1
JULY 2020
PEOPLE
FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT
DEFENCE
STRATEGIC UPDATE
HOW
MANY VENTILATORS, ICUS, CORONA
VACCINATIONS,
WILL $270 BILLION BUY?
CAN
THE BEST DEFENCE MONEY BUY REALLY THE BEST DEFENCE? ARE WEAPONS REALLY THE
ANSWER AT ALL?
Prime Minister Scott
Morrison is to be commended for understanding that the world now faces the most
threatening strategic stability outlook since 1939. Whether throwing the
considerable sum of $A270 billion at hi-tech defence hardware is the best
possible response to the deep problems that beset not just Australia, but the
whole world, is a question that perhaps has not been given enough thought.
In a world awash with
weapons, are more exotic and hi-tech weapons the answer or are they merely
going to compound the problem?
In an Australian
budget that has already gone way into the red (and for excellent reasons), and
in which the pandemic blazons the immediate need for investments in pandemic
preparedness, vaccines and vaccine research, ICUs and ventilators, an announcement
that the need of the moment is a ten year spending plan worth 270 billion on
exotic ways to kill other humans, especially ones with whom we would be wiser
to be collaborating on coronavirus vaccine research seems oddly placed.
True, the defence
forces have made extremely useful contributions in both fighting bushfires and
in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. The capabilities that made that possible should
urgently be expanded. But exotic ship to ship missiles add nothing to those
more mundane, but much more useful, capabilities.
This is not at all to
deny that the concerns that underlie Prime Minister
Morrison’s defence
spending plan are real. Of course, they are real. Indeed, they are even MORE
real that Prime Minister Morrison himself admits – they are catastrophically,
civilisation-endingly, real. The likelihood of a nuclear exchange in which
everything we call civilisation and possibly in which humans as a species would
perish, has simply never been higher. The answer is not however to invest in
nuclear weapons or indeed in any weapons at all, but to work to eliminate them.
Australia has critical
infrastructural dependencies on eg, the internet that make us acutely vulnerable
to both cyber and EMP threats. These need to be addressed not just to secure us
from human enemies but from for example, a massive coronal mass ejection.
The answer to global
strategic instability, undoubtedly as bad or worse than in 1939, is not to add
to it with yet more weapons. It is to seek peaceful solutions to those problems
and to encourage others to
seek such solutions.
In the meantime, there
ARE real investments that should be made – in
Pandemic preparedness,
in infrastructural resilience, in infrastructure more broadly, in health and
education and in social security that would both give Australia something truly
worth defending and would in themselves diminish potential threats.
