I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. Last week, Donald Trump instructed the US military to start testing nuclear weapons immediately. It was a startling order, one that breaks with more than three decades of protocol for the US, justified, according to the President, by the actions of Russia and China, and as these nuclear armed powers race to expand their arsenals,
other countries closer to Australia are considering joining them. Today, Professor of Strategic Studies at the A and U and contributor to Australian Foreign Affairs Brendan Taylor on what Trump's order will mean for the nuclear arms race and what will happen if our neighbors go nuclear. It's Thursday, November six, so Brendan. Donald Trump recently said the Department of War in the US should start testing nuclear weapons, and he said that was because of China and Russia's recent actions.
So to begin with, tell me what China and Russia have been doing. Well.
China and Russia been pretty busy in the nuclear space of late, especially within the last week.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent comments has once again turned the world's attention towards Moscow. Speaking to reporters, he announced that Russia is developing and testing new generation strategic weapons.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, announced that Russia had tested two nuclear powered platforms. One was a nuclear powered cruise missile.
Moscow says the Budivesnik winged missile has global reach and can stay in the air for hours thanks to a nuclear powered engine.
And the second was a nuclear powered torpee called the Poseidon.
Russia has conducted a test of a new nuclear powered and nuclear capable underwater drone known as Poseidon. Putin described it as a new weapon which cannot be intercepted.
Putin has been talking about since about twenty eighteen a new suite of what he calls super weapons that the Russians have been developing. That this is kind of the first indication that these have actually been tested. The Chinese have also been busy. They too have been testing new and somewhat exotic weapon systems. Back in twenty twenty one, they tested and what they call a new FOB system. That's an acronym that stands for fractional orbital Bombardment system.
This is a missile that essentially went into a lower orbit and flew all away around the.
World, sending it into space and around the planet before it landed just twenty five miles away from its intended target. Hypersonic glide weapons can fly five times the speed of sound and lower than conventional weapons.
The US does not currently have the ability to even track this weapon, much less defeated.
It's significant because it gives China the capacity to potentially evade US missile defense systems. But the big news story from the Chinese side has not necessarily just been those new systems it's been delivering. It's been the alarming rate at which its nuclear arsenal has been expanding. China traditionally has had a very small nuclear arsenal consisting of about two to three hundred warheads. Over the last five years or so, it's more than double the size of that arsenal.
So today we think that China has about seven hundred warheads in this arsenal. The Pentagon estimates that by twenty thirty that number could have increased to one thousand, and there are even some suggestions that by twenty thirty five the arsenal could have increased again to around about one thousand, five hundred warheads.
Wow, Okay, so how does that compare China and Russia's capability is, how does that compare with the US It's nuclear capacity at the moment, Well.
The United States has a fairly similar sized arsenal to the Russians. The US has about one thousand, seven hundred deployed nuclear weapons. That's about the same number as the Russians. I've actually deployed nuclear weapons. And then the Americans have about another two thousand warheads that are put in storage. The Russian arsenal is, contrary to what mister Trump told us last week, is actually slightly bigger than the American one. The Russians have got about two and a half thousand
warheads in storage. So certainly those two arsenals are the biggest in the world by quite a margin, much larger than China's nuclear arsenal around seven hundred warheads.
Okay, am, we're talking about the big superpowers here, the big players. But could you maybe just put this in a global context for me? Which other countries have nuclear weapons and who is considering getting them?
Yeah, so there's six other countries in the world that we know have nuclear weapons at the moment, the British and the French both have nuclear weapons, the Indians and the Pakistanis, and then the Israelis almost certainly have nuclear weapons, and the North Koreans we know definitely have nuclear weapons. The arsenals of all of those countries are much smaller than the superpowers. The British and French. There arsenals are in the range of the low hundreds, as are the
Indians and Pakistanis. The Israelis have around about ninety warheads, we think, and the North Koreans it's a bit hard to tell because there's such a closed society, but we think they have around about fifty warheads with enough plutonium to be able to manufacture up to ninety as well.
Okay, and the US hasn't done any nuclear testing for more than three decades now, So if that changes, what does that actually look like within the US on a practical level, A.
Lot depends upon what mister Trump actually meant when he said that the US was going to resume nuclear testing, talking about literally presuming underground nuclear detonation tests.
You'll find out very soon, but we're going to do some plastic Yeah, other countries do it.
If they're going to do it, we're going to do It's unlikely that P's suggesting a kind of a return to the kind of mushroom clouds out in the desert of the types of tests that we saw during the Cold War. And intact, one of the things that it's important to recognize about nuclear testing is it has changed a lot. Unlike during the Cold War when those tests had to be conducted in the atmosphere, or after the nineteen sixties when that kind of testing was banned, when
it tended to be conducted underground. Today countries are able to use supercomputers and other forms of high energy lasers to test the nuclear weapons, or at least to simulate
what a nuclear explosion would look like. So even though there hasn't been testing in the United States for thirty years, it's kind of amazing to think that the US actually knows a lot more about how its nuclear weapons are likely to perform than whilst the case during the Cold War because of these technological advances that have been made.
And how controversial would it be to restart testing.
I mean, once again, I think it depends upon the types of tests. I think if we were it's very unlike but if we were to see a return to even those sorts of underground tests. I think it would be an incredibly controversial step to go down that particular path. In fact, I think it would be a great disadvantage to the United States to start testing nuclear weapons again in the way that it has previously, partly because it has so much more data than any other country in
the world. The US historically has conducted more than a thousand nuclear tests already. The Russians have done about nine hundred, the Chinese have only done about forty five, so they
actually don't have much access to data at all. So it would not only be a controversial step to start testing again in the United States, but I think the US would end up losing ground because it would potentially allow or give an excuse for the Russians and the Chinese in particular, to start testing again and give them access to data that they just don't have at present.
Yeah, I mean, Trump is saying that the rationale for this is because of what countries like Russia and China are doing. But that's how an arms race begins, isn't it, Because then Russia and China have a reason to go even harder on their end. So what's the risk here of this escalating.
I mean, I think unfortunately we're already in the beginning stages of an arms race. I mean that's really been the whole story of the nuclear age, and certainly during the Cold War, whenever one country did something, there was almost an automatic tendency for another country to react, and you had this back and forth, this kind of action reaction dynamic going on. I think that we're in the
beginning stages of that once again. But what really worries me is I don't think this arms race is one that is limited or is going to be limited just to the United States and China and Russia. I think it's an arms race that is also going to draw in other powers as well, and most worryingly from Australia, I think those powers are going to be within our own region. I think this arms race is going to
be a lot more uneven. You're going to have a lot more players with arsenals of different shapes and sizes and levels of capability, and that's going to be an arms race. I think it's going to be much more difficult to manage, and there's also going to be more prone to accident talk or inadvertent escalations and misperceptions and miscalculations.
Coming up the nuclear arms race, we could face much closer to home. So Brendan, how likely is it that countries in our region are going to be drawn into the nuclear arms race?
I think that's a really good question. And I don't think we're going to wake up tomorrow and find out that South Korea or Japan has surprisingly gone nuclear. But I'd say over the next one to two decades there's a much higher chance than not that countries in our region will go nuclear. Certainly, in the case of some countries such as Japan, they have the technological capability to
go nuclear relatively quickly. I think for Japan, the big constraints the domestic political constraints understandable reasons, because Japan has been the only country thus farther has been subjected to a nuclear attack when the US bomb Hiroshimar Nakasaki at the end of the Second World War. There's still very strong domestic political opposition to Japan acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.
But I think it's a very different case in South Korea and looking across the border into North Korea and seeing North Korea building up its nuclear arsenal, but also keeping in mind the neighborhood that South Korea lives in, with the China that's building up its arsenal, with Russia the world's largest nuclear power, it's easy to kind of understand why the South Koreans might be thinking about moving that direction, particularly given concerns about whether the US, particularly
a US that's adopted a very American first kind of mindset as the current Trump administration has, whether it will come to South Korea's defense, whether it will be willing to sacrifice a major US city to defend Soul, for instance. I think that's likely to push South Korea in that direction.
And so what does all of this mean for Australia Because we signed the Nuclear non Proliferation Treaty in the seventies, but you know that was fifty years ago now and the world has changed a lot, and from what you're saying, stands to change a lot more dramatically right now. So where does that leave us?
Well, I think it's going to cause some real dilemmas for Australia, and I'm not sure that we've really begun to think through these dilemmas as far or as fast as we should be thinking through them.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the foundations of our societies.
I think Foreign Minster Wong has said some very helpful things at the United Nations about the risk of nuclear weapons intersecting with new artificial intelligence technologies.
Nuclear warfare has so far been constrained by human judgment, by leaders who bear responsibility, and by human conscience. AI has no such concern, nor can it be held accountable.
But I think our policy hasn't really caught up with a lot of the rhetoric. I think for Australia, one of the big challenges is what are we going to do if one of our friends or close allies goes nuclear you know, a country like South Korea for instance, or Japan, a country that's one of our leading trading partners and an increasingly close security partner for Australia as well.
Are we going to join in international sanctions against South Korea and Japan and kind of stay true to our non proliferation identity or are we going to display a bit more sympathy and understanding. I think the other two big challenges for Australia is as there is indeed a nuclear arms race in Asia, or that's centered in Asia, one of the big questions is how far south does
that go. I mean, it may seem very unlikely now that Indonesia could go new clear, Indonesia's one of the strongest advocates for nuclear non proliferation in the world at present, But it's worth keeping in mind that back in the nineteen sixties Indonesia did think seriously about obtaining a nuclear weapons capability. And sometimes it's country trees do become bigger and stronger economically, there's strategic personalities can change as well.
So that certainly would be a nightmare scenario for us, and it might be one of the only factors that leads Australia to seriously consider developing a nuclear weapons capability of our own.
Yeah, is there a certain point at which it becomes more dangerous for Australia to not have nuclear weapons?
I mean, it's worth keeping in mind that it's the past. We've been down before. After China conducted as first nuclear test in nineteen sixty four, the Gorton government did actively think about developing a nuclear weapons capability. I think it would take us some time to kind of build back that capability and that expertise. But the other thing where we need to really build our capacity is just in the area of knowledge about nuclear strategy and policy and periferation.
There's not a lot of experts in the country or even within government working on these areas, and I think part of the reason for that is ORCUS has become so all consuming. So certainly that's going to build up a nuclear expertise to some extent, but it's a very different kind of nuclear capability than the nuclear capabilities that are coming with this new emerging nuclear arms race. But as you said, Australia has been a longstanding supporter of
nuclear non proliferation. I think we really need to double down on our efforts in that space, particularly at a time when the nuclear non proliferation architecture is really coming under strain and really crumbling and all but now falling apart.
Well, Brendan, thank you so much for your time.
Thanks so much for having me.
You can read Brendan Taylor's article about the new nuclear arms race in the latest edition of Australian Foreign Affairs. It's called the Bomb Will Asia Go Nuclear? And it's out now. Also the News, the head of Australia's spy agency has issued a warning that foreign powers are willing
and capable of assassinating dissidents on Australian soil. In a major address, ASIO boss Mike Burgers warned that some nations warned weaponize so called fault lines in countries they consider hostile, and said the organization has foiled an elaborate plot by foreign spies to convince several Australians to betray their country. After months of grooming, and New Yorkers have emphatically elected
Zorin Mamdami as their next mayor. The thirty four year old will become the second youngest mayor of New York, as well as the first Muslim and only the second Democratic Socialist to run the US's largest city. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.