thyroid cancer.

The US has paid out just US$150 million in compensation despite the internationally mandated Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal having awarded over US$2 billion in personal injury and property claims.

A survey by the Asia New Zealand Foundation earlier this year found that just 23 per cent of New Zealanders viewed China as a threat, compared to 35 per cent who saw the US as one.

The US has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads with 1,700 actively deployed; China has 620 with 34 deployed.

China has a long-standing policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, while the US refuses to rule it out.

When our leaders claim to be supporting Pacific countries in their commitment to a nuclear-free Pacific by rightly criticising China’s missile tests while steadfastly refusing to criticise the USA’s regular testing of intercontinental nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, they’re indulging in hypersonic hypocrisy.

July 12, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international | Leave a comment

Cooperation yes, uranium no: planned uranium sales to India would facilitate certain nuclear waste and risk and possible nuclear weapons

Dave Sweeney | Nuclear Free Campaigner, Australian Conservation Foundation | www.acf.org.au, 9 July 26

In response to news of a major uranium deal between Australia and India, the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Dave Sweeney said:

“There are serious and unresolved concerns about plans to elevate Australian uranium sales to India.

“For more than a decade there has been a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with India but regulatory concerns have constrained exports.

“A Joint Standing Committee on Treaties examination of the deal in September 2015 recommended a series of clear steps occur before any Australian uranium was supplied to India.

“It said important changes and checks and balances were needed, including independent review of India’s nuclear regulatory regime, improved safety standards, the full separation of India’s military and civil nuclear facilities, improved nuclear decommissioning planning and comprehensive on-site inspections from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“These concerns remain relevant today. There are compelling reasons for Australia not to send uranium to India.

“Australian uranium would fuel radioactive risk and waste and potentially allow the diversion of domestic uranium reserves to fuel India’s nuclear weapons program in an already tense region.

Some in the Indian government basically have admitted as much, including the former head of New Delhi’s official National Security Advisory Board, K. Subrahmanyam who outlined to the Times of India that given ‘India’s uranium ore crunch, it is to India’s advantage to categorize as many power reactors as possible as civilian ones to be refuelled by imported uranium and conserve our native uranium fuel for weapon-grade plutonium production’.

“Australia regularly cites the importance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, yet India – a nuclear weapons state – is not a signatory to the NPT. 

“Australia should not facilitate atomic exceptionalism or risk in the region.

“Like Australia, India’s energy future is renewable, not radioactive. That is the policy area that the Australia and Indian prime ministers should be preferencing”.

July 11, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international | Leave a comment

Pacific nuclear survivors urge Australia to sign and ratify UN treaty banning nuclear weapons ahead of key conference

Australia is the only state party to a nuclear-weapon-free zone treaty in any region of the world that has claimed to be protected by the nuclear weapons of another state.

Andrew Mathieson, July 3, 2026, https://nit.com.au/03-07-2026/25161/pacific-nuclear-survivors-urges-australia-to-sign-and-ratify-the-un-treaty-banning-nuclear-weapons-ahead-of-key-party-conference

A delegation of Pacific nuclear survivors joined Indigenous advocates in Canberra on Wednesday to call on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to sign and ratify an international disarmament agreement which aims to comprehensively ban and eliminate nuclear weapons in the region.

Members of the Parliamentary Friends of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons invited members of the Pacific civil society to Australia’s Federal parliament to lay bare the human and environmental toll of tests over several decades.

The Australian parliamentary friends forms a bipartisan, cross-party forum, which currently is comprised of 47 of the 226 MPs across both houses and from all sides of politics, who meet and interact with nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation proponents to discuss treaty matters and their ongoing issues.

They were also reportedly joined this week by Anangu-Yankunytjatjara woman and second-generation nuclear test survivor, Karina Lester, who recently spoke with National Indigenous Times about the impact on her family of the 1953 British nuclear tests at Emu Field in remote South Australia.

She urged mobs that were “tested on, mined on, threatened with nuclear waste dumps or feared the impacts on their people, country and culture” to find their voice and speak up at the public inquiry that had commenced last month in Melbourne.

Australia has not yet signed or ratified the treaty which the United Nations first established as a resolution in 2017.

The invitation to multiple Pacific islander representatives coincided with two significant anniversaries falling on the first two days of the month: the 80th year of the first US test detonation on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands followed by the 60th year of the first French test detonation at Mururoa Atoll, Mā’ohi Nui in colonial French Polynesia.

‘Powerful nations can have consequences that last for generations’

Pacific civil society members lined up to plea to Australian MPs from the Labor Party, the Liberal-National coalition, the Greens and Independents.

“The experiences of the Marshall Islands and other Pacific communities remind us the decisions made by powerful nations can have consequences that last for generations,” the spokesperson for a concerned Marshall Islands Student Association, Samuel Barton, told the gathering.

“We ask the world to remember our history, stand with survivors, pursue nuclear disarmament, and place human dignity, justice, and peace at the centre of global decision-making.”

The UN general assembly first decided nine years ago to convene a conference to negotiate a legally-binding instrument to prohibit the use of nuclear weapons.

The Australian government announced in 2023 that it was “considering the treaty systematically and methodically, as part of (Australia’s) ambitious agenda to advance nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament”.

According to the Labor government’s national defence strategy published two years ago, “Australia’s best protection against the increasing risk of nuclear escalation is (the) US extended nuclear deterrence and the pursuit of new avenues of arms control”.

But this implicit endorsement of nuclear weapons is incompatible with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the government has also admitted.

‘Australia must match its history with urgent new action’

Australia is the only state party to a nuclear-weapon-free zone treaty in any region of the world that has claimed to be protected by the nuclear weapons of another state.

Reverend James Bhagwan, General Secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, said that in a region of increasingly militarisation that signing the treaty “would be a clear commitment to a nuclear-free free Pacific and a genuine ocean of peace”.

Merewalesi Tuilau, speaking on behalf of the Fiji Veterans and Families Association, added the Pacific “demands and deserves complete freedom from nuclear weapons and their threat – not simply management, but total elimination.

“Australia has shown it can lead,” Mr Tuilau said, “Australia must match its history with urgent new action”.

‘We want nuclear weapons testing to be relegated to history’

The anniversaries of the dual detonations in the Pacific were acknowledged after Labor member for Macquarie Susan Templeton put forward a motion to push the government to signing the treaty ahead of its ALP national conference later this month.

“With the legacy of nuclear testing still felt deeply in Australia, our region, right across the world, we want nuclear weapons testing to be relegated to history,” she said.

“I will continue to advocate for the importance of sustained international commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, including the Treaty on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and also the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”

The Canberra event was a part of a wider lobby and advocacy tour that also took in Sydney and Melbourne, sharing heartfelt testimony from Indigenous communities affected by nuclear testing and calling for a Pacific region that is “decolonised, demilitarised, de-nuclearised and decarbonised”.

Articles 6 and 7 of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons call on “victim assistance, environmental remediation, and international cooperation and assistance” to address ongoing and unresolved humanitarian, human rights, and environmental impacts from nuclear weapons.

July 7, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international | Leave a comment