Stephan Frühling poses a controversial question: whether Australia should get its own nuclear weapons. He answers that the security environment is changing so much that the prospect cannot be dismissed out of hand, as it has been for many decades. Given this, we must think through the consequences in clear-eyed fashion, he says. What would an Australian nuclear weapon mean for proliferation? Would it make Australia a target for attack by China in some future crisis? These are good questions, and raising them is an indication of how much the Asian security environment is changing.

Underlying his analysis is the return of great power rivalry. And this leads to a larger strategic problem, which goes beyond Australian security. It is the important question of our time: what role will nuclear weapons play in major power rivalry? International politics and technology suggest that their role will be substantial.

There’s much to admire in Michael Wesley’s hypothesis in his essay “Dangerous Proximity” – the historical sweep, encompassing the British settlement in Australia; strategists obsessed with how to defend a continent of few people; the changing nature of conflict through the advent of technology; and the rise of “coercive statecraft”. I came away disturbed and motivated. Australia, it seems, needs to completely rethink its approach to security because the nature and purpose of force has been transformed, and armed conflict is not the only way to defeat an opponent.

Wesley argues that long-range bombardment and nuclear weapons make major combat between powerful countries unthinkable. A new statecraft, based on coercive control and influence, lowers the risk of a nuclear exchange. Long-range precision-guided hypersonic missiles are being acquired by Russia, China, India and other Asian nations. Australia has lost its technological edge and the benefits of its remote location. Worse, new weapons threatening the Malacca Strait will see ships sailing around the east and south of Australia – placing us in the heart of “competition among the United States, China, India and Japan for influence in South-East Asia and the South Pacific”.

Michael Wesley’s essay in AFA4: Defending Australia, “Dangerous Proximity”, is a pleasure to read. However, some of his judgements are made too confidently, and some internal contradictions in the piece are confusing.

Michael’s article is a reminder that for decades Australia has lacked a national security strategy beyond hoping that a “great and powerful friend” will come to the rescue in the event of conflict. In retrospect, this approach worked. But I agree that it is no longer viable when the Indo-Pacific is emerging as one of the most important theatres of great power competition.

Intellectual preoccupations come and go. “Transparency and accountability”, once widely recommended, now rarely figure in the discourse. “Globalisation” and “governance” have recently yielded top place as the most overused expressions in foreign affairs to “the international rules-based order”. This latest buzz-phrase – featured in last issue’s Back Page section – is more often cited than applied, particularly by Australian governments. It means different things to different people: to economists it’s the Bretton Woods institutions; to lawyers and diplomats it’s the international legal system, repeated appeals to which count for less and less. Even rationalism, the orderly emblem of the Enlightenment, is being overruled by rules-free Trumpery, Michiko Kakutani argues in The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. So it’s surprising that Stephan Frühling should refer to another “new world order”, a phrase that was on everyone’s lips in the years of President George H.W. Bush, but that hardly applies to today’s disorderly world.

Equally unexpected is Associate Professor Frühling’s reference to a “nascent debate” about Australia acquiring nuclear weapons. This debate must be taking place quietly inside our proliferating national security establishment, for it is not audible in the wider community. Occasional expressions of enthusiasm are heard from those with vested interests in Australia developing nuclear power plants, but these voices never raise nuclear weapons. If plans exist for our future submarine fleet to be nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed, the government has not taken the risk of revealing them, nor what their eye-watering cost to our “debt and deficit” would be. When Australia’s ICAN won the latest Nobel Peace Prize for its promotion of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, many outside the major parties were delighted. If Australians want nuclear weapons, Frühling’s article is the first many of them will have heard of it.

Frühling’s account of Australia’s on and off, past and prospective, nuclear involvement is useful, if necessarily selective. It is salutary to be reminded that ever-eager Australian defence planners sought to enable the new F-111s to carry nuclear weapons, and that they were again considered for Australia following China’s first atomic test of 1964. But Australians remember vividly the British nuclear tests at Maralinga, whose dreadful consequences Frühling fails to mention. He omits Australia’s efforts over many years to achieve nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament and to eliminate nuclear testing. He does not discuss Canberra’s current bipartisan about-face, refusing to ban atomic weapons, even though it could back his argument that Australia should consider acquiring an independent nuclear capability. He refers repeatedly to Australia having to get American permission to build our own nuclear weapons but does not explain how or when Australia incurred this obligation. Safe reprocessing and disposal of Australia’s nuclear waste he ignores entirely.

Frühling cogently sets out the possible nuclear and conventional threats to Australia and methodically eliminates all of them, apart from speculating about a future powerful Indonesia. Yet he persists in arguing the case for nuclear weapons, which he says could substitute for conventional forces or complement them, and could have small warheads for short-range “tactical” purposes, particularly in “maritime battle”, to safeguard the sea and air approaches to Australia. Would such restraint, and a “spiked moat” around our continent (as Frühling puts it), deter Australia’s neighbours from responding with an arms race and nuclear weapons of their choice? Would Asian nations with which we need closer and deeper relations (as the October 2012 “Australia in the Asian Century” White Paper argued) trust Australia not to aim our nuclear devices at them? It seems unlikely. Moreover, the more countries have them, the greater the risk that nuclear weapons will be used, accidentally or by design.

The main arguments for and against nuclear weapons, which don’t appear in Frühling’s article, are economic, legal, environmental and ethical. Even for a country such as Australia, which has uranium, the costs of developing nuclear power and nuclear weapons from scratch are crippling, economically distorting and not feasible. Any country that has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would be in breach if it built or used nuclear weapons, and could face international sanctions. A country that threatens or uses conventional force against another state that is not directly attacking it is in breach of international law, and its leaders could be accused of the war crime of aggression. A country that causes a nuclear attack releases deadly radiation over a wide area, rendering it uninhabitable even for the humans, animals and plants that survive, and a counter-attack compounds the disaster. A country whose leaders can force others to suffer “what they must” – as Frühling cites the ancient Athenians doing to the Melians – should first consider treating others as they wish to be treated.

Frühling is careful not to prescribe nuclear arms for Australia, and instead sets out our strategic options, suggesting that they deserve timely consideration in the context of an unreliable US alliance. Independence has never been more desirable. But before Australians seek security in nuclear weapons, we should remember Ronald Reagan’s wisest words, with which Mikhail Gorbachev agreed: “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Australia should remind others of them at every opportunity.

Alison Broinowski, former Australian diplomat and academic, and vice-president of Honest History and of Australians for War Powers Reform

Read Stephan Frühling’s response here

The risible notion that I have ever referred to myself as a “noted Sinologist” is just one of the many fanciful accusations that Clive Hamilton flings my way in his response to my essay. Another is that I belong to some kind of cabal of China academics who are allegedly averse to criticising the Chinese state or its influence in Australia because we have invested so much time studying the Chinese language and Chinese history. Hamilton attributes fabricated quotations to me using inverted commas, including one in which I wish I had written a book on China’s influence in Australia (I don’t, actually), and attacks me for what I never said. Falsely attributed quotations and the invention of conspiracies are, coincidentally, tactics also favoured by the Chinese Communist Party. For the record, I’m a freelance writer, editor and translator, not a salaried academic.

To accuse me of being blind to Chinese operations in Australia is simply more evidence-free bizarreness on Hamilton’s part. To suggest that I would happily rationalise, on any grounds, Chinese students’ aggression towards pro-Tibetan protesters at the April 2008 Olympic torch relay in Canberra borders on defamatory. I wrote and spoke about the torch relay in various forums, including in an essay published in The Monthly in August that year. That piece also discussed death threats to a journalist friend from soi-disant Chinese nationalists for her reporting on human rights abuses in Tibet. The fact that I don’t agree in every detail with Hamilton’s arguments doesn’t make me an amoral idiot.

I always thought I knew a lot about China, until I started writing my first book about it. Before I read Linda Jaivin’s article, I thought I knew about The Red Detachment of Women too. It is a classic. Almost every person from mainland China can immediately recall the signature lyrics from the film: In ancient China, Mulan [yes, the same Mulan known to the rest of the world through the Disney cartoon] went to join the army for her father; today, the women’s army hold their guns for the people …

For some reason, I always thought the Women’s Army in The Red Detachment fought against Japanese invaders. I bet if you asked ten Chinese people under the age of forty, “Who did the Women’s Army fight against?” you would receive ten different answers. Most of the younger generation, who must have watched every episode of Doraemon, would not know all the names of the eight model operas of the Cultural Revolution. These shows were the classics of the last century. The younger generation spend their money on K-pop concerts or local productions of Broadway musicals. For this reason, I found the labelling of The Red Detachment as “political propaganda” amusing rather than concerning.

In her essay “Red Detachment” (AFA5: Are We Asian Yet?), Linda Jaivin includes a patronising commentary on my book Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia. Headed “We need to talk about Clive”, the commentary betrays a conceit behind the practice of Australian Sinology: that Australia’s China experts are the only ones entitled to talk about China, and their other favourite subject, themselves.

The Sinological conceit goes something like this. To speak authoritatively about China, you need years of immersion in its language, culture and history. Once you have mastered these disciplines, you are authorised to talk about yourself as a noted Sinologist. Jaivin explains that as a noted Sinologist she and the in-group of fellow experts have a privileged role explaining China to the rest of us.