Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:The need for the Australian Government to take actions that strengthen and not undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty following North Korea’s nuclear weapons test.

With the news this week that North Korea has detonated a nuclear weapon and news since that time that North Korea is using the threat of the use of a weapon to try to force the United States to the negotiating table, on top of our awareness that Iran’s nuclear aspirations are destabilising global security, together with calls from the new head of al-Qaeda in Iraq for nuclear specialists from around the world to provide the materials for a terrorist bomb, I think it is fair to say that the world is on the cusp of a new era of accelerated nuclear proliferation. If ever there was a matter of urgency for the Senate to discuss, it is what response Australia should have to this particularly frightening new development in terms of global peace and nuclear proliferation.

We are aware that we have come a very long way from the time when former Prime Minister Keating established the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. It is a tragedy for Australia that the initiative taken by a Labor prime minister in 1995 was ended—that initiative ended with the election of the Howard government—and that effort to lead Australia to offer global leadership in nuclear non-proliferation has largely dissipated in the last decade, such that Australia, having had a leadership role, is now being seen as a deputy sheriff to the United States in a world that is becoming increasingly dangerous.

Following the explosion of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War, the world was shocked into the reality of what nuclear weapons could do. In 1953, US President Eisenhower made his famous ‘Atoms for peace’ speech based on his conviction at that time that the world was racing towards catastrophe. He said:

So my country’s purpose is to help us move out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light …

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It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.

He proposed disarmament. By 1968 we had the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which essentially codified a bargain that the five existing nuclear weapon states—the United States, the USSR, China, France and Great Britain—were to negotiate in good faith to disarm and that the non-nuclear states were to be guaranteed assistance in developing civilian nuclear power in return for agreeing not to pursue their own weapons. By the mid-1970s, however, things were deteriorating. In 1974, India conducted a nuclear test, and it is obvious that the expertise and material for India to be able to do that were provided by the United States. By the early seventies it was very clear that the peaceful atom and the destructive atom could not be kept separate. The spirit and the spread of nuclear knowledge and technology for peaceful purposes was clearly spreading weapons—and it still does to this day.

Since then we have had news of the Khan network. For 30 years this Pakistani used his knowledge and networks from Pakistan to build a clandestine procurement network around the world. For many countries, the nuclear bomb represented security and prestige, and countries used the proliferation of nuclear technology for strategic priorities. The US gave it to the UK, France gave it to Israel, the Soviet Union gave it to China and China gave it to Pakistan—and now we are on the verge of the United States giving it to India, outside the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and with the support of Australia. What I think we should be looking at today is whether or not Australia will sell its uranium to India. (Time expired)